Déjà vu no bother for born-again mistress of reinvention del Rey

THE first Best New Act of 2012 gong was given this out this week. Because these awards have become something of fetish for the music industry (there are literally dozens of them and they all feature the same names), Qmagazine decided to jump the gun by a few months. At Q's annual bash last Monday night there was a shortlist of three acts: Emeli Sandé, Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey.

In keeping with the all-too-familiar make-up of these awards, all three of these acts are already quite well known. Emeli Sandé, a Scottish r’n’b singer, has already had a number two hit in the UK singles chart with

Heaven

and has written for Cheryl Cole and Tinie Tempah. Frank Ocean, a New Orleans hip-hop artist who is bursting with talent, has written for Beyoncé and Justin Bieber and appeared on the Kanye West/Jay-Z album,

Watch The Throne

. Neither are hardly the “

next

” big thing.

But the winner, Lana Del Rey, surpasses them both with an already bulging portfolio of media coverage. Not only has she had a top 10 single but she's also been on Later with Jools Holland. There was a time when we weren't supposed to know the name of the act that won a "Best Hope" award, but now the category can safely bleed into any of the main categories.

Del Rey is an interesting winner in that the US singer has the highest profile of any other New Act winner – and by that I mean she has racked up more than two million YouTube hits, has been remixed by superstar producers and has already sold out a tour. You can easily understand why with just one listen to her Video Gamessingle – you simply won't hear a better piece of music all year.

But the big story with Del Rey is that the music bloggers, bless ’em, are in a right sulk, screaming “fake” at her. Lana’s crime was to massage her bio and construct a new media personality for herself – aided and abetted by her record company.

What really happened is that the 24-year-old New Yorker (real name: Lizzy Grant) had a pop at stardom a few years ago, failed miserably, went away to develop a new sound and a new look and is now an “overnight” success.

Calling her new image “the gangsta Nancy Sinatra”, all she’s really done is let slip the fact that her new name was made up by “a series of managers and lawyers” (most band names are) and allowed her official bio to portray her as some sort of trailer trash ingenue. But perhaps her biggest crime for the musically correct was to try and cover up her mainstream pop past once she began to be garlanded by the indieratti.

She’s probably regretting she ever poked the indie purists now that they have turned on her like a lover scorned. She’s been dismissed as an “indie Frankenstein”, her father is apparently a squillionaire and she has a crack team of songwriters, stylists, photographers, video directors, make-up artists and choreographers behind her as she cheats as her way to fame and fortune. Goodness, I hope she’s not a member of the illuminati – because that’s how she’s currently been portrayed.

The thing about music – whether bubble-gum pop or “meaningful and authentic” indie landfill – is that it doesn’t doesn’t matter what the real back story is. You wouldn’t want to look too far into how The Strokes spent their teenage years (in ultra-posh Swiss finishing schools) and as for the charge of reinvention, all Lana Del Rey can say is that she was influenced by the master of the art – the man who wrote his own back history – Bob Dylan.

Does it matter if her Lana Del Rey was dreamt up by The Man on the back of an accountant's envelope in the canteen of Evil Empire Inc? Take a listen to Video Gamesand decide for yourself.

Mixed bag

** Courtney Love pulled her band Hole out of an Australian festival appearance for the very good reason that the worst band in the world, Limp Bizkit, were above them on the running order. Quite right too.

** The Rihanna video. She’s from Barbados, lives in Los Angeles (and Miami) and shoots her video in Belfast’s New Lodge?