Fave Five: Lana Da Poet!

OK, I know I’m utterly obsessed with Lana Del Rey and her music and I’ve always from the first time I heard it considered it to be poetic. I have recently come to love her intros and outros to songs. I only get to hear these when watching the music videos as a large chunk of them are not encompassed on her albums, they delight me and get me thinking about the reinvention of poetry.

When I was younger, every Tom Dick and Harry street-smart enough to rock a bandanna used to praise the poetic qualities contained within Tu-Pac’s music. To this day I still fail to see this poetic genius.  I for one think when equated to the Franks, Janelles and Lanas of today, Pac fails to compare (queue the average black person hurling insults at my tastes). In all honesty though, lyrics such as “More than an adversary I'm very quick, I'm ready to hit 'em with this gift, I'm equipped to kick” come second when placed against Lana’s lyrics from songs such as ‘Carmen’ and ‘This is What Makes Us Girls’ to name but a few.

Any who, this post was not intended to diminish Pac’s body of work, or any other artist for that matter… I just wanted those of you who have never been privy to Del Rey’s work to experience first-hand its wonder.
Here is a list of my Fave three snippets from Lana Del Rey intros and outros. I felt it would be a tad disingenuous to list five intros and outros as I honestly am obsessed with just these three, so you’ll excuse this month’s fave five…

Hope you like it either way!

3.            Outro from National Anthem

“And I remember when I met him, it was so clear that he was the only one for me. We both knew it, right away. And as the years went on, things got more difficult - we were faced with more challenges. I begged him to stay. Try to remember what we had at the beginning.

He was charismatic, magnetic, electric and everybody knew it. When he walked in every woman’s head turned, everyone stood up to talk to him. He was like this hybrid, this mix of a man who couldn’t contain himself. I always got the sense that he became torn between being a good person and missing out on all of the opportunities that life could offer a man as magnificent as him. And in that way, I understood him and I loved him.

I loved him, I loved him, I loved him.

And I still love him. I love him.”

2.            Outro from Ride
Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.
We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.
Live fast. Die young. Be wild. And have fun.
I believe in the country America used to be.
I believe in the person I want to become.
I believe in the freedom of the open road.
And my motto is the same as ever:
"I believe in the kindness of strangers. And when I’m at war with myself I ride, I just ride."
Who are you?
Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies?
Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience them?
I have. I am fucking crazy.
But I am free.

               

1.            Intro from Ride
“I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met along the road were my only summer.
At night I fell asleep with visions of myself, dancing and laughing and crying with them.
Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour, and my memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times.
I was a singer - not a very popular one,
I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken.
But I didn't really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is.
When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I'd been living, they asked me why - but there's no use in talking to people who have home.
They have no idea what it's like to seek safety in other people - for home to be wherever you lay your head.
I was always an unusual girl.
My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean...
And if I said I didn't plan for it to turn out this way I'd be lying...
Because I was born to be the other woman.
I belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone.
Who had nothing, who wanted everything, with a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn't even talk about it, and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.”

If this isn't poetry, I clearly have no concept of what poetry is…

Fave Five: Poetry on a Beat

Music is a great thing. It permits us to feel and experience, it is both a method of release and retention, it opens up new wounds all the while carrying the ability to heal old ones. If this can be said about music in general, imagine then what happens when you cross paths with a well written song, the abilities of this song are probably to the power of a hundred thousand trillion.
When an awesome beat meets phenomenal lyrics, many magical things occur and you could swear some lyrics are just plain old fashioned poetry.

Here are five songs that without fail always manage to move me and this based solely on their lyrical content, well maybe not just the lyrics but, also the perfect combination of a beat, a voice and lyrics.

5.            Janelle Monae – Oh, Maker
From the very title of this track you can’t help but be intrigued. Maker is an interesting word to use. My take is that it represents God in a religious sense and he’s being just and righteous and fair, this God is looking down on this relationship between the song’s protagonist and her lover or she is maybe making a plea to the maker to shelter and look over them and their union.
This is the ultimate theme song for tarnished and unpermitted yet unadulterated love.  With lines that read “I hear the colors in the flowers, Just like the candle snuffed at dawn, You're here, you're near, you're there and then you're gone” and “tell me did you know, This love would burn so yellow?, Becoming orange and, in its time, Explode from grey to black then bloody wine” demonstrating perfectly the turmoil of a forbidden love.

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4.            Rihanna (feat: Mikky Ekko) – Stay
I fell in love with this song the very first time I heard it. It’s poignant and emotive beat speaks volumes moving you to want to experience the elusive elations of love. You know the feeling, the one has you wanting to run as fast as you can but, in a circle that leads you to exactly where you began.
The songs is reeks of longing with stanzas such as “The reason I hold on, Cause I need this hole gone, Funny you're the broken one, But I'm the only one who needed saving, Cause when you never see the light, It's hard to know which one of is caving” painting vividly the feeling of wanting and hoping for something that will never be as boundless and fertile as one had played it out in the mind. 

3.            Miguel – Do you
With an opening lyric that asks Do you like drugs? It’s hard to not be intrigued. Miguel delivers a great and sexy song about a girl being addicted to love and even more profound, to him.
He alludes to sex being purchasable in the line “My mama said the greatest things in life are free” and this he weighs up against honest unadulterated love which cannot be bought. He speaks about the feeling of wanting, so badly to want to know this girl’s inner most being and how joyous that would be.
This is a simple song, with a simple thought process behind it but, the more you think about it there is so much substance contained within the lyrics. The use of the metaphor comparing love to drugs, the some-what reversed chronology and the almost too simple narrative makes this song a winner in my eye.   

2.            Lana Del Ray – Lolita
Upon first hearing this song my assumptions were that it was a song about love, the love of a girl for her man completely disregarding anybody’s views on their relationship. I wasn’t completely off the mark, the only thing I got wrong was that this (love) song was about a young girl’s relationship with her paedophile father. The title of the track is taken from a book of the same title written by Vladimir Nabokov dealing with the same subject matter.
The song starts of young and playful, flirty almost and goes on to gradually paint a picture of this not-so-perfect thing where she (the protagonist) is restricted “I want to have fun and be in love with you” and has self-doubt and low self-esteem issues “I know that I'm a mess with my long hair, and my suntan, short dress, bare feet”.
I wonder though about the main character’s psyche, she seems to relish the idea of this relationship, wanting so badly to please this man who is obviously taking advantage of her. You can also see though that she does want to be a regular teenager and lead a normal teenage life but is conflicted by the situation in which she finds herself through lines such as “No more skipping rope skipping heartbeats with the boys downtown” and “I want my cake and I want to eat it too, I want to have fun and be in love with you”.

1.            Frank Ocean – Summer Remains
This song is a poem. Woven beautifully, telling the tale of a man who is burdened by what is perceived as right, warm summer months, being in a heterosexual relationship, etc. All this stuff that he does feels wrong to him but, yet because it is socially accepted he deals.
He opens up in the first verse by stating that what he is about to say is the truth and nothing but, which is already in itself a form of conformity (when looked at from a legal stance). He then goes on to tell his audience about the cold of what should be warm summer days and how unnatural a thing that is. In the second verse he alludes to his recent “coming out” singing about being with a girl and the theory that states “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” speaking again to societal perceptions of a traditional relationship “When that jungle flower blooms, Leave it in the ground, Don't try to cut it out” and again this verse is ended with a proclamation of how unnatural doing the opposite would be.  He eventually revolts against the system of natural order resolving to burn in hell all the while knowing he lived a life that was of his own accord “But we're under the palm trees, Thinking heaven must be, Somewhere under these palm trees, With all the hell we're raising, At least we had the palm trees, To shade us from the ray beams, But not even the palm trees, Could save us from the flames, Summer remains”