Lana Del Rey is back with another visually arresting music video for her new single "Carmen," is taken from Del Rey's first major-label album "Born to Die," which debuted at No.2 on Billboard Hot 200. "The album is a tribute to living life on the wild side. I'm sort of kidding because I'm not that wild any more... I used to drink a lot. Too much," she once said. "I haven't had a drink for seven years now," the 25-year-old singer said."Carmen" is a dark tale of pretty-girl psychosis and it narrates the lifestyle of a 17-year-old Hollywood party girls like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and the 'Blue Jeans' singer tries to give hints at how she grew up in the Big Apple and returns to the found-footage motif with a mix of strippers, instructional drug videos and digitally aged clips with vintage, early-1960s appeal that "explains everything" in the newly-released clip. Among the images in the video are blooming roses, athletically gifted pole dancers, as well as clips from a scientific video that explores the chemical effects of crystal methamphetamine.
This cautionary tale of a doomed woman who sells her body on the streets is littered with Coney Island references. Del Rey told The Sun: "Carmen is a song I can't say too much about because it's so close to my heart. It's the song on the record I relate to most closely. It's set partly in Coney Island, a place that's been important to me throughout my New York City career." Coney Island is a peninsula in southernmost Brooklyn, and was America's original Sin City, decades before Las Vegas, and was rife with prostitution.
Spliced into the footage of the video are schematics of methamphetamine and audio blurbs that ask how meth can change your brain. With a siren-like voice, Del Rey is no stranger to the mash-up video style herself and she continues in this vein for "Carmen," and she designates the video as a "BIO PIC" in the video's YouTube description, but it's up to the viewer to decide how much or how little is an authentic glimpse into the life of the singer, who has been widely criticized for relying too heavily on artifice.
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