“It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio”: How Lana Del Rey’s breakthrough hit transformed the contemporary pop landscape

At a time when the music industry generates $28.6 billion in global revenue a year, it’s easy to forget that 20 years ago, major labels faced an existential crisis as they battled the spectre of ‘free’ P2P filesharing and scrabbled to work out how they were going to make a profit from recorded music ever again.

Subscription-based music streaming would ultimately provide the answer. Conceived as a utility – like gas, electric or water – streaming would pump all the music a consumer would ever need, tap-like, into their homes, just as long as they paid their monthly subscription.

At the same time, much was being made of the idea that emerging music and social media platforms would empower DIY music creators like never before. By the second decade of the 21st century, this notion was reinforced by a number of massive viral hits, songs that emerged from seemingly nowhere to sear themselves into our collective consciousness.

One of the first and biggest viral hits appeared online on 15 May, 2011. The song was Video Games, an exquisitely haunting ballad seeped in longing and frustration, and co-written and recorded by Lana Del Rey. The song was uploaded to YouTube as an evocative self-made video, featuring grainy vintage footage interspersed with shots of Del Rey singing into her webcam.

Video Games was unlike anything else around. For the industry, the song demonstrated the power of streaming platforms. For the artists, Video Games showed that it was acceptable to embrace sadder, introspective themes in pop music. The song would influence a whole generation of artists and usher in orchestral and hip-hop influences. It would also cement Lana Del Rey’s position as a leading figure in the field of contemporary pop.

The artist known as Lana Del Rey began life as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, born and raised in upstate New York in 1985. As a teenager, Grant struggled with alcohol and drugs, fuelled by anxiety and alienation brought on by a preoccupation with death.

“When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too,” she told Neil McCormick of The Telegraph in January 2012. “I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal… I got into a lot of trouble. I used to drink a lot. That was a hard time in my life.”

Grant dropped out of school to go to rehab, living with her aunt and uncle on Long Island. Her uncle taught her to play guitar and in an interview with Mark Savage of BBC News in 2012, Grant said she realised that she could “probably write a million songs with those six chords."

She moved to New York in 2004 and enrolled at Fordham University, studying philosophy and metaphysics. She played open mic nights in Brooklyn under names such as Lizzy Grant And The Phenomena. The songs were folky, with no hint of the hip-hop beats, electronica and experimentation of her future work.

In spring 2005, Del Rey registered a seven-track E.P. with the US Copyright Office and released a second E.P., From The End, under the stage name May Jailer. She released her first album Sirens in 2006.

In 2007, she submitted a demo to the indie label 5 Points Records, who offered her a deal, with an advance of $10,000.

She began working with producer David Kahne, releasing the E.P. Kill Kill as Lizzy Grant.

Like Dylan, Bowie and Madonna before her, she recognised the importance of shaping new personas. She envisaged a “gangster Nancy Sinatra” image and settled on the name Lana Del Rey.

“I wanted a name I could shape the music towards,” she told Vogue in October 2011. “I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba. Lana Del Rey reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.”

She created a strong vintage aesthetic, with bold 60s hairstyles, sculpted eyebrows, chic retro silhouettes and Hollywood Hills sheen. The look was reminiscent of female characters in David Lynch films, where darkness and despair lurk beneath white picket fences and manicured suburban lawns.

“She’s got some fantastic charisma,” observed Lynch years later. “It’s like she’s born out of another time.”

On 4 January, 2010, 5 Points Records released Lana Del Ray, the debut album by the artist referred to as ‘A.K.A. Lizzy Grant’. Del Rey took on two new managers, Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, who later got her out of her record contract when she felt “nothing was happening”.

By then, Del Rey was building a team around her and one key member was Justin Parker, an English songwriter and producer who co-wrote Video Games with Del Rey in 2010.

Another key element was Robopop, a production duo consisting of Pennsylvania-based Daniel Omelio and Brandon Lowry, who shaped the soundscape of this song.

The duo first heard Video Games as a basic demo of piano and vocals that Del Rey and Parker made. “Dan and I were immediately excited about the song,” Lowry told Paul Tingen of Sound On Sound in 2012, “and we suggested that we’d do a demo”.

They did this over two days in February 2011 at BMG Studios in New York. What followed was described by Tingen as “a serendipitous two-day romp through Cubase, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, IK's Miroslav Philharmonik Orchestra and various dance music sample CDs”.

"The first thing we did was slow the song down,” recalled Lowry. “I found out that Lana is influenced by a lot of downtempo music, and it seemed appropriate for this song. We pulled the tempo back to almost 60 bpm, like a dirge, almost as if the whole song was in slow motion. We also made a few changes to the lyrical content and the melody.”

Omelio laid down the track’s electronic arrangements in one inspired six-hour late night session. He realised he had discovered a signature sound.

"I remember coming home that night and telling my girlfriend that this was going to be a defining track for Lana,” said Omelio. “I knew right away that it was a pretty epic piece of work and that it would put her on the map and define her as an artist. It was such a heartfelt and real piece of music, that I felt sure that people would connect with it right away.

Despite attempts to have the track mixed “properly”, Robopop’s rough mix was the one chosen as the final version. Sumptuous strings elevate the downtempo ballad and Del Rey’s vocals are deep, rich and gloriously understated.

In the EDM dominated pop market of 2011, it was a unique and stirring soundscape. Yet none of the labels that Del Ray played the song to saw any potential in it.

“I would play my songs, explain what I was trying to do, and I’d get ‘You know who’s No. 1 in 13 countries right now? Kesha’,” explained Del Rey. “Video Games was a four-and-a-half-minute ballad. No instruments on it. It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio.”

Lyrically, Video Games focuses on Del Rey’s attempts to rescue a doomed relationship. For all its beauty it is strikingly frank, as Del Rey charts the frustration of her relationship with her gamer boyfriend.

“The verse was about the way things were with one person, and the chorus was the way that I wished things had really been with another person, who I thought about for a long time”, Del Rey told Dazed magazine in 2011.“‘Swinging in the backyard, pull up in your fast car, whistling my name’. That was what happened, you know? He’d come home and I’d see him. But then the chorus wasn’t like that. That was the way that I wished it was – the melody sounds so compelling and heavenly because I wanted it to be that way.”

By 2011, Del Rey was living in London and on 15 May, she uploaded two self-made videos to YouTube: one of the song Blue Jeans and the other of Video Games.

Lana Del Rey - Video Games - YouTube

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The latter was a viral sensation and she was signed by Stranger Records to release the song as her debut single. The media interest was phenomenal.

"I just put that song online a few months ago because it was my favourite,” Del Rey told the Observer in October 2011. “To be honest, it wasn't going to be the single but people have really responded to it."

In the same month she signed a joint deal with Interscope and Polydor to release her second album, Born To Die.

The accolades for Video Games rolled in: including a Q Award for ‘Next Big Thing’ in October 2011 and Ivor Novello awards for her and Parker for Best Contemporary Song in 2012.

But almost as soon the adulation began, a backlash kicked in, with Del Rey being crucified by the media when her ill-fated first album was unearthed online.

Media outlets were incensed to discover that Lana Del Rey was a pseudonym, which shattered the prevailing narrative that she had emerged fully formed from nowhere.

The key criticism was lack of authenticity: that it was all a marketing ploy; that Del Rey had had facial surgery; and that she had completely reinvented herself. Then there were allegations that her parents were wealthy and had bankrolled her career.

Del Rey was forced to defend such accusations, arguing that her family had struggled financially and that her father’s financial success only happened much later when he joined an internet domain developer business.

In many ways, this should not have been an issue but it was. The media felt duped for falling for a narrative which, in some ways, it had actually helped perpetuate.

But as Alexis Petridis noted in The Guardian in December 2011, Video Games was still an astonishing song: “None of that matters,” he wrote. “Authenticity is for the Antiques Roadshow, not pop music… Regardless of who made it, where they came from, who their dad is, what they're called and whether or not their lips have been subject to the ministrations of a surgeon, Video Games would be a magnificent song. There's something imperishable and undeniable about its sighing melody, the way it rises and falls with the mood of a lyric… like the criticisms levelled against her it doesn't seem to matter, at least while the song is playing.”