As the
summer comes to a close, a familiar creeping feeling comes over me. It’s a
feeling characterised by sunsets and still being awake at sunrise; lying in bed
on creased bed sheets, the weak evening light falling through the window; hot
oven-like temperatures; warm beers; wasted days; listlessness; boredom;
frustration. All in all, I’ve come to call this “Lana Del Rey Season”, and as
the songstress prepares to release her long awaited fifth album this Friday,
the seasonal feeling couldn’t be more aptly named. But what are the defining
features of LDR Season, you might ask? Here, I outline the tell-tale signs that
the season of sad girls, stagnant heat and reckless romance is upon us.
End of
summer melancholia
As
temperatures reach over 30 degrees here in Berlin, it might be hard to believe
that autumn is on its way. While hot temps in early June spread happiness and a
silly sense of possibility, by the end of August, too-warm weather can suck the
life—and dreams—out of you. Most notably, Del Rey sang about this in her iconic
2013 track, “Summertime Sadness” characterising a whole season of doom and
gloom that previously all of us seasonal summer sufferers were too embarrassed
to admit to. Summer may be the most blissful time of year, but is it also is a
time of crankiness and bitter vibes as you come to the realisation that
holidays don’t last forever, and work and real life must resume.
Track:
“Summertime Sadness”
Bonus:
“Sad Girl” or “Summer Bummer“
Crazy
crushes and desperate desire
Would it
be even end-of-summer if we weren’t questioning all of our life choices, but
most notably our romantic ones? Late summer is characterised by strange,
wild-eyed recklessness almost as though love and romance are finite resources
rapidly depleting with the onset of grounded autumn. It’s a time to consider
people you might not have thought of as viable romantic partners before; to be
driven crazy by running into your ex; over-the-top dates; sexy soirees; violent
jealousies; ferocious insecurities and grandiose romantic gestures. Del Rey, of
course, sings about all of this across her back catalogue. In “Young and
Beautiful” she recounts those “Hot summer nights, mid July/When you and I were
forever wild”, but a Lana-love story never lasts—inevitably the boyfriends are
bad and the women are desperate and love is a terrible, terrible thing. In
“Cruel World”, she croons “I shared my body and my mind with you/ That’s all
over now.” Crazy summer romances burn out as quickly as they spark.
Track:
“Born to Die”
Bonus:
“Lust for life”
August
ennui
Del
Rey’s songs are heavy with the fog of boredom and frustration—”Lying on my bed
it’s a bummer,” as she sings in “White Mustang”. Lana Del Rey Season—
alternatively titled “Sad Girl Summer”—is a season dense with pointlessness,
uncertainty and putting all your better life choices on hold until the weather
cools down and you can think clearly again. Del Rey’s sonic scape is a hazy
world of messy, sunlit bedrooms, stifling cars and lonely poolsides. It’s a
cinematic scene defined by getting dressed up and having nowhere to go, of being
sad and not knowing why, of driving to nowhere, the numbing sensation of
sipping on an overpriced cocktail, chain smoking if you smoke, of uneasiness
and chaotic melancholy all rolled into one.
Track:
“Video Games”
Bonus:
“High By The Beach”
Bad life
choices
Part of
the reason why the music of Del Rey is so relatable is because it describes
those less than desirable sides of ourselves—the side that won’t go home from
the party, who chases the wrong person, who acts selfishly, carelessly and
without a thought for the consequences. As summer comes to a close, you might
have noticed that you and all your friends are acting a little wired—have you
snapped at someone recently for no reason, convinced a pal to stay out drinking
with you, indulged in ludicrous social media stalking, or spent all your
paycheck on the sort of slinky glamorous sheath only to be worn once to impress
the abstract object of your affections? Then you might just be in the throes of
Del Rey season, where bad life choices are the order of the day.
Track:
“F**ked My Way Up To The Top”
Bonus:
“Freak”
The
pressing feeling that it’s time to get your life back together
As the
nights steadily grow shorter and piles of fuzzy sweaters slowly replace crop
tops on shop floors, it’s time to admit that you’ve got to get your life back
on track. Those wild, crazy nights of crying and screaming at your friends and
lovers can’t last forever, after all. The prosecco has stopped flowing, the
party is officially over, it’s time to sleep, wipe your face clean of mascara
crumbs, take out the empty beer bottles and face the music. You might feel sad
about it—as Lana sings on her one of her newest tracks “The Greatest”: “I’m
facing the greatest/the greatest loss of them all”—but really, enough is
enough. Del Rey puts it best when she says,
“I had a ball/ I guess that I’m burned out after all.” September can’t
come quick enough.
Track:
“The Greatest”
Bonus:
“13 Beaches”
Lana Del
Rey Season is upon us, and here’s how to spot it. By Kathryn O'Regan. Sleek Mag, August 29, 2019.
The trash on the Venice boardwalk sparkles like Wet n
Wild lip gloss. This is what people forget about Los Angeles beaches: They're
part of the city, inundated with the city's grit. Half-melted Icees in
Styrofoam cups, one flip-flop, taco foil, condoms, a dead vape pen. Needles.
But also: a Swarovski crystal earring. A pinwheel unmoored from its handle. A streak
of gooey glitter. Coins of many lands. A few miles up the Pacific Coast
Highway, away from the skateboarders and homeless people, WASPs sun themselves
at country clubs as employees sweep the sands. But their brooms can't clear the
ocean.
"I'm mostly at the beach!" Lana Del Rey
exclaimed in a recent interview, explaining her cultivated disconnect from the
Hollywood pop machine. Reading this, I wonder where she goes and what she does
after she unfolds her towel and sets up her umbrella. Does she drive past
Malibu to El Matador, where the water is the cleanest but the one Porta-Potty
often overflows? Down to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, near the aquarium where
schoolkids swarm? In her songs she dwells on Venice and Long Beach, two places
where the red signs the city uses to warn of excess sewage in the water show up
the most. I think she goes to the beach but she spends her time looking at that
filthy, shiny sand.
Lana Del
Rey is up to her elbows in water in the video for "F*** It I Love
You," one of the singles that built excitement for Norman F******
Rockwell! (referred to hereafter as NFR!), her fifth album and the one that has
cemented her status as a serious artist among critics who may or may not have
thought her previous work problematic, or at very least, incomplete. In several
shots, she holds onto a surfboard. Her hair is in in Dutch braids, similar to
the styles cholas wore in the 1990s. See, there's the slippage, the step away
from an authentic or even consistent narrative: Few Latinas from East L.A.
would have made it the 15 miles west to the beach 20 years ago, or even at the
height of the surfing craze in the 1960s, when as a kid the writer Jack Lopez
almost got beaten up by a tough guy for walking down Western Avenue in board
shorts, clutching a copy of Surfer magazine. "Cholo meets surfer," he
wrote in his memoir. "Not a good thing." But Lopez was insistent in
violating the boundaries of the acceptable; that wrongness, he wrote years
later, endangered him but also helped him get free.
Music
videos juxtapose disconnected images to induce a kind of dream state in the
viewer: to approximate the effect of music itself. There's a subtle tension
within many popular songs, however, between the unsettling effect of
juxtaposing disparate elements — say, English folk melodies and Delta blues
(that's Led Zeppelin) or Caribbean inflections and Nordic electronic beats
(many Rihanna singles) — and the comfort of a unified narrative, the
songwriter's art. The rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s reinforced the
value of narrative pull and shored up other hierarchies: rock over disco,
sitting and listening over dancing, lyrics over sound. (Exhibit A: The Poetry
of Rock.) Hip-hop, a revolution in fragments, challenged this order, yet it
still exerts itself in most discussions of what makes great songs.
For most
of her career, Lana Del Rey has not participated in this discourse. Instead,
she has made slippage the basis of her approach. It took her time to master
this practice, and she's gone to extremes: Over the course of five albums,
she's often repeated herself, mixed signals and followed her impulses over the
edge of good taste. Critics have doubted her motives. But she has earned a
following among listeners who value unmonitored reveries.
On NFR!
Del Rey is at her most instantly compelling, a pro asserting her future spot in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as her closest peer and rival Stefani
Germanotta did with her turn in A Star is Born. Words like "classic"
and "greatest" adhere to her now; she writes songs that use them unironically.
The possibly fictional shade whose fluttery alto flickered and beckoned on
YouTube nearly a decade ago is a woman now — "a modern day woman with a
weak constitution," she intones on the album's billowing final track,
"hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have
it." That's one of several moments in which Del Rey seems to open herself
up; another is the melancholy "Mariners Apartment Complex," four and
a half minutes of gospel-inflected transcendence in which her pastiche is so
perfectly constructed that it becomes flesh, an utterly believable plea by a
weary but steadfast soul to the lover whose tether she refuses to loose. It's a
story about which most people can feel something.
Yet the
sensitivity and compassion Del Rey expresses in these songs really resonates
not in its straightforwardness, but because of all the pings it sets off in the
listener's brain, each one hitting like a nearly-erased memory. In
"Mariners," she deflects the Elton John comparison its piano part
demands ("I ain't your candle in the wind"), only to build to a
chorus that seemingly echoes the Oscar-winning theme from a classic 1970s
disaster movie (Maureen McGovern's magisterial "The Morning After")
and, in its warm but uncanny multi-tracked vocal hook, the synth-kissed love
songs that brought Leonard Cohen back from obscurity in the 1980s. At least
that's what one fan, namely me, hears. That's the gist of Lana Del Rey, and
still her superpower as she floats toward more readable songcraft: Whether her
music makes cultural connections that are obvious or obscure, they always feel
deeply personal, individuated, like mementos.
In her
early days, what she claimed — bouffanted femme-fatalism weirdly aligned with a
tattered Fourth-of-July style patriotic nostalgia, Bettie Page reborn as an
Instagram star — felt undeveloped and, because of that, cynical. Intimations
that she'd had help in inventing herself clouded her status. But as she built
her repertoire, Del Rey proved fully committed to the messy alignments of her
art, and better able to articulate how they formed the stories by which she, or
the characters she claimed as her own, lived. She would be a problem — a
loyalist to outdated ideals like mad love and bad-boy machismo, a constant
gardener of the weediest patches of the contemporary psyche. On NFR! she
remains that artist, even as she asks herself if she might, with insight,
better compartmentalize her impulses.
Lana Del
Rey is all about wrong combinations: sunset dreams and dirty water,
Mexican-American braids and a wetsuit, hip-hop flow and torch song feeling,
conventional feminine submissiveness and post-feminist self-possession.
Cognitive dissonance is the essence of her art, the way she builds her dream
logic. Satin slips, Freudian slips: Throughout her tenure as a pop star, Lana
has pursued revelations about how desire disassembles and recombines elements
of a woman's personality. "Heaven is a place on earth with you," she
whispered in her first hit, 2011's "Video Games." She sang it just
the way you do a line from a song that pops into your head unbidden, wondering
if you're quoting your favorite current pop star or the one your mom loved in
the '80s or something some guy said back in the '60s to a girl trying to be his
perfect date. The sentiment is soaked in banality, but also in the perfume of
all those other girls. "Tell me all the things you want to do," Lana
continues. "I hear that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?"
And so a dream of romantic fulfillment slipped into self-negation, the way it
has since time immemorial in the scripts that young women learn from those
songs and from movies, their moms, other girls and the boys who benefit. The
tone of her voice as she uttered these words was forever after labeled
"sad," but was really something different. My mom would have called
it "needy"; today, more common descriptions are "disempowered,"
"self-sabotaging," "unwoke." "Women hated me,"
Del Rey told writer Alex Frank in 2017. "I know why. It's because there
were things I was saying that either they just couldn't connect to or were
maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a
vulnerable place."
But we
know this. Over the course of her five albums, as she has learned to be a more
specific writer and a more adventurous vocalist and to make room in her
echo-saturated arrangements for her words to resonate, Del Rey has continued to
stand firmly against the ideal of self-empowerment. Instead, she has explored
what happens when women call themselves children; when they stumble in high
heels; when they put the love of a man before all. Mostly, critics have
perceived this as an anti-feminist stance. Lindsay Zoladz sympathetically
recontextualized it in a cogent 2017 essay, seeing Del Rey's embodiment of the
weak woman as an antidote to "empowerment as the default aspiration of the
pop star" – the tendency of chart toppers from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift to
configure their careers as one long therapeutic, vaguely political pep talk.
Del Rey herself simply said she found feminism uninteresting. She's modified
that stance somewhat in the aftermath of the #metoo movement, citing Trump's
infamous "grab 'em" remark as a sign that sexuality has been
weaponized beyond even her tolerance levels. Yet even on NFR!, an album some
writers have extolled as a (circuitous) form of protest, Del Rey remains much
more invested in describing how people — mostly women — fall apart, how they
take risks or otherwise work against their own best interests in the pursuit of
pleasure, intimacy and what she still guilelessly calls "love."
To many
of its champions, NFR! is Del Rey's revenge against those who would
misinterpret her, a fully realized conventional singer-songwriter album
offering a critique of 21st-century decadence rather than another chance to
wallow in it, an "obituary for America" that still extends some hope
that, with the proper perspective, its best qualities – its beauty, its small-d
democratic impulses – can be redeemed. The album certainly boasts Del Rey's
most artfully constructed narratives, extending the arc of apparent
self-realization also evident in widely framed narratives that stood out on her
previous album, Lust For Life. In songs like "Coachella – Woodstock In My
Mind," in which she made a cosmic quilt of her experience watching her
artistic soulmate Father John Misty perform for fourth-generation flower
children at a festival built on the countercultural helium fumes of electronic
dance music, Del Rey made a sonic and emotional argument for collapsing the
boundaries that uphold authenticity as a cultural value. Referencing a Led
Zeppelin lyric in an easy-listening arrangement, she shared her view of utopia:
a place in which parents and children and their children's children dissolve
into each other under the sway of art. Music's power to unite is an old
fashioned idea, romantic, even mystical — and conservative, in that it argues
for art as a conduit for personal transformation rather than an identity marker
that fuels political or cultural debate. At first considered a nihilist, Lana
Del Rey became a champion of the meaningful, even as she maintained her stance
that meaning is best communicated through strange juxtapositions.
With
NFR!, Del Rey further invests in meaningfulness. She seems to have become more
interesting in standing alongside (or towering over) her peers; in league with
producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff, she makes space for comparisons to Lorde
and the aforementioned Gaga and even Taylor Swift. The album's dominant story
line describes an affair with a fellow artist in which the power roles never
solidify, a situation Del Rey depicts as unsustainable but clarifying.
Addressing this bohemian deadbeat, she upends the gender roles she's so often
fetishized, trading in her kitten heels for kicks that allow her to keep
walking. She cusses at her "man child," demanding that he grow up;
she describes herself as the more active breadwinner ("you write, I tour,
we make it work"). At one point, in a sonic nod to Leonard Cohen, she
simply announces, "I'm your man."
These
are the most cleanly satisfying moments of the album, evoking what we expect
from singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Tori Amos, both of whom are clear
inspirations in Del Rey's pursuit of legible expressiveness. She and Antonoff
don't try to imitate Mitchell's tricky musical fusions, but they do invoke the
finely honed confidentiality of Amos' music, and similar moods cultivated by
other women in the 1990s, when Mitchell served as a beacon lighting many
different approaches to the singer-songwriter role. (Fiona Apple is another
obvious source of inspiration.) These artists made spaces where women could
share complicated thoughts and otherwise unspoken feelings, using tools
traditionally associated with the feminine: piano, lyric poetry, a voice
cultivated by singing hymns and lullabies. The most straightforward songs on NFR!
have that morning-light quality: a woman sitting at a keyboard, singing what
she needs to say.
But as
winning as those moments are, they aren't what makes Lana Del Rey an
interesting artist. The power of NFR! emanates from another source: her
compulsion to collapse logic, to violate boundaries musically, through imagery
and within her storytelling. This is not only about Del Rey's persona as a bad
girl to whom bad things are done; her supposed confessions would be nothing
more than reality-show fodder if not for the way she and her collaborators
construct them. On their own, taken song by song, her lyrics – even in the full
flower NFR! represents – often read as unremarkable and derivative. What hooks
the listener is the way she enacts her dramas just as the mind replays
formative memories, especially painful ones. She repeats herself. She veers
into cliché. Her touchstones fall into each other across time. Many people have
called NFR! a 1970s throwback, but its songs barely dip into that era's experimental
sounds, instead touching down in the baroque-pop 1960s, the cyborg 1980s and
the G-Funk 1990s without distinguishing between its reference points. And its
lyrics, as always with Del Rey, similarly recombine references, not to make
them fresh, exactly — no shout-out to Sylvia Plath can feel new, not since
about 1981 – but to put them in our faces as old friends, old adversaries.
Take
"Cinnamon Girl," one of the new album's deep cuts. The title's a
mildly clever cop from a Neil Young classic, and the first line, "cinnamon
in my teeth from your kiss," takes you somewhere. But then? There's a line
about different colored pills, alluding to her sweetheart's addiction, and one
about her frustration becoming like fire. B-plus poetics. There's some moaning
about how no one has "held me without hurting me," and half-formed
thoughts about words she cannot speak. Compare this vague non-story to four
lines randomly pulled from Mitchell's 1972 song about her then-lover James
Taylor's heroin habit, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," written when
she was five years younger than Del Rey is now: Concrete concentration camp /
Bashing in veins for peace / Cold blue steel and sweet fire / Fall into Lady
Release.
Mitchell's
lyric reads as poetic and incisive. Next to it, Del Rey's feels uncooked.
Musically, "Cold Blue Steel" also strikes the listener as much more
sophisticated, with its subtle arrangement and a melody that sinuously moves
from folk to jazz.
Yet let
Del Rey's song sink in, and it offers its own revelations — sensual and
emotional, like Mitchell's, but less clearly mediated. The simplicity and
directness of "Cinnamon Girl" hits as its leaden rhythm seems to grow
more elastic. A syn-drum keeps the narcotized time as a string section puddles
around it. Del Rey moans her lyrics in a small voice, almost pleading but also
self-soothing. Sometimes she makes a trilling leap that sounds like the
squiggle of one of the vintage synths Antonoff employs — a sign of her
indebtedness to West Coast hip-hop, whose smudged arrangements and stoned
cadences she often assimilates. Sometimes all the song's effects fall away,
only to push forward again; there doesn't seem to be much order to the
dynamics. The whole effect is slippery, unattached to the process of telling a
story. The song feels more like you're in a story, in someone's head at a
particularly unsure moment. A great songwriter, as we tend to understand that
role, would offer a more coherent view. But for Del Rey, the mash-up of affects
and references is the point. It is emotion's actuality.
The
principles that direct Del Rey's artistic practice are embedded within a
particular cultural lineage — though perhaps it's more accurate to call it a
tendency. We can think of this inheritance as one aspect of the American Dream,
though not in the usual sense of that phrase. It's more like America's dream
life, its psychic swamp, its nocturnal emissions. The 20th century saw the
development of a scientific language designed to shed light on this realm, one
that is unique to each person but also shared, culturally shaped and
individually rearranged. Artists responded, differently every decade, forming a
timeline that connects European Surrealism to American horror and noir,
free-associative jazz improvisation to the transgressions of post-punk. Lana
Del Rey took this lineage to heart as a teen named Lizzy Grant and created a
character through which she could explore it. At first, she followed her
impulses and landed on clichés: She was a bad, bad, girl, "born to
die." But even then, there was power in her commitment. Over time she has
developed the ability to step back from her compulsions, and though she still
finds power in them — NFR!, like all of her albums, remains a repository of
masochistic out-breaths and bad-girl flexes — she has become curious about how
this language formed and why it speaks to her.
As
virtually everyone who's commented on her work has noted, Del Rey accesses the
twin realms of Surrealism and the psychoanalytic most often through their
cinematic manifestations, particularly film noir and its latter-day revival,
especially within the work of David Lynch. To adopt a noir style is not
original, but Del Rey has outdone her rivals in this arena by going deeper into
its essence — that phenomenon of slippage that also defines her music. Noir is
Surrealism unleashed in the city, amidst its noise and grime and electric-lamp
shadows. Like that art movement, it privileges psychic interiority over other
aspects of experience. In a film like Edward G. Ulmer's 1945 noir Detour, in
which a man kills a woman because she is blackmailing him, but also because he
can no longer stand to hear the sound of her voice, the crisis leading up to
the murder is depicted as a visceral assault on his senses, the pressure of his
situation magnifying everything and eventually leading to disaster. That's just
one example. The most powerful scenes in Lynch's films often build to a similar
level of disorientation, with characters morphing into monsters for a moment,
or being absorbed into rips in the time-space continuum. These baffling scenes
affect the viewer because they express the ways stress and a trauma can
reconstitute a person's internal life.
It's
easy to read the Del Rey's map of the noir landscape, but just as enlightening
to consider how her musical precedents set the stage for the work she's doing.
West Coast rappers and producers have tread similar ground for decades: A
playlist of songs that lay deeply embedded within the Lana Del Rey aesthetic
would include Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill A Man," with its
insights into the mood of murder, and Warren G's "Regulate," a
drifter's tale as redolent of menace and magic as any of Lynch's scenes. Those
sources linger like friendly ghosts on NFR!, as do Kim Gordon's explorations of
the abject in Sonic Youth – the tenderness she brought to Karen Carpenter's
story in "Tunic" prefigured Del Rey's faded warmth in "How To
Disappear." If this album signals the peak of Del Rey's singer-songwriter
period, it's worth remembering that her first debts were to hip-hop and
post-punk, and noticing how crucial those sources remain even as she nods more
noticeably toward Laurel Canyon.
"Beloved
imagination," Andre Breton wrote in the manifesto that, in 1924, announced
Surrealism's intent, "what I like most in you is your unsparing
quality." We live in a time when the interpretation of dreams has given
way to psychopharmaceutical rebalancing, and when the neatening effects of
self-actualization are generally considered more rewarding than the dwelling on
the psyche's dark expanse. Recently, though, in the music of young artists like
Billie Eilish and Logic, in the podcast-driven true crime craze and the work of
women auteurs like Joanna Hogg and writers like Elena Ferrante, that expanse
has again come into view. Lana Del Rey began her inquiries there. She is a
creature born of trauma, possibly literally, if you take Lizzy Grant's teenage
experiences with addiction into account; but certainly aesthetically. At its
best, her music absorbs and disorients. It calls for interpretation, but in the
most personal sense of the word – it wants to be crazily loved or angrily
hated. It wants to trigger you.
NFR! still
allows for that seductive uneasiness. It surfaces in the long outro to
"Venice Bitch," a psychotropic soak that buries the chorus of the
bubblegum drug trip "Crimson and Clover" in reverb, guitar noodling
and Del Rey's voice murmuring a line that smudges the line between tenderness
and obsession: If you weren't mine, I'd be jealous of your love. Even as she
learns the comforts of coherence and closure, Del Rey still knows there's
something to learn from the weird and the wrong.
Lana Del
Rey Lives In America's Messy Subconscious. By
Ann Powers. NPR, September 4, 2019.
Lana Del
Rey has enjoyed a healthy relationship with most music critics since last
week’s release of her latest album, “Norman F— Rockwell,” which many hailed
unconditionally as her most sophisticated work yet.
Except
NPR writer (and former L.A. Times critic) Ann Powers, whose in-depth review
sparked outrage from the beloved pop star and her fans on social media.
Del Rey
did not mince words on Twitter Wednesday night when she replied to Powers’ post
sharing her provocative article, which called Del Rey’s lyrics “uncooked” in
comparison to those of artists such as Joni Mitchell and analyzed Del Rey’s
reliance on a “persona as a bad girl to whom bad things are done.”
“Here’s
a little sidenote on your piece,” the “Venice Bitch” singer wrote. “I don’t
even relate to one observation you made about the music. There’s nothing
uncooked about me. To write about me is nothing like it is to be with me. Never
had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.”
Here’s a
little sidenote on your piece – I don’t even relate to one observation you made
about the music. There’s nothing uncooked about me. To write about me is
nothing like it is to be with me. Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never
will.
— Lana
Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) September 5, 2019
“So
don’t call yourself a fan like you did in the article and don’t count your
editor one either,” Del Rey added in another tweet. “I may never have made bold
political or cultural statements before — because my gift is the warmth I live
my life with and the self reflection I share generously.”
In a
statement to The Times Thursday, Powers defended her thoughts on the album and
said she felt no ill will toward Del Rey, wishing her continued success.
“It is a
critic’s responsibility to be thoughtful and honest to herself in responding to
artists’ work, and an artist’s prerogative to disagree with that response,”
Powers said. “I respect Lana Del Rey and hope that her music continues to
receive the passionate appreciation it has received for years.”
Powers’
deep dive lauded the album as containing “Del Rey’s most artfully constructed
narratives, extending the arc of apparent self-realization also evident in
widely framed narratives that stood out on her previous album.” But among the
praise, Powers also noted the music’s “needy,” “disempowered,”
“self-sabotaging” and “unwoke” tones.
Revered
as a pioneering critic, Powers has weathered plenty of controversy sparked by
her scintillating criticism, particularly during her stint at The Times. The
tweet sharing her Del Rey analysis was flooded with support from fellow
critics, along with dismissive notes from Del Rey’s admirers. Critic Jessica Hopper
noted Powers’ long history of championing female artists and leading the charge
to take their work seriously.
Powers
responded to the brewing backlash in a follow-up post Thursday morning,
writing: “I really appreciate all the support today. I still think NFR is a
deeply compelling, crucial album and hope everyone spends time listening to it
(and goes back to Ultraviolence and Lust For Life too).”
Lana Del
Rey hated NPR’s album review. But critic Ann Powers stands her ground. By
Christie Carras. Los Angeles Times , September
5, 2019.
In 2012,
the same summer that Lana Del Rey released her debut album Born To Die, my best
friend fell in love with a terrible man. “Doesn’t he look just like my guy?”
she asked enthusiastically as we watched a tattooed hand clasp around Del Rey’s
neck in the music video for the album’s title track. After several weeks of
hearing this friend complain about her man’s shitty stick-and-poke tattoos, his
stupid hair, his love, his abuse – her hollow promises that she’d leave him
after each violent fight – I felt repulsed by my friend’s eager identification.
As a friend, I resented whatever drove these women back into the etiolated arms
of their awful, spirit-sapping men. As a lesbian, who has the utmost privilege
of neither loving nor desiring men, I was exasperated. My anger began to
concentrate itself on my friend (for goodness sake, just dump him) rather than
the man who kept convincing her to return. As she withdrew into her vitiating
relationship, myself and the rest of her friends grew weary and distant. At the
end of the summer, all she had left was Lana Del Rey.
Del
Rey’s early critics accused her of pornographising, glamourising, romanticising
– all adjectives that were popular on Tumblr at the time – female subjugation
and abuse. The pop star’s sexual self-presentation outright disturbed many
listeners in a year when female empowerment, resilience and self-celebration
seemed to be one of pop’s central concerns. Nicki Minaj likened herself to a
starship who was “made to fly”, Rihanna told us to “shine bright like a
diamond”, Kelly Clarkson advised “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. As
a result, Del Rey’s accounts of late heterosexuality in a late capitalist world
were especially abhorred. “You’re no good for me, but baby I want you,” she
tersely expressed, relaying an all too common heterosexual experience, while
her peers sang about overcoming nonsensical desire, and converting their bad
experiences into resilience. In pop, you don’t often hear women’s pain – you
hear how they overcame it.
It’s part
of (and here’s a couple of eyerolls coming your way) neoliberal postfeminism,
the kind that was birthed in the 1990s by conservative feminism, most
priniciply by Naomi Wolf’s 1993 work Fire With Fire which argued that women
needed to embrace their “power feminism”. It meant that women’s liberation was
their own problem – and it came down to their lifestyle choices, the views they
espouse, the way they presented themselves to the world – an idea that’s been
internalised by pop music today. We need our female pop stars to be autonomous,
self-surveilling; we need them to take a stand. The onus is on them to change
the world.
“Even
when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique (‘This is what
makes us girls / We don’t stick together ‘cause we put our love first’), she
asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are
(‘Don’t cry about it / Don’t cry about it’),” Pitchfork wrote disparagingly in
their review of her debut album.
Today,
many of us still wait in anticipation for Del Rey’s satisfying ‘I don’t need a
man’ moment. Personally, I hope it never comes. Unlike any other popstar, Lana
Del Rey explains heterosexuality to me, at a time when loving men and being
straight has never been more unfashionable. We want Del Rey to be empowered; to
unlove men, because expressions of post-heterosexual empowerment deny the
struggles and circumstances of patriarchally constructed heterosexuality.
Instead of asking why our friends don’t leave their men, we should question what
makes heterosexuality so sexy – or, rather, why it causes a morbid dependence.
“Male dominance is sexual. Meaning: men in particular, if not men alone,
sexualise hierarchy,” Catherine MacKinnon wrote in 1989’s Towards a Feminist
Theory of the State. To accuse Del Rey of “glamourising subservience” puts the
blame on Del Rey rather than the men who have forged their own dominance.
“Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” is another Gender Theory 101
slogan that comes to mind as I watch Del Rey pinned to a pinball machine by an
older man in the music video for 2012’s “Ride”.
Nowadays,
Del Rey is no longer oblivious to the pressure to cohere to an empowerment
narrative. For instance, she no longer sings the lyric “he hit me and it felt
like a kiss” from Ultraviolence’s title track, as borrowed from the Crystals.
On her latest, Norman Fucking Rockwell, she renegotiates the terms of her own
subjugation. “God damn, man-child,” she sings on the opening track, ridiculing
her man while loving him and sticking by him. It taps into the leading question
of straight women’s lives today: men are stupid and embarrassing, so why do I
love them?
Elsewhere
on Norman Fucking Rockwell, in what is quite frankly a genius move, Del Rey’s
cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” could be read as a gender reversal of many of
her songs, most notably “Blue Jeans”. As she waited for her liquor-breathed man
all day on the 2012 single, on “Doin’ Time” she repeats late Sublime frontman
Bradley Nowell’s similar anguishes: “Me and my girl we got this relationship /
I love her so bad but she treats me like shit / Locked down like a
penitentiary.” She further explores the male position on “Mariner’s Apartment
Complex”, as she imagines herself tending to a feminised, enervated lover; assuring
him “I’m your man”. Many listeners consider this Del Rey’s most emboldened
moment – but in her world, she’s only free to roam within the confines of
heterosexuality. The closest she gets to empowerment is trying her hand at male
nurturance. It’s an image that many heterosexual women love: their man becoming
small and soft and dependent in their arms. “Dominance eroticised defines the
imperatives of its masculinity, submission eroticised defines its femininity,”
says Mackinnon.
None of
this is to say that what Del Rey is doing is truly radical. It isn’t.
Hemingway, Nabokov, and Bukowski fill her bookshelves, not Mackinnon, Dworkin,
and Butler. Still, I wonder if critics would still refer to her as ‘dull’ and a
‘one-trick pony’ if her music veered away from an addiction to heterosexuality
(what alternative are straight women really presented with today?). What
critics miss about Del Rey is that her music is simply a way to survive. She
turns everything around her into a carnivalesque surface as a coping mechanism.
The beach becomes an object. She loves the pier because of its rust and tack.
She loves kitsch because it exposes an object’s own objecthood, the way
heterosexual men and women turn one another into symbols of sexual difference
in order to keep themselves turned on.
It’s why
even when your friend assures you over and over that she’ll leave him, she will
almost always return. Here’s the rub: you can’t bend desire. Unfortunately,
empowerment and unshackling from men only really exists in a Lizzo song. In
real life, we mustn’t ignore the realities which Del Rey exposes.
Lana Del
Rey explains heterosexuality to me. By Emma Madden. Dazed , September 6, 2019.
Where is
Lana Del Rey from? What a boring question. It’s been asked more than answered;
her various origin stories crosshatch the sky – like chemtrails. When she wears
an oversized LOCALS ONLY jacket on a Long Beach port terminal in the recent
video for her elegiac single ‘The Greatest’ from her latest album, Norman
Fucking Rockwell! (2019), the phrase shimmers over her. When she sings that
she’s ‘well qualified to represent the LBC’ in her cover of Sublime’s ‘Doin’
Time’ (1997), she only emphasizes her lack of qualifications to represent
anywhere. (After all, she was 12 when the song came out.) She is American,
surely. But the America she lives in seems different than ours. Over six
albums, she has skimmed across Hollywood, New York, Brooklyn, Las Vegas, Miami,
Hyannis, the desert, the prairie, all of the states and the Garden of Eden. She
swipes through landscapes as if they were boys online, horny and bored. No one
would describe her as grounded. In most of her live performances, her body
swirls, soft steps along invisible fault lines, rotating on a different axis,
never quite on beat. Her inability to look comfortable in her body makes for an
ambivalent eroticism, a desire dizzy with intoxicating self-consciousness. All
she wanted was to keep wanting.
Del Rey
pledged allegiance to wide roads, fast cars, open borders, dead presidents. But
now, like so many who were born nowhere, she’s moved to LA, just before fire
season. Many people are saying her new album is about the end of America, but I
think it’s about living in a place that has already ended, living in its memory
and the carcass, which is to say: America’s been dead a long time. The
apocalypse happened hundreds of years ago. How does it feel to live in a place
that is also an idea of a place that is also the emptiness the place left
behind? That psychedelic mix of physical decentralization and filmic
over-representation makes LA feel like a ghost town full of people. What’s
funny is, when you write about how it feels to live in LA, you are also writing
about how it feels to be a girl.
Like LA,
Lana Del Rey, the stage name of Elizabeth Grant, is a project of quotation. I
don’t think there’s a single song on the new record that doesn’t borrow phrases
or riffs from someone else. Her lyric cosmology includes The Beach Boys,
Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, The Mamas and the Papas,
Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, countless girl groups, and so on, and so on. It’s
beyond pastiche; it’s library-like, almost career-as-archive. Del Rey remembers
and memorializes while simultaneously erasing authorship and context: ‘I heard
the war was over, if you really choose,’ she intones in ‘California’,
converting John Lennon’s anti-war slogan into a woozy rumour. ‘But sometimes,
girls just want to have fun/ The poetry inside me is warm like a gun,’ she
lilts in ‘Bartender’, merging Cyndi Lauper and George Harrison in such an
unexpected combination that both become almost unrecognizable. There’s that
disembodiment again. Even when she’s singing original lyrics, they seem to
reverberate with familiarity, as if they had been lifted from some collective
cadence and content. Some have called this cliché or inauthentic. But, to me,
she offers a more profound, compassionate definition of cliché: a thing we all
know has happened many times but can’t tell you where or how or by whom. Cliché
against private property! If anonymous was a woman, cliché might be her sister.
This ambivalence about authorship, the inability to claim an original self, and
yet the need to speak one’s subjectivity anyway – to speak through collage –
also has its own precedent. Camp has always venerated the soap opera and other
mass-produced narratives as the intimate material of side-lined lives.
Now Del
Rey has accumulated enough material to start repeating herself, endlessly
recycling fragments of her own mythology. She doesn’t just reference past
albums to demonstrate narrative development. The media insists that she has
grown in this album, matured into a more serious, genuine, joyful, empowered or
articulate artist. To me, this has always seemed conservative. Don’t we stan a
queen of inertia, stasis, horizontality? She’s never promised action: ‘We go so
fast, we don’t move,’ Del Rey croons in ‘Love Song’. She emerged like this,
empty and whole. Unlike most celebrities, singers and actors, her messaging has
not dramatically changed since Donald Trump became president, except for a few
minor tweaks. (She stopped performing in front of the American flag in 2017.)
Instead, we have to sit with what hasn’t changed under the current president –
what the US was before him, and what it will remain after; all that Trump
merely hears, repeats and bellows back to us.
In Norman
Fucking Rockwell!, she repeatedly refers to the titles of her songs within
other songs. (She quotes ‘Venice Bitch’ in ‘Mariner’s Apartment Complex’,
‘Norman Rockwell’ in ‘Venice Bitch’.) Musical phrases recur across the album
itself, a shiver of déjà vu. This repetitive tendency is sometimes somnolent,
mantra-like and narcotic (‘Dream a little dream of me,’ she sings in ‘Fuck It I
Love You’, quoting Ella Fitzgerald; ‘Dream a dream, here’s a scene,’ she sings
in ‘Love Song’, a few minutes later). Sometimes, it feels lazy in the best way,
lazy like the morning after sex, lazy like LA when you could still afford rent
with a three-day work week. When I saw her in concert this summer, she sang the
entirety of her 2014 anthem ‘Pretty When You Cry’ while lying completely flat
on the floor. It looked like the stage was empty; a live stream broadcast her
recline on huge screens around us. We stared at nothing, while she took a rest.
I wept with exultant identification.
Sometimes
her repetitions glitch and stutter, like in the video for her psych rock magnum
opus ‘Venice Bitch’, which replays found freeway footage until you almost feel
like you might be going somewhere. In Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay ‘Remembering,
Repeating and Working-Through’, the psychoanalyst described ‘a compulsion to
repeat’ which takes the place of memory. Instead of remembering the past, a
patient unconsciously re-creates its conditions. By doing the same thing again
and again, we both stave off threatening new experiences and try to drive in
reverse, so to speak, moving against the current towards what the death drive
ultimately craves: a return to the selfless, pre-birth state. This echoes Del
Rey’s once very public wish to be ‘dead already’, which is not the same thing
as wanting to die.
In Joan
Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, the protagonist, Maria, sleeps or
circles the LA freeways all day. She isn’t going anywhere. ‘Venice Bitch’ – all
nine minutes and 47 seconds of it – is a song destined for these drives,
quoting Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 song ‘Crimson and Clover’: ‘Over
and over, over and over, over and over’. The most famous line of Didion’s novel
– ‘I know what nothing means and keep on playing’ – is a precursor to what will
be the most famous line of Norman Fucking Rockwell!: ‘I miss doing nothing the
most of all.’ Nothingness is something we do, something we know, day after day.
In the
album’s transcendent closer, ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to
have – but i have it’, Del Rey puts her sadness back in context. It can only be
communicated in the negative: ‘Don’t ask if I’m happy, you know that I’m not /
But at best, I can say I’m not sad.’ She is not more than anything else. This
‘24/7 Sylvia Plath’ blinks, sputters, glows. In a way, Del Rey has always been
operating at an apocalyptic register because she has always been writing about
heartbreak, all the ends of the world we keep in our bedrooms. She has been
called girlish because young girls are known for intercepting the highest
frequency of feeling, for recognizing the mythological implications of
supposedly banal personal dramas. Maybe that’s what she’s always cared about,
and all that Americana is only a means to The End – Hollywood style.
Who has
Elizabeth Grant become in the near-decade since rechristening herself as the
singer Lana Del Rey? Internet phenomenon turned Saturday Night Live laughing
stock, her sustained popularity has perplexed those who would prefer to see
brilliant women fail. She has defied critics and graduated summa cum laude from
the pop pantheon into the hall of legends; based on her new album, she deserves
comparison to the heavyweights of American mythology like Joni Mitchell and
Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan, Silvia Plath and Carole King.
Norman
Fucking Rockwell! slaps in all the right places. Del Rey’s latest album is a
culmination of the artist’s last four records, a singularity that allows her
various personae to converge into higher form. A Lolita wannabe, a saturnine
seductress, a beach bum, an Americana poet, an avatar of angst — Del Rey
amalgamates these versions of herself into a higher form, becoming one of
Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon.
In 2012,
Del Rey’s debut album, Born to Die, delivered a complex satire of American neediness
far ahead of its time, which combined babylike vocals with crushing
instrumentals and lyrics rife with literary references to everything from Walt
Whitman to Vladimir Nabokov. The net effect was like listening to a toddler
recite passages from The Bell Jar: mesmerizing and depressing. Over the years,
Del Rey has introduced more of her own voice, which is naturally lower and
velvety — something like a counterpart to Johnny Cash’s gravely bass. In albums
like Ultraviolence (2014) and Honeymoon (2015), she toyed with the concept of a
torch song, producing subversive anti-anthems about romance’s entanglement with
death. Lust for Life (2017) extended these motifs into an exploration of
patriotism. That same year, Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American
flag, viewing it as “inappropriate” for the Trump era. She changed her backdrop
to a screen of static instead, a multifaceted commentary on the “white noise”
of American politics and the dissociative phenomenon of living in the world’s
wealthiest country, which also happens to jail children.
Del
Rey’s most recent album, produced by Jack Antonoff, takes its name from one of
America’s greatest propagandists, Norman Rockwell, who spent 50 years
advocating presidential policies from his pulpit as an illustrator for the
weekly Saturday Evening Post. Although his paintings became monolithic postwar
signifiers of what the American Dream should look like, it’s important to
recognize that Rockwell also advocated for progressive ideals like social
welfare and civil rights. But subsequent generations of artist have not been
particularly kind to the artist, parodying his work as a critique of an America
that never quite lived up to the dream it was selling. The fucking between
Norman and Rockwell is a symbol of Del Rey wedging herself into that lineage. And
instead of adopting one of the artist’s paintings for her album cover, she
references Roy Lichtenstein’s work. Del Rey poses on a boat with one hand
around Duke Nicholson (grandson of the actor Jack Nicholson) and the other
outstretched to the viewer. An American flag waves in the background just below
the initials NFR!, which are illustrated inside a comic book action bubble.
The
mixing of artistic references is confusing if also apropos for the album.
Lichtenstein was Rockwell’s contemporary, and he often painted damsels in
distress — some in the midst of drowning beneath the ocean waves. Likewise, Del
Rey’s music indulges in melodramatic archetypes of women by amplifying concepts
of femininity and futility to the point of high camp. “Fuck it I love you,”
exemplifies the form, spilling into a delirious chorus of expletive-riddled
adorations after imploring listeners to “dream a little dream of me, make me
into something sweet.”
Here,
Del Rey also manages to balance delirium with an eloquent critique of romance.
“The poetry inside of me is warm like a gun,” she sings on the ambitious
“Bartender” track, referencing The Beatles. “But that cherry coke you serve is
fine, and our love’s sweet enough on the vine.” Elsewhere, she’s gloriously
despondent. “Fresh out of fucks forever,” she sings on the prodigious “Venice
Bitch” song. “Ice cream, ice queen, I dream in jeans and leather.”
Del
Rey’s lyrics combine narratorial precision with a masterful turn-of-phrase
comparable to that of country singer Kacey Musgraves. “You took my sadness out
of context at the mariner’s apartment complex,” she sings on the album’s second
track, “I ain’t no candle in the wind.”
She is
rejecting more than the male gaze; she is refuting the myth of male
exceptionalism. “God damn, man child,” she asserts on the album’s eponymous
first song. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news.” “You act like a kid
even though you stand six-foot-two,” she later remarks, “You talk to the walls
when the party gets bored of you.”
When
Born to Die debuted seven years ago, Lana del Rey refined the vainglorious
qualities of American culture into music. She appeared on that album’s cover
looking like the California cousin of a vampire from True Blood: powerful,
seductive, cruel. The music followed suit. By comparison, Norman Fucking
Rockwell! is entirely human and painful in its complex depictions of romantic
fatigue and emotional gaslighting. The new album ends with the song “hope is a
dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have it” wherein Del Rey
calls herself a “modern-day woman with a weak constitution” witnessing “a new
revolution” that’s “born of confusion and quiet collusion.” But by the end of
the song, she breaks through the refrain, whispering in falsetto: “I have it, I
have.” And yes, she does.
Lana Del
Rey and the Gaslighting of American Culture. By Zachary Small. Hyperallergic
, September 10, 2019.
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