Lana Del Rey ”Ride”

Miss Lana started off the year with an almost universally derided SNL performance. Her whole listless artist schtick does wear thin after a few seconds, but that doesn’t mean her songs aren’t tuneful or filled with quotable lines like “you can be my photon, daddy” (I don’t know what that means, but I’m itching to steal it). The video for her latest single “Ride” is the latest in a very dubious form – the music-video-as-short-film, pioneered by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Bad”, perfected by Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. Despite its pretensions, I think this is a gorgeous video that essentially does for American patriotism what Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” did for the church.