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Inside last night’s sold-out Lana Del Rey show in Toronto: The world’s biggest indie star on the rise and the stylish fans watching

By Randi Bergman | December 1st, 2011 | 1:00 pm

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Photography by Lewis Mirrett

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Last night’s sold-out Lana Del Rey show at Toronto’s Mod Club was as much about buzz as it was about music. Del Ray’s star has risen extraordinarily fast in the less than three months since her first single, “Video Games,” complete with a (maybe) homemade video, was released on YouTube—it currently has 8 million views and counting—and fans everywhere can’t get enough. Or, rather, they can’t seem to figure her out. There are too many words that come to mind when trying to describe the 25-year-old singer, so I’ll just go with “dichotomist.” Her voice? Purring meets badass. Her lyrics? Melancholy, yet hood. Her sound? Poppy, yet cinematic. Her looks? Southern beauty queen meets Ann Margaret meets the Pink Ladies. She’s impossibly beautiful, with lips too beestung to be natural. Though she’s reported to have grown up in Lake Placid, her accent is mysteriously Jersey. (There are those who scoff at her put-on identity, such as her claims to have grown up in a trailer park when, in reality, she attended boarding school, but Bob Dylan had similarly fictional roots.)

And then there’s the controversy, but I can’t go into that now for fear of missing the subject at hand, which is this: In only nine songs, ending with her apparent first live performance of “Diet Mtn Dew” (“If you judge me, I will kill you,” she pre-empted), she managed to perplex last night’s crowd into even more questioning. Is she the real thing? Plastic? Nervous? If I may opine, the mystery is part of her appeal. She’s got that down, and I can’t wait for more.

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