Lana Del Rey – Lolita
2010 · Directed by Lana Del Rey
57K Likes
Best comments
1.“Only Lana looks good in cheap wigs.”
More comments
- 2.“Her homemade music videos are better than a lot of produced music videos today.”
- 3.“I wonder if Michelle Phan knows Lana used bits of her Sailor Moon makeup video in this, lol. I would never get over it!”
The story
Before the record deal and the Born to Die frenzy, Lana Del Rey made her own videos. She had already worked under names like Lizzy Grant and put out a 2010 debut that got pulled from iTunes within a few months. Then in 2011 her homemade clip for Video Games, all old footage and webcam close-ups, went viral and got her signed.
This Lolita video comes from that do-it-yourself stretch. Wikipedia's list of her videos credits it to Del Rey herself and dates it to 2010: she sings in a blonde wig with a fan blowing her hair up, cut together with clips of Sailor Moon, Las Vegas casinos, old Disney films and old Lolita movies. The uploader calls it her homemade video for a demo of the song. The finished Lolita landed as a bonus track on some editions of Born to Die in 2012.
The title points straight at Nabokov's novel, a book that has shaped her work, along with its 1962 and 1997 film versions. A wig, a fan and a pile of borrowed clips. That was the whole Lana look before anybody paid for it.
