Life Is Sweet Or Whatever, Baby

Lana Del Rey “Dark But Just A Game”

Jack Antonoff does some interesting production tricks on “Dark But Just A Game,” mostly in extreme contrasts betweens textures and tones that in some cases work like a musical equivalent of rack focus in cinema and in others feel more like quick cut shifts in perspective. This feels appropriate to the subject matter – Lana Del Rey is singing about the tragic glamour of Hollywood once again, but this time wondering if her own experience of fame can avoid the obvious well-known narratives of decadence and doom. Antonoff plays on the “maybe, maybe not” feeling of the lyrics by moving between what sounds almost like a parodic version of Del Rey’s classic noir-gone-trip-hop aesthetic and a brighter, quasi-Beatles feel, and not always in a straight A-to-B-section progression. I particularly like the way he constrasts a cleanly mic’d shaking tambourine with a digital bass drum that’s EQ’d so low it sounds like it’s pasted in from a completely different song. It sounds like the present accidentally bleeding into the fantasy of the past, like a boom mic or some modern trash showing up in the frame of a glamorized period piece.

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