Persephone’s Bees - Nice Day

TruCounterfax #1: Persephone’s Bees

In an imminently short-lived series, I will identify artists whose failures exactly mirror the trajectory of successes. Today, we compare Persephone’s Bees, a neo-loungey act fronted by a genyoowine Russian, to Lana Del Rey.

Why didn’t this band, with this song and its accompanying album, take off? They were on soundtracks. They signed to Columbia. I guarantee you there is at least one hole-punched copy of this single, its accompanying promotional EP, or the album it’s from (Notes from the Underworld) in your local record store’s USED CRAP NO ONE WANTS $0.99 boxes, the ones they keep under the “real” shelves.

Columbia seems to have promoted the hell out of this thing. I think I got a promo copy of it two years after I’d nuked my PR contacts (and at least two years since most labels stopped sending out real CDs for the most part).

And hey, let’s just pretend that it was super-successful, and everyone loved the above break-through track, because it had a video with dancing cats in it or something. Then the album comes out, and there are thinkpieces about the front-woman (how Russian is she, really? Is it true that her father has ties to the KGB and also owns a luxury yacht company?), and over-readings of lyrics like this:

I see the darkness in your eyes I taste darkness in your eyes I’m headin’ to the city of love Blue city of love Strange city of love

I see the light in your eyes You preach light with your eyes I’ll take you to the city of love Blue city of love Strange city of love

Hide your eyes from me Take reflection and you’ll see How I’m there in your mind Working my way out

I see the darkness in your eyes You’re breathing the darkness in your eyes We’re now in the city of love Blue city of love Strange city of love

Hide your eyes from me Take reflection and you’ll see How I’m there in your mind Working my way out

To point out the ways in which lead singer Angelina Moysova seems only to be interested in getting the attraction of men (I presume) with their darkness, which is such a stereotypical and artless way of talking about things like romantic relationships and darkness. When push comes to shove, these lyrics, as self-evidently horrible as they are, are poorly-written, too, and why is it that everyone swooning over this album can’t see how full of shit and artifice it is, anyway? Can’t Women in Rock aspire to anything hire than empty cliches about getting inside a man’s (I presume) head?

“Uh, I thought that song was about Russia or something? I wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics. Is that what she’s saying? I heard ‘Tribbiani’s Basement’ [“Off to the Races” — and of course this makes perfect sense, the whole album recalling Matt LeBlanc as Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet]?”

Anyway. As long as we’re examining the traits of things that get popular for inscrutable reasons, as though this examination might actually tell us anything about the complex systems through which the thing came to prominence in the first place (Duncan Watts calls it the Mona Lisa Problem — “Mona Lisa was successful because it had all the traits of the Mona Lisa”), we might as well plug a counterfactual in there and see what happens. Lana Del Rey got popular because she got popular, and Persephone’s Bees didn’t get popular because they didn’t get popular — and it wasn’t for lack of trying, neither. But assuming they were, I bet we could totally nail their asses as the phonies we knew they were all along.