With the song’s drumless “Bang Bang” intro and the most mountainous hairstyle she’s ever displayed publicly, this was her “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” hypothesis out in the field study for the first time. Like the underrated squeakfest “Off to the Races,” it would’ve been a crucial uptempo addition to the album proper, before we knew she was only going to embrace more and more narcoleptic speeds from there.Įven though “Kinda Outta Luck” was never officially released, it was a dry run for the Lana persona proper, posted to YouTube with a video and everything. Rather, it’s a sinister spy-rocker that recalls Britney Spears’ “Toxic” with its snake-charming bass line, cheerleader chanting (“kiss me in the D-A-R-K dark tonight”) and soupcon of castanets to nail that B-movie vibe. With a “y” so as not to be confused with “Lolita,” the trap-slow, orchestra-and-samples version appended to the deluxe edition of 2011’s polarizing Born to Die, the tune’s superior original arrangement didn’t kowtow to the more limited spectrum of the finalized Lana brand. In “Put Me in a Movie,” she bends rock’s romanticized-jailbait tropes until they break, purring “You can be my daddy” (okay, sure) but also “Come on, you know you like, little girls” (uh, is this still age play?), and then inhabits the daddy role herself: “You’re my little sparkle jump-rope queen.” It’s also the birth of her “lights, camera, ack-see-on” catchphrase, deployed to exponentially more disturbing effect here than on “High by the Beach.” Whether she’s actually double-daring a pedophile or merely engaging in elaborate roleplay of taboos previously unexplored from the woman’s side in popular music, Del Rey created a piece as disturbing and worthy of analysis as any Eminem track with “Put Me in a Movie.” This is the tune that revealed Lizzy Grant was truly something else, a soft-voiced subversive imp who wanted to appear in thrall to the canonical male gaze only to stab it in the throat once it convinced her to split a motel bed. But her unchallenging tunes deserve a reputation as remarkable as the headline-grabbing stuff.
It’s one of her catchiest songs, not that Lana Del Rey ever had much interest in being radio-friendly. Her exceedingly young-sounding inflection on this rapped-accordion-reggae joint (!) to her grandma is a good framing for her Liz Phair-echoing boast that she’s been “crazy-ass since I was 3” and we wish those who mocked her studied self-seriousness in early media appearances could hear her hiccupping “I wanna be the whole world’s girl, grandma!” in a post- Lily Allen bit of amateur MySpace mic-rocking.
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