Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey

Remember when Lana Del Rey made her American TV debut on SNL back in 2012 and her performance sucked so much that it turned into a meme? The same thing kind of happened last night, except this time, I don’t think it was LDR’s fault. Her performance itself was good; she was more animated than I expected her to be, and she climbed into the walkway and took a selfie with an adoring fan. But if you weren’t 20 rows deep from the stage, then you couldn’t hear a single fucking thing, which makes this more of a fan review than an LDR review. It’s fun to watch LDR play her home turf on such a grand stage, and as she stood in a New York Yankees patterned dress, I couldn’t help but remember the videos of her performing as Lizzy Grant somewhere in Williamsburg sometime in the mid-’00s. She started out with the slow-burning song “Cruel World” that sounded so garbled I could barely make out her words despite the fact that I was standing just left of the soundboard. I thought that maybe I lost some of my hearing at the FlyLo set, but it wasn’t just me. About three songs in, the surrounding crowd got impatient, a girl turned to her boyfriend and said, “We should just go to the Black Keys, I can’t even hear her,” a resigned expression on her face. Soon after, the collective crowd began to shout “LOUDER LOUDER LOUDER” which, honestly, probably just sounded like abrasive shouts of “LANA LANA LANA” if you were all the way up by the stage. Thus, what could have been an excellent LDR performance became an excellent fan performance. Since no one near me could make out half of her words, the set became a kind of live karaoke experience. A couple slow-danced next to me as they both sang along to every line of “Blue Jeans” in unison, and later, a girl asked if it would be ok for her to throw confetti all over me during the chorus of “Summertime Sadness.” At one point during “Born To Die,” I noticed that LDR changed the line “Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain” to “Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain,” but overall, the sound quality was so shoddy that I didn’t even know she performed “Cola (Pussy),” which is definitely a sad moment to miss. By the end of a festival, people are exhausted and not always so nice, but the camaraderie wrought by everyone’s mutual frustration was heartening. As the Black Keys’ set became so thunderous that it drowned out LDR entirely, I gave up and started to make my way home. Crossing over the bridge back into the city, LDR’s vocals finally sounded crisp, the festival’s acoustics made better by all of that East Harlem concrete. –Gabriela