Video: Lana Del Ray’s Tropico is NSFW
Lana Del Ray has been the hottest topic on the world-wide-internets this week with the re-release of several songs taken from her smasher of a latest longplayer, Born to Die, which made everyone go la-la for Lana early last year. Tropico features four tunes plucked from the mega-selling album, which have been re-released in EP format as one neat package. But it’s not the EP that’s the focus here, it’s the bonkers video that the Southern belle has created with help from director Anthony Mandler, who was previously responsible for videos Ride and National Anthem.
The 27-minute-long clip features heavy symbolism about redemption, starring a handsome Shaun Ross as her lover. Tropico, ‘the movie’, begins with voiceovers reciting passages from the Bible, followed by her first track off the EP, Body Electric. Lana appears, hanging out with Marilyn Monroe, ‘her mother’, with Elvis, ‘her daddy’, and Jesus,’her bestest friend’. Obviously. She grinds in character as Eve with an albino Adam (Shaun Ross) in a colour-saturated, hazy Eden. A pouty Lana croons the chorus, “I sing the body electric, I sing the body electric, baby, I’m on fire…We get crazy every Friday night, I drop it like it’s hot…”
After some pretty heavy sexytimes with Adam, temptress Lana takes a bite of the forbidden fruit and Elvis and Marilyn get hella pissed (stay with us here…). We see that naughty Lana is now a stripper in modern day, with her lover stocking shelves. Lana’s rendition of poetic spoken word is played over imagery of women twerking and getting spanked with knickers full of cash.
The best track, Gods and Monsters, comes at the 11-minute mark where Lana and her fair-haired fella are seen in Day of the Dead makeup. It’s a raunchy number, where Lana is “living like Jim Morrison”. She couldn’t make it more obvious that her “innocence [is] lost” while she is pictured doing back bends in red lingerie on a pole.
In the final moments of Tropico Lana is still trying for redemption, dressed in a lace veil, back in hazy Eden. Lana and her partner then flee their dangerous lives in a convertible and Lana looks ultra hot in a lacy fringed halter-neck thing. More blatant symbolism as she shreds her lacy wears and dresses in flowing white. She joins her man twirling in slow motion in the saturated light at a countryside scene.
A snippet of Elvis singing “You were always on my mind” closes Tropico with an image of Lana and her lover,’going off forever into the sunset’. And that was that.
I made the through the 27 minutes without a break and still feel the same about Lana, she is a pop star that neither breaks rules or makes exciting music, but rather, fence-sits on the ordinary, creating ‘art’ for all to enjoy. Tropico is filled with so many cliches, and symbolism that could be extracted in any middle school classroom, but, I’m fine with that, and if you do have a spare half-an-hour it’s worth a watch.
Words by Carol Bowditch.
