Lana Del Rey falls hard in "Summertime Sadness"

Lana Del Rey showed us her penchant for tragedy when she and A$AP Rocky played the Kennedys in her last video for "National Anthem," and she continues down that road in the hazy new video for "Summertime Sadness," a cut off her major-label debut studio album, "Born to Die," which the 26-year-old raspy-voiced singer describes as "Hollywood Sadcore."
You know that feeling you get on cool nights in the dog days of summer? That tight feeling in your chest as you watch the sunset from your third floor walk-up? Well, most adults like to supplement that with cigarettes and beer, but Del Rey would rather jump off a bridge than deal with that type of twilight sadness. The scenario of "Summertime Sadness" is typical of her debut album, and tells the super true sad love story of two lesbian lovers ending their own lives.
Keeping the buzz alive while sticking with sepia-tones and a healthy dose of melodramatics, Del Rey probes a crumbling relationship in the new video, which was filmed in April in Santa Clarita, California with "Hart of Dixie" actress Jaime King playing her other half, and directed by King's husband, filmmaker Kyle Newman with the help of "Hesher" helmer Spencer Susser - looks like a visual ode to Instagram, which is similar to Del Rey's other videos.
The video is bittersweet with beautifully shot, sepia-soaked and melodramatic, and flickers through mock found footage of the viral singing sensation and her girlfriend enact a love story during their happy days that ends in suicide attempts with both the grief stricken lovers falling in slow motion off of a bridge, suicidal after realizing the irreparability of their relationship. "I just wanted you to know," Del Rey intones as she tumbles slowly into the abyss, "that baby you were the best."

Lana Del Rey Strikes A Pose In "Carmen"

Lana Del Rey is back with another visually arresting music video for her new single "Carmen," is taken from Del Rey's first major-label album "Born to Die," which debuted at No.2 on Billboard Hot 200. "The album is a tribute to living life on the wild side. I'm sort of kidding because I'm not that wild any more... I used to drink a lot. Too much," she once said. "I haven't had a drink for seven years now," the 25-year-old singer said.
"Carmen" is a dark tale of pretty-girl psychosis and it narrates the lifestyle of a 17-year-old Hollywood party girls like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and the 'Blue Jeans' singer tries to give hints at how she grew up in the Big Apple and returns to the found-footage motif with a mix of strippers, instructional drug videos and digitally aged clips with vintage, early-1960s appeal that "explains everything" in the newly-released clip. Among the images in the video are blooming roses, athletically gifted pole dancers, as well as clips from a scientific video that explores the chemical effects of crystal methamphetamine.
This cautionary tale of a doomed woman who sells her body on the streets is littered with Coney Island references. Del Rey told The Sun: "Carmen is a song I can't say too much about because it's so close to my heart. It's the song on the record I relate to most closely. It's set partly in Coney Island, a place that's been important to me throughout my New York City career." Coney Island is a peninsula in southernmost Brooklyn, and was America's original Sin City, decades before Las Vegas, and was rife with prostitution.
Spliced into the footage of the video are schematics of methamphetamine and audio blurbs that ask how meth can change your brain. With a siren-like voice, Del Rey is no stranger to the mash-up video style herself and she continues in this vein for "Carmen," and she designates the video as a "BIO PIC" in the video's YouTube description, but it's up to the viewer to decide how much or how little is an authentic glimpse into the life of the singer, who has been widely criticized for relying too heavily on artifice.