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lizzygrantarchives · 13 years ago

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GQ, September 19, 2011

"My look? I'm going for 'I live in Monaco but don't f*** with me'," laughs Lana Del Rey. A delightful combination of wide-eyed naivety and trash-talking savvy, the 24-year-old New Yorker (born Lizzie Grant) is dressed in vintage high-waisted jeans by Versace and a folksy horse-print jumper when GQ.com meets her in London's Soho. Currently riding a colossal wave of hype thanks to viral hit "Video Games", Del Ray is slowly adjusting to her life in the spotlight: "I'm always just surprised when someone writes something about me" she says guilelessly. Here she talks about admiring Kurt Cobain, dancing like Snoop Dogg and asking the "invisible whoever" for advice...

Which question are you bored of answering already?

I'm a little embarrassed by the "gangster Nancy Sinatra" thing. That was supposed to be a joke. No one listened to anything I did for eleven million years so I put all this stuff up on my Facebook page, [but I was] just kidding. You know how these things happen - if a big blog prints something about you then everyone just takes it. I remember one day I had eleven Google Alerts about it…

Are you more comfortable with the whole David Lynch association?

I would have been more comfortable with it if it had been something that was only mentioned a few times. But of course the David Lynch tip is not a bad way to go, is it? I didn't really know he was an influence but when I was 17 I kept singing in bars and everyone kept coming up to me saying, [adopts quizzical hipster tone] "Are you a fan of David Lynch?" I looked it up and realised that basically everyone thinks I'm a f***ing weirdo. I think it was because I was singing about disturbing things while being sort of happy.

Can you describe the way you dance?

I drop it like it's hot. You should come to my show. My dancing is Hawaiian-inspired but I also get a little fresh when it comes to my faster songs. I get down. Literally. You'll see. [laughs]

Which British man do you think has great style?

I would have to jump on the Mark Ronson bandwagon. [adopts indeterminate "British" accent] He always looks really noice.

Which lyric are you most proud of?

There was an older song that you've never heard called "Pawn Shop Blues". [sings] "In the name of higher consciousness / I let the best man I met go / Because it's nice to love and be loved but it's better to know all you can know." Because I remember I'd met someone so special and famous but I knew he wasn't enlightened about how to be a good person. I knew it would get in the way of me becoming a nice person. That's a difficult choice to make.

What's your hangover cure?

I don't drink. I used to a long time ago. I used to drink a lot, but that was seven years ago now. It's something I still think about all the time but I'm much safer without it.

How did you meet this famous person?

Um, it was in a self-help group. [laughs]. He wasn't that famous. I just thought he was famous…

TV famous or movie star famous?

Rock star famous. Just middle of the road ish. To me he was famous because I didn't know anyone who was wildly recognisable. I remember thinking it was exciting at the time.

Do you get chatted up a lot?

By boys, you mean? Yes! I do. [giggles]

Do they hope you're going to sing about them?

Maybe so. I think the musicians do. The rest of them just hope I'll be their girlfriend. [squeals with delight] People are really talkative in New York. Someone always comes up to me and says hi during the day. I always say, "Oh, it's nice to meet you, thank you, but I'm actually married." Then I've had a lot of people say, "But are you happy?" I think that's the creepiest question. It's funny, but nothing is f***ing sacred!

You're a huge Nirvana fan. How exited are you by the Nevermind reissue?

Well, I'd have to say I'm not that excited because I already have everything. Bootlegs? No, I have all the stuff regular people would. But I mean, on a scale of one to ten how excited am I about ever having heard them and loving them? Just off the charts. Come to think of it, the first music video I ever saw was "Heart-Shaped Box" on MTV when I was eleven. It wasn't even the music at first, it was just him. [deep breath] Him is enough - totally. [smiles]. Two nights ago I watched Live At Reading, which I never saw [before]. I was sitting there watching it with my friend. It's weird when you see something that you have never seen about someone you love. It's like finding a gem. You don't want it to end.

Can you recommend a good book?

Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - that will help you. I'm listening to audio books now. I've actually been listening to newscasts on this new movement in biology of creating human life through synthetic chemical compounds. I couldn't believe that was really happening.

What's the oddest request you've had from fans?

I've gotten strange messages. I've had people be really persistent - asking me where I'll be all the time and can they come and just meet up. You know, you get it all. But it was kind of the same fanbase for a really long time since I was 17. I can honestly say it's only in the last three months that there have been more people at all who have listened to me. There are new fans out of nowhere, which is strange. I've gotten poetry - it's good too. Are there lots of "sweater / better" rhymes? No, that's all me. [laughs] I can't believe that's the one you like.

What was the first hip-hop record you became obsessed with?

The first Biggie Smalls track that I really loved I would say, just like everyone else, was "Juicy". I realised what cool was. I wasn't that young - I was 15 and my best friend at school, who is still my best friend today, was actually my teacher. He was a white English teacher who played basketball and listened to hip-hop. I didn't know what everyone thought was cool. He played Biggie Smalls for me in his car. I didn't really know that there was that space for storytelling in songs. I thought, "Everything I thought I could do, I was right about." You could keep it really smart. Some of the people I met were pretty traditional and I was [already] singing some sort of weird things pretty young.

The video for "Kinda Outta Luck" features a number of well-dressed men. What should every man have in their wardrobe?

I guess it does - I've never thought about that! That's a good question. I go for almost everything because I'm jumping worlds a lot. I like a good suit - Scott Disick-style. I like the whole pocket-square style but I also like getting back to basics - the wife-beater and jeans.

What's the most important item on your rider?

I don't have a rider. [giggles] I'm not that demanding. In New York I pretty much live in diners - I order French Fries, Diet Coke floats and lots of coffee. In New York, The Waverly is a good place to be if you want to relax because of its big, sparkly red booths.

Have you ever fired a gun?

Only a few times. I'm much worse than I thought. My uncle takes me to the shooting range sometimes - just a rifle and a handgun. It's really loud too. Last time the shells were flicking back and skimming my face - I thought, "Jesus Christ!" I think if I was a little stronger I'd get into it.

How many tattoos do you have?

I only have one. [reveals small design on her hand] It was scarily unpainful. I looked away and then looked back and it was there. I thought, "You can do a lot of bad things in one second that you can't take back." I did it five years ago. I think by the time I die I'll only have one more.

What music do you love that would surprise people?

I don't have that many guilty pleasures because I don't like that many things. It's hard to say what people think of you - my tastes haven't changed. I've listened to the same thing since I was 15. I've been listening to film scores lately because that calms me down. Particularly Thomas Newman's score for American Beauty - it's just sick.

You're up on the ceiling covered in roses?

Yeah, in my mind! [laughs]

How important is religion to you?

Like so many people, they always state the difference between faith and religion. The faith that I've come to find is a science of my own through lots of trials and errors. I've been through so many different walks of life that I've needed to ask a lot of questions that no human power can answer. I've had to seek a lot of guidance. I've had to pray a lot because I've been in trouble a lot. But it's not until you do that that you realise there are answers out there to be found.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

To thine own self be true. Seek and ye shall find. There's a science to prayer, I would say. I think sometimes when you're really faced with a huge life dilemma or problem and you've turned to every sort of thing for answers, sometimes the last resort is to pray and to put out a question to the universe in your mind. Even when you put your question out there, you ask that invisible whoever "What do I do?" you sort of get answers; you forget the problem all over again.

Who, in your opinion, is overrated?

I wouldn't answer that even if I knew! Everyone? [laughs] I can think of many people. As Fran Lee said, "Just because you feel entitled to share your life with everyone doesn't mean you should do so." [pauses, smiles] Such a bitchy thing to say...

Originally published on gq-magazine.co.uk with the headline GQ&A: Lana Del Rey.

#2011 #GQ #Andy Morris

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therecordconnection · 2 years ago

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Ranting and Raving: "Live and Let Die" by Paul McCartney & Wings

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1973 is a major year for Paul McCartney. It’s the year he finally started seeing success again after the Beatles. His new band, Wings, finally starts taking flight that April after the single “My Love” tops the Billboard Hot 100. Its subsequent album, Red Rose Speedway, finds success that the first Wings album didn’t find. At the end of the year, Band on the Run comes out and through the strength of its title track and “Jet,” it becomes the top selling album of 1974 in the U.K. and Australia. In between Red Rose and Band on the Run, McCartney finds another success, this time within the world of film. The latest installment in the famous 007 James Bond film series (based on a series of novels by Ian Fleming) is set to release in late June. This time, an adaptation of Fleming’s Live and Let Die will be gracing the silver screen. McCartney and his lovely wife Linda (who is also the backing vocalist/keyboardist in Wings) are the ones who will be tasked with providing the theme song for it.

Even in 1973, being the artist that provided the Bond theme for the newest film was considered a great honor. Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, and Nancy Sinatra are a few of the famous voices who had delivered great Bond themes just a few short years before the McCartneys wrote one. Bassey and Jones even scored Top 40 hits out of them (“Goldfinger” peaked at #8 for Bassey, “Thunderball” at #25 for Jones). Paul and Linda however will do one better: “Live and Let Die” will peak at #2 on Billboard, being the Bond song that performs the best until Duran Duran takes the #1 title in 1985 with “A View to a Kill.”

But more importantly than that, “Live and Let Die,” to me, serves as the turning point for Bond themes. Starting with this song, Bond themes officially breach containment and begin to live second lives as pop songs that are almost completely divorced from the movies they’re written for. The nature of the Bond theme changes with McCartney’s contribution, but that might also be due to the fact that ‘73 was the year the nature of the Bond film series itself underwent major change.

Sean Connery, the Scottish actor who originated the role of James Bond in 1962, played 007 in every film (except On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969) until Live and Let Die. After Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, Connery refused to return for another film. When Connery declined, producers needed to find a new actor to become James Bond. Sir Roger Moore ended up getting the job, starting with Live and Let Die and ending his tenure, after seven adventures, with A View to a Kill.

(Roger Moore and the main cast of Live and Let Die)

I admit that I’ve always found myself gravitating more towards Moore’s time in the role over Sir Sean. The campier nature of those films and the cheesy escapism of them makes for a fun movie night. They’re larger than life stories and they revel in the absurd. They don’t take themselves that seriously, which I see as a positive. On the negative side of things, Moore’s era is often criticized for being too campy and over the top. More action, more car chases, more ridiculousness and snark, and none of the more serious, gritty, cinematic elements that Connery’s era cemented into legend. If you ever wondered where Michael Scott might have gotten ideas for Threat Level Midnight or wondered what fueled the Austin Powers series, Moore’s time as Bond was the model.

Live and Let Die suffers from these criticisms. It’s dated as all hell, mostly due to the film being made during the height of Blaxploitation. Because of this, the movie suffers from a good number of bad 70s stereotypes. Let me paint a picture for you: Black gangsters all speak like Dolemite, pimpmobiles are present, Bond is referred to as “honky” at least three different times. At it’s best, Live and Let Die is a fun and silly action-adventure film and serves as a ridiculous time capsule from a different age. At its worst, the movie would be considered problematic by today’s standards. One very good thing can be said though: McCartney’s song has aged wonderfully.

This most likely has to do with the fact that McCartney didn’t have much to really work from. When writing “Live and Let Die,” the screenplay for the film was unfinished, which meant that his only source material to pull from was the Ian Fleming novel, which in itself is a gambit because he couldn’t be certain just how closely the film was going to follow the book. In Paul’s 2021 book, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, he writes about the backstory of how “Live and Let Die” was written:

"Writing a Bond song is a bit of an accolade, and I always had a sneaking ambition to do it. Ron [Kass] told me the film was called Live and Let Die. The screenplay wasn't finished at that point, so I got the Ian Fleming book, and it's a real page-turner. I just spent that afternoon immersing myself in the book, so when I sat down to write the song, I knew how to approach it. I didn't want the song to be, 'You've got a gun. Now go kill people. Live and let die.'" That's just not me. I wanted it to be, 'Let it go. Don't worry about it. When you've got problems, just live and let die.' Once I had that thought in my head, the song almost wrote itself."

Just as McCartney had the pressure of bringing a new Bond theme into the world, Roger Moore had the pressure of having to reintroduce the world to James Bond. How do you breathe new life to a character and adapt it to your specific strengths? How do you do this while still retaining all of the things that made people fall in love with the character in the first place? Ultimately, it was Moore that had the bigger pressure to deliver the goods, but McCartney’s song certainly helps and I think McCartney’s more pop direction for the theme served Moore’s first outing as Bond more than something orchestral, sweeping, and cinematic like the themes to From Russia With Love or Goldfinger did. “Live and Let Die” has a “movie theme” vibe to it, but it’s much more over the top and silly sounding by comparison, which suits the direction that the seven films made with Roger Moore would eventually go. Getting a pop songwriter like McCartney to provide the theme just feels right when considering that.

Roger Moore’s first outing in Live and Let Die immediately separated his Bond from Connery’s version. For starters, Moore had a more dapper look than Connery and a kinder looking face. He had the look of a classic playboy, natural with a cigarette and a martini in his hand at the bar. While both Bonds were charming womanizers, Moore’s Bond was more of a smooth talking ladies man, where Connery was often rude and chauvinistic. Most importantly, Moore was a witty son of a bitch, having an utter mastery over one liners and elite quickness with a joke. The man had snark on lock and was the kind of Bond who looked and sounded like he talked his way out of situations rather than solve them with violence and weaponry. Connery’s version of Bond wouldn’t have fared well with the campier, goofier “popcorn movie” direction the series would take through the rest of the 70s and 80s. It was clear that Eon Productions (the company behind every Bond film) wanted to create movies that not only made a lot of money, but appealed to a wide variety of audiences. Action! Adventure! Romance! Thrills and chills! Bond delivers on all of this and more.

As does McCartney’s song. I’ve spent a lot of time so far writing about Bond and the movie that the song was written for, but really, it almost doesn’t matter when you look at the song itself. There are probably plenty of McCartney fans who are completely unaware that the song is the theme to a movie of the same name. There’s nothing in the song’s lyrics that is exclusive to the movie. Granted, songs like “Thunderball” and “You Only Live Twice” don’t have anything exclusive to their respective movies either, but they still don’t sound like pop songs you could hear on the radio or out in the wild. McCartney made a smart move by playing to his strengths and writing just a straight, well constructed pop song, which is always a good use of your Paul McCartney.

The song itself contains at least three different and distinct musical ideas. Think like how “Band on the Run” is three little songs strung together to make a single piece. The first part starts very simply with McCartney at the piano, delivering a damn fine melody. The lyrics are vague enough that you can either relate them back to James Bond or relate them to yourself, which adds to the listener’s ability to divorce it from the movie. It’s a hopeful song. If you have problems, if something just won’t go right, just let it go. “Live and let die.” McCartney takes the title of a pulp spy novel and turns it into a philosophy of casting aside the things that don’t work anymore; the things that mess with you.

When you were young and your heart was an open book / You used to say live and let live / (you know you did, you know you did, you know you did) / But if this ever changing world in which we're living / Makes you give in and cry / ... / Say live and let die

Those three little piano notes and that brief empty space in the song right before McCartney sings, “Say live and let die” kills every single time I hear it. The explosion and combination of guitar and horns gives the song that grand, cinematic feeling. It’s fantastic. The way that the orchestration takes over and drives the song. You can almost picture car chases and gunfights in your head as it’s going. It rises and builds until it crescendos and becomes... a reggae tune?

What does it matter to ya? / When you got a job to do / You gotta do it well / You gotta give the other fellow hell

It becomes a reggae tune for about ten seconds before rising again with “You gotta give the other fellow hell” and letting the orchestration back in the driver’s seat. It’s a weird shift and even weirder, it still works. That bit came from Linda McCartney, a woman who had a love of reggae music and somehow found a way to work it in, proving that she enjoyed off-the-wall musical ideas in much of the same vein that her husband did. It’s one of the most memorable parts of the song and it adds to the fun of the whole thing. There’s no way to know if it was fully intentional on Linda’s part, but the movie does have a good number of scenes that take place in the Caribbean, so the idea of this sweeping, loud, grand movie theme turning into a reggae tune real quick is a musical idea that does tie into the film. If you’ve seen the film, the connection makes sense. If you haven’t, it’s just another oddball idea in a McCartney song. “Live and Let Die” gets to enjoy the best of both worlds.

The major reason I think “Live and Let Die” has gotten to live a life beyond the movie it was written for is due to the fact that it’s just a well constructed and well executed song. When McCartney plays the song live, he makes it as wild and over the top as any Moore-era Bond film. When he sings “Say live and let die” in concert, the explosion of sound following it involves a good deal of pyrotechnics, fireworks, and sweeping spotlights. It’s a fantastic number and it’s not just a great Bond song, it’s a great song, period. There’s no dead weight that could be trimmed from this thing. It doesn’t even suffer from the classic McCartney songwriting issue of not knowing how/when a song needs to end. It’s a perfect three minute affair that has great musical ideas stuffed into it. It’s pure and classic McCartney in its greatest form. There’s so many little moments in this song that you wait for and you fall in love with every single time. It's a fun ride that's just as exciting and thrilling as the movie it was written for.

“Live and Let Die” is the song that proved a Bond theme didn’t have to just be tied to the movie it was written for. It can exist beyond it. Marvin Hamlisch and Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” Sheena Easton’s “For Your Eyes Only,” and Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill” are all great pop songs that followed in the wake of what “Live and Let Die” pulled off. You don’t have to have seen The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, or A View to a Kill to love those songs, just like you don’t have to have seen the movie Live and Let Die in order to enjoy the song that borrowed its name. Great pop songs have a way of living their own unique lives and finding an audience beyond what they were written to be, whether commissioned for a movie or not.

When you got a job to do, you gotta do it well and this song does its job very well.

#ranting and raving #paul mccartney #wings #live and let die #original post #Youtube

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