Born to Irish parents in 1818 and raised in India, she went to school in Great Britain and returned to India at age 16 when she eloped with a young officer her mother had attempted to court. By the time Eliza Gilbert (who later rebranded herself Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert) arrived in San Francisco, she had been expelled from Bavaria and was no longer warmly welcomed in Europe. The news of this scandalous behavior, particularly her trysts, spread widely, and her reputation as a femme fatale preceded her arrival in San Francisco in 1853. What is more, her publicity tactics tended to converge with her personal life she was no stranger to deploying her “feminine wiles” to network among the elite in the cities she visited and further promote her act. As her biographers and scholars would be the first to bemoan, she often renamed herself and reinvented her life biography for the sake of legitimizing and marketing her acts. Throughout her career, Lola schemed to carefully construct an identity and establish a career for herself. Playfully developing the implications of Lola’s celebrated “Spider Dance,” the final lines of “Lola Montez,” “she’ll catch you in her web” as well as promotional materials produced by Volbeat (featuring these lines or iconography literally depicting Lola in a web), all exploit the parallels between her use of seduction for power and the quality of spiders as clever, mischievous predators capable of ensnaring prey in their webs.īoth Volbeat “Spider Dance” designs underscore parallels between Lola’s devious character and that of a spider scheming to catch prey in its web. The third verse develops her persona as a temptress, seducing with her eyes, “captivating all the men,” and convincing them that they are her great love to wield influence over them. This verse also specifies the typical audience member of her act as a Gold Rush miner, “howling loud like a wolf,” as these miners were notorious for their uninhibited carousing leisure activities. The second verse elaborates on the sex appeal of her performance, on her quintessentially “subversive” approach that disregarded “public morality,” particularly Victorian era gender conventions.
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The first verse simplistically proclaims her beauty, a quality upon which Gold Rush commentators unanimously agreed, and it introduces her infamous “Spider Dance” as “blinding,” or depriving viewers of reason. The first three verses of the 2013 song aptly describe many elements of Lola’s initial stardom and enduring legacy. As evidenced by Volbeat’s song, written over 150 years after Lola first became a sensation as a performer on the international circuit, she remains immortalized as “utterly erotic,” a “shady and a tempered dame,” essentially a femme fatale inseparably linked to the frenetic cultural cauldron of Gold Rush California. The lyrics tell the story of Lola Montez, a showgirl among the many who flocked to California during the Gold Rush of the 1850s with hopes of reinventing themselves. When the Danish rock-metal band Volbeat released their album Outlaw Gentlemen and Shady Ladies comprised of songs about legendary characters of the American West, the track “Lola Montez” immediately emerged as a favorite among fans and critics alike. You might fall and find the love of your life
#Volbeat album with lola montez skin#
When Lola was dancing and showing her skin Lifting her skirt, howling loud like a wolf Her performance utterly erotic, subversive to all ideas Read the next two articles, “The Showgirl ‘Full of Sin’ or ‘Respectable Theatre’?” and “Lola Montez Denies Conventions in Her Image”.
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#Volbeat album with lola montez series#
Note: this is the introduction to a short series on Lola Montez. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).