(Image: Private Media)

Red (Taylor’s Version). Taylor Swift. Republic Records; Blue Banisters. Lana Del Rey. Interscope/Polydor Records

Of the deluge of pop music of a certain type — hitting the market just in time for Christmas — Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift represent its opposite extremes.

Del Rey is a relative latecomer whose entire oeuvre is essentially an exercise in travelling backwards as she moves forwards, beginning as aspiring ingenue in early incarnations to some sort of woman-child-woman — adult and infant all at once, her songs dissolving into spoken-word recitative. Swift is the teen-adult, writing songs at the age of 13 about being 15; she has, with the release of a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” that turns her original five-minute burn song into a Malibu firestorm, rerendered adulthood as perpetual adolescence.

The remainder of the Red (Taylor’s Version) album I can take or leave; it’s remastered country-rock thin on melody. But “All Too Well” is a stunning production from the heart of postwar American pop, a conclusion and renewal of a form you didn’t think had anything left in it. Just an extraordinary, extraordinary song.

Both “Taylor Swift” and “Lana Del Rey” are pop-culture composites, with a real girl at the centre, but Swift is a pretty simple two-level parallax: country-gal prodigy plays increasingly knowing version of herself. Del Rey, since emerging with the song/video “Video Games” in 2011, has spent a decade being something akin to a university-level teaching aid for postmodernism 101, a vast collage of stray moments and styles of the last half-century, channelled through the wholly feminine, relentlessly rendered as the incomplete and passive.

Del Rey “herself” is Elizabeth Grant, a ’90s kid from Connecticut, a child of the randomly rich, her dad a domain-broker millionaire. Shipped off to private school after a teen drinking problem — Grant says she acquired an extreme death angst at 13, one she has never fully lost — she emerged in New York, after lost years waitressing, as a college arts major and a singer-songwriter in a sort of jazz/torch style, sporting an odd mix of Brooklyn style and 1950s-ish peroxide-blonde ‘do.

Character-building

There’s a lot of Lizzy Grant that’s vanished from the internet, but not enough to obscure the evolution of a character she had clearly been developing for years: the would-be femme fatale stuck in a post-feminist world, a woman willing to do almost anything to live… except work. By 2010, this had become the alter ego “Lana Del Ray” — yes, “Ray”, billed as such on her debut album. It features a bunch of songs trying to use postmodern pastiche, a method that is now part of the culture it’s mining, all the way back to the B-52s, Devo and RedPlanet posters, and with the usual motifs, as seen in the single “Kinda Outta Luck”: film noir, ’50s ads, grindhouse, bad girls, wigs and, of course, bloody Gilda. The video shows Grant in character, and why the character doesn’t yet work; she’s half-in, half-out of a persona from a world that David Lynch and Tarantino had already worked over.

What happens between that and “Video Games” is the twist that turns influence into raw material; via a process with a small group of co-producers and co-songwriters, Grant turned Del Ray into “Lana Del Rey”. Brunette not blonde, living not in the heroic heartland of postwar pop but its interstices — the echt mid-’80s, the pre-’60s 1960s — Del Rey, across a string of videos, is a cipher of flattened affect and forgotten hairstyles — permed, coiffed, middle-parted — wrapped in dresses of dazzling rayon in sky-blue and mustard, the lyrics a recitative of objects dwelling below the level of fetish: video games, sun dresses, white Mustangs, country clubs, chemtrails.

They really exist as musical video-art — from “Video Games” through “Summertime Sadness” to “Born to Die”, from “High By the Beach” to “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”, the Del Rey project is a post-producer’s delight, in which digital-era wall-of-sound is laid over filters mimicking every lost film and video process, while the props department has emptied a thousand junk stores for ’50s fabrics, ’60s furniture, ’70s knick-knacks, all surrounding Del Rey as she lays out a feminine death wish on the instalment plan, a deep desire to be seen to be not seen, to barely be at all (“all I want to do is get high by the beach, high by the beach”).

The Del Rey archive is either a release valve from the current relentless push for female agency and the completion of the second-wave feminist revolution, or it’s an active refutation of its claims: in Lana World, the only way of being is to be a styled object among objects, taking off your red dress, putting on your red dress like it was the sales at Target*, becoming not by being desired but by wasting your beauty on some heavy-inked tool who’d rather play Asteroids on his Xbox.

Lace gloves and white fishnet fascinator

It’s not merely a hymn to female masochism, it’s a hymnal of it, a compendium of its variations, a guilty pleasure amid our anti-id all-superego era — and that has been its wild success. There’s no doubt in my mind that Grant is running this, ex-teen New England alcoholic into Deleuzian accelerationism and Nancy Sinatra. For me, that peaks with “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”, the song a deconstructed chant/lullaby which appears to combine personal memories of being an odd girl through the stylings of Douglas Sirk — “driving my little red sportscar” in lace gloves and white fishnet fascinator — before the whole thing becomes a non-song horror passage in which the country club gals turn into red-eyed wraiths tearing into flesh as tornadoes rip up the soundtrack.

What’s Lana Del Rey without “Lana Del Rey”, this palimpsest of six decades worth of desires? Not much, her new album Blue Banisters suggests to me, although that appears to be a minority opinion. Released just over six months after the Chemtrails album and said to be a break-up record, Blue Banisters has two early songs — the title number and “Arcadia”, in which “my body is a map of L.A. … which you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota” — that manage to preserve the usual tension between personal feeling and the flux of an endlessly branded world.

But then it starts to wander off into simple, piano-and-voice singer-songwriterness, fairly generic and unanchored; a sort of “feel-the-pain”, the affectlessness of which Del Rey proper was part-parody. Possibly there wasn’t much more that could be done with “Lana Del Rey”; on the other hand, I could watch/listen to video/song pieces called things like “Betamax Energy Crisis” or “Kidnap Me to Idaho, I’ll Pay For the Gas” forever, certainly more than sad-song piano noodling. Blue Banisters reveals how much of Del Rey is a post-music project. A lot of the songs, after the first couple of albums, don’t hold up that well.

Not fair to compare

That is particularly so in comparison with Swift, though the comparison is unfair. No one can measure up to Swift — unquestionably a genius — who with a string of co-writers has managed to reinvent the pop song, largely by perfusing her earlier persona, the babyfat-and-white-guitar Walmart country songstress, through a later knowing urban persona who is nevertheless still only 16.

For a half-century the songwriters of the pop factories chased the elusive goal of expressing what it was like to be a teenager; Swift was the first to write those songs while living it. It’s what gives what should be utter bubblegum like “You Belong With Me” a sort of uncanny knowingness, and her 20s stuff like “Blank Space” two or three more layers through which the wit (“darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream”) refracts.

“All Too Well” is the culmination of that process, appearing as Swift rerecords her earlier material to regain copyright control of her masters. Released as a tight-ish five-minute song of concluded love (with beard-baby Jake Gyllenhaal playing the older man) cut down from a rambling 20-minute version, it has now been reconstructed (with co-writer Liz Rose) as a 10-minute country-pop case for the prosecution.

What makes it extraordinary is how it entwines the fairly, almost wilfully, sappy mainline of the narrative, private in its references (“Oh your sweet disposition/my wide-eyed gaze/we’re singing in the car/getting lost upstate”) with a hard-edged insistence (“Cause there we are again/when nobody had to know/you kept me like a secret/but I kept you like an oath”), built of single-line portraits (‘weeping in a party bathroom/some actress asking me what happened?‘), before being rewrapped in direct sentimentality — scarves and snowfalls — to take it to its conclusion.

What makes the song great is that it never subordinates one side to the other. To deny there’s great writing there is snobbery — if Dylan had growled out a line like “kept me like a secret, kept you like an oath” in Blood on the Tracks, boomer male writers would title novels with it — but to try to extract such from the pop song would be to lose their power, leaving them as pompous as Dylan can sometimes sound.

“All Too Well” works by avoiding any urge to make a general statement about love, refusing to surrender its task of making a case about this love, of its particular history. The split between the general and the particular, the male case for right, the female case for love, usually shadows the rock/pop split: “Idiot Wind” v “Baby, It’s You”. We hear from the former a lot more than the latter.

“All Too Well’ is something beyond Del Rey, as brilliant as that is — it’s a genuine renewal of the genre’s possibilities, which is perhaps what makes it so enthralling. If I can’t thus convince you with this material, it is worth remembering that Romeo and Juliet is a teen drama. And Dire Straits were pretty good in their day…

*This gag is adapted from one by The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, the world’s ranking oldest teenager.