Singer Lana Del Rey on SNL: Was She Really that Bad?

Much controversy in the news this week concerning the appearance of internet singing sensation Lana Del Rey, whose supposedly lackluster performance on Saturday Night Live set the Twitterverse ablaze with critical sniping. Even NBC News anchor Brian Williams was outed as having penned an e-mail calling it "one of the worst outings in SNL history."

What had I missed by falling asleep too early that fateful Saturday night? I tuned in her performance of the song, Video Games, on YouTube this morning and was amazed that it had inspired such criticism and vitriol. Actress Juliette Lewis — who has herself tried to convince people she's a legitimate singer (ha!) — was among the most brutal: "Wow, watching this 'singer' on SNL is like watching a 12-year-old in their bedroom when they're trying to sing and perform."

Which leads me to my central thesis: that good singing, per se, is not a matter of how long one can hold a pitch without faltering; nor how accurately one phrases the words against the grid of the beat. In fact — to my way of thinking anyway — a good singer is someone who doesn't try to sound any better or worse than they actually are. 

Let's take an obvious example of the first kind of bad singing: Christina Aguilera, whose histrionic approach to the craft has resulted in some of the most tortured r&b stylings since Aretha Franklin set an impossibly high bar in the 1960s. Every note that Aguilera jiggles into seven different divisions and pitches is an example of  her trying to convince us that she is the best of the best, as if such displays of supposed "soulfulness" are anything other than egotistic grandstanding. Yes, she can sing, but does she sing artistically? Nay, quoth the raven. 

Then there's Bob Dylan, often comically derided for both his nasality and incomprehensibility. It is my contention that Mr. Zimmerman is one of the great song stylists/vocalists of the 20^th century, for having fashioned a hybridized approach to singing that invoked the best of his revered folk and blues forbears. In the beginning of his career, he was just another convincing Woody Guthrie impersonator, but evolved into one of the most expressive and original singers of our time. Again, he didn't try to sound like a polished vocalist — quite the opposite! He was an urbanite posing as a rustic, but his absorption of folkloric style was spot-on. "I sing better than Caruso," he once jibed to a journalist, a great line and true in its own sly way.

Back to Ms. Del Rey, whose modest technical gifts weren't necessarily showcased at their best on SNL, where she was understandably quite nervous making her television debut. Nonetheless, I found her restraint admirable, her breathy whisper both fragile and sensuous and the song itself rather haunting. As for Juliette Lewis — who removed her critical tweet the very next day  and replaced it with "I woke up singing a Lana Del Rey song," she should be forced to watch herself "sing" as punishment for daring to judge someone far more accomplished than herself. Those who live in balsa wood houses should not play with matches.