A record of my life as a reader, writer, and father, (not necessarily in that order).

I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live (SNL) in years. Mostly because I don’t stay up late to watch TV or much else. Because there is no sleeping in when you have small children.

With all the brouhaha about the Lana Del Rey “debacle” on SNL, as a music fan, I had to satisfy my curiosity to see what the latest batch of Outraged Internet Missives were about. You can see the performances below.

Video Games
http://www.nbc.com/assets/video/widget/widget.html?vid=1379139

Blue Jeans
http://www.nbc.com/assets/video/widget/widget.html?vid=1379120

Watching these off-key and nervous performances reminded me instantly of another singer/songwriter I saw perform at one of her first concerts: Liz Phair. It was 1993, her album Exile in Guyville had been out for a bit, garnering a lot of critical buzz. I had bought the album and loved it, despite Phair’s vocal weaknesses. (Ever since developing an Opera Habit my tolerance has disappeared for bad or “ugly” voices, by the likes of Phair, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Lou Reed, regardless of their skills as song writers.)

The Phair concert was at the Metro, in Chicago, a much smaller stage and more friendly hometown crowd than that for Del Rey. Phair was stiff, holding the guitar in her hands like it was a foreign object she wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to do with. I was more receptive to her nervous performance for a few reasons: 1) I had just endured a craptastic bumbling dirge of a performance by the opening act Red Red Meat, 2) I loved the album, and 3) I wanted desperately to like her performance.

Later I found out that it was one of Phair’s first shows, that she had not spent any time playing her songs live in the clubs that dot the city. It was the last time I ever saw her play live. Later, a friend would see her on her next tour in support of her subsequent album. My friend told me that Phair had improved. But then I watched video clips of Phair performing and I saw the same brilliant song writer who looked lost and unsure of herself on stage, with the same awkward grasp of her guitar that I had witnessed years before.

Didn’t the likes of Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde blaze trails for something stronger than this? Those women own their stages, and they hold their guitars as if they are natural extensions of themselves, as they should.

Del Rey finally responded to the controversy over her poor performance on SNL with this statement,

“Things are cool. They always will be, whether the music goes good or not,” she says. “Like, I consider being able to sing a luxury, it doesn’t run my life, it’s not my main focus…”

That doesn’t sound like an artist who thrives on the stage. What I saw on both SNL clips was someone who was unsure of what to do with herself on the stage. She was not in control of the audience. She didn’t know how to play to the audience. This ambivalence doesn’t bode well for improving her live performances. Which is a shame, because the songs are catchy in their weird but heavily produced way.