With a title that reads like an automatic response to the finale scene from “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” Nessa Barrett’s “Bad Girls Never Die” is also yet another “heavily influenced by” (read: totally ripped off from) Lana Del Rey single. And while Barrett has long been a self-confessed Del Rey acolyte, “Bad Girls Never Die” is the pinnacle of her “studies” (to the point where it’s giving Single White Female on the imitation front). Starting with the Bond theme-reminiscent musical intro (once again produced by Arthur Besna and CJ Baran) and the first verse, “Diamonds, please/Rubies too/I’ll dance for cash/I’ll dance for you/I’m too high to come down/Born to ride/And wear a crown.” Apart from Del Rey often prattling on about diamonds and “dancing” (usually for “Daddy”), in addition to riding and being born to do something, there’s even a touch of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” here, when the latter sings, “Too high, can’t come down.”
The Britney infusion also briefly appears in the video for “Bad Girls Never Die” (directed by Barrett’s go-to, Claire Bishara), when Barrett parts a beaded curtain à la Spears on the album cover for Oops!…I Did It Again. To boot, it’s in the spirit of Spears to appear wearing very little in her music videos. As Barrett does for her angel sequence, posing in profile with the kind of angel wings one can strap onto their shoulders (no CGI here!). But, aside from that, the entirety of the sound and aesthetic is strictly Del Rey, right down to the lilt of Barrett’s voice. Then, of course, there’s her early 2010s Del Rey hair color, along with emulating the sartorial style Del Rey inhabited at that time. An extension of that being the acrylic nails Barrett sports as her hand emits a fire while she sings, “I’ll be young forever [little does she know…]/So I’ll put on a show/I’m crazy, but whatever/Yeah that’s just rock n’ roll.” The Del Reyness is even more oversaturated in this brief amount of lines. Most notably via Barrett’s talk of “putting on a show” the same way Del Rey announces she will on “Yayo” with, “Let me put on a show for you, Daddy.” Or when she says during her “Ride” monologue, “I am fucking crazy, but I am free.” Which Barrett writes off as being “whatever.”
Barrett gets even more blatant about cadging Del Rey’s lyrics when she continues, “Beauty is a weapon/I’m pretty when I cry.” The latter being something Del Rey declared on, what else, “Pretty When You Cry.” Barrett then delves into the chorus, “If good girls go to heaven, then bad girls never die” as Bishara alternates between the shots of her as an angel and dancing naked in the flames. At around this time, an electric guitar riff chimes in to echo the musical style of the guitar breakdown in “Shades of Cool” from Ultraviolence. Indeed, this is the Lana album and era that Barrett specifically seems to want to channel (complete with her flames moment that also echoes one of the scenes in the video for “Shades of Cool”). As made further evident by her appearing to reference a meme that commonly gets used by fans commenting on Del Rey’s “vibe” when she wrote that album. That meme being a pair of stiletto-heeled boots on fire as they walk down the street (with the caption, “Lana Del Rey leaving the studio after recording Ultraviolence”).
Barrett might opt for “regular” high heels instead for her own fiery walk, but the allusion is still very much there. As is the one to Nicki Minaj when Barrett continues to flex about being young as she notes, “The night is young/And so am I” (Minaj once said something to the same effect in 2014 [you know, before she became a MAGA lackey]: “The night is still young/And so are we”). She then wields a shotgun (another Del Rey kind of “aesthetic”—see also: the “Ride” video/hear also: “Guns and Roses”) and turns the “Born to Die” phrase into its opposite while holding a skull up like it’s poor Yorick, insisting, “Witch bitch/Born to bite/Born to live/Born to fly.” Here especially, there is a quality of “AI was prompted to come up with some Del Rey-inspired lyrics.” She then keeps her Lana-circa-2012 tone going by reminding, “Bad girls never die.”
The occasional interspersing of “subliminal” “found footage” (or at least footage that wants to have that style)—mainly, a cat’s eye, a full moon and a rose on fire—is also in keeping with Del Rey’s early music videos, including “Video Games” and “Carmen.” What’s more, the color scenes are intermixed with some black-and-white ones of Barrett “moodily” smoking a cigarette while wearing sunglasses (which, these days, is more Charli XCX on her Music, Fashion, Film tip). It’s this scene that serves as a kind of denouement to the video, with her running wildly down the street before another montage of all the same images of her as before come back—as the gun-toter, the “dancer,” the boa-wearer, the girl in white, the angel in the sky and the girl dancing in the flames. Clearly, it’s the latter that Barrett sees herself as the most…not instead, as a full-time Del Rey impersonator.
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