Hello, I’m back. Going to skip all of the apologies for not posting biweekly or even monthly because I am trying to be gentle with myself! Also, in lieu of previous posts, I am back to going long on a single album that has stuck with me recently. I have tried in the past few years to listen to artists whose politics mostly align with mine, but Lana Del Rey is someone I’m still reckoning with. It’s okay if you don’t agree and skip this one. I’m trying to be honest about the messy way that art reaches me, and letting go of the perfectionist who wants to project an image of myself that is less than true.
Did you know that The Beach Boys, though synonymous with California, weren’t surfers and were merely singing about a sunny culture they only peripherally knew? In many ways, Lana Del Rey is also synonymous with California, even though she’s from New York. In both cases, the songs embody so much of our ideas about the West Coast that it doesn’t matter. After all, California is itself a myth, a promised land that continues to offer a vision of gold—whether via Hollywood or Silicon Valley—even as that illusion crumbles alongside other American dreams.
On her newest album, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, Lana Del Rey is still spinning tales of gold, steeped in her own spiritual musings on the cosmos and what they offer her. On “The Grants,” she recounts a shaky theology: “My pastor told me when you leave, all you take is your memory.” I’m not familiar with this particular idea (forgive me if I’m rusty), but Lana clings to it in pure faith: “I’m gonna take mine of you with me.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment, her lush vocals backed by a choir of Melodye Perry, Pattie Howard, and Shikena Jones, turning the song into worship, a stirring message that laughs in the face of the notion that you can’t take it with you. Lana takes it all the way: “My sister’s firstborn child / I’m gonna take that, too, with me / My grandmother’s last smile / I’m gonna take that, too, with me / It’s a beautiful life / Remember that, too, for me.” Note the turn in that last line, how it goes from her own thing to something she needs from someone else.
On the next song, the title track, she takes this belief in eternal memories further. There is indeed a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, and Lana uses it as her own version of a balm in Gilead. The tunnel is beautiful, but Lana fears it has been forgotten as an extension of her own worry: “When’s it gonna be my turn?” she sings, then asks that someone carry her like she has promised to carry them: “Don’t forget me.”
Elsewhere on the record, she prays for God to send her “three white butterflies to know you’re near” and for her grandfather to protect her father while he’s deep-sea fishing (on a song aptly titled “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing”). Both God and Grandfather have divine powers in Lana’s configuration, though Lana’s grandfather is expected to keep someone alive while God is asked only for a small sign of beauty. Both spectacular, but the shifting weight of cosmic power is mystifying.
With the line “don’t forget me,” she explicitly notes that she’s quoting a Harry Nilsson song, and across the record she makes her references to mostly white American songs as scriptures clear: Leonard Cohen (his line also makes an appearance on the new boygenius album) and The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” which she says reminds someone of Florida, a knowing wink at projections of California authenticity. But her recognition of Black music and how it has shaped her artistry plays a living role, as with the features on “The Grants” as well as a Tommy Genesis sample and a trap remix of a prior Lana song that give the last tracks a burst of energy.
Lana’s theology is loose and free-flowing as her style throughout the album, stream-of-conscious strings of lines on each song that circle similar themes over patient piano and strings but that also take diversions as needed. Some songs repeat or parallel other lyrics, as on “Kintsugi” and “Let the Light In” and on (again) “Let the Light In” and “Margaret,” as if Lana is trying to solidify something she’s still working out.
One of Lana’s main subjects on this record is suicide, referencing her Uncle Dave’s several times and confessing to her own struggles with ideation. “I wanted to go out like you,” she sings to Dave on “Fingertips,” seemingly referencing an attempt to drown at fifteen that was interrupted by neighbors who pulled her from the water. “But sometimes, it’s just not your time,” she recognizes, still singing from the distance of years if not feelings.
In the same song, she references the research around the efforts to eradicate death once and for all, as if immortalization is as intriguing to her as an abbreviated life. Again, weight shifting between two forces of great power to save us or just send us a sign. In being caught between wanting to die and wanting to live forever, Lana embodies a fuller faith that embraces her deepest doubts.
It’s almost strange to hear a mainstream pop singer openly theologize on record. So strange, perhaps, that critics can’t decide whether she’s laughing with or at her pastor on “Judah Smith Interlude,” a four-and-a-half minute track that is a piano-backed voice recording of the celebrity pastor sermonizing about lust (right after “A&W,” a song unofficially titled “American Whore”) and why the creator of the rhinoceros would bother with people like him, accompanied by Lana laughing and repeating him in the background. To me, she sounds fully tuned into his message, without a hint of irony behind her recording and proceeding to immortalize his message on her album. But as off-putting as his message may be to listeners who don’t want to hear his weak messaging (myself among them), her own spin on cosmic meaning is spellbinding by contrast.
Lana, after all, is a walking contradiction, but so are we all, our words and actions and other words complicating, revising, and talking over one another. Where others try to escape, Lana embraces them, her messy complexity on full display in her freewheeling approach to songwriting and singing. After all, she’s famously criticized the project of feminism in interviews, but the album’s lead single “A&W” is a feminist text more revelatory than plenty of songs that claim the label. “I’m a princess, I’m divisive,” she sings, proceeding to critique the perfect victim mythology and explaining that she (or the mythical speaker of her songs) doesn’t actually feel like explaining herself after all these years. On “Peppers,” a jumpscare line about kissing her boyfriend when he has Covid isn’t Covid denial but romantic obsession (however ill-advised). Not all of it works, but then, that’s why she’s Lana. “When you’re right, you’re right,” she proclaims on “Paris, Texas,” “Even when you’re wrong.”
I’ve often seen Lana and Taylor Swift as two sides of the American girl myth unraveling over the span of their careers. They are two white women who have been seen as all-American, Swift having to unravel that mythology to be seen as human rather than pure, Lana willfully and playfully embracing and rejecting it at turns as someone who has always been seen as less than pure, both in terms of authenticity (which is, to me, the least interesting criticism you could level at a musician) and for critiques about her body and behavior rooted in misogyny.
I have sometimes decided to let my complicated feelings about Lana drive me from listening to her at all. Case in point: in 2019, I put Norman Fucking Rockwell! in my top ten albums, but two years later I put neither of her 2021 releases anywhere on my list, after her comments on the racial politics of the album cover for the first (essentially, she defended her very white cover as not racist before anyone had even said anything about it) steered me away from engaging.
So, I won’t fault anyone for steering clear. But I’m also willing from my particular social location as a white male to cringe at her sometimes troubling comments or behavior and admit that—for me—they don’t ultimately discount the larger work she makes (I do and say so hesitantly, knowing I am hypocritical in where and when I apply this, but trying to parse it out without being didactic). For myself, I have found Lana’s music compelling enough to return to, to hear how she picks apart—or sometimes unintentionally reinforces—the racialized and gendered image of the American girl and pieces it back together into her own strange gospel.
I guess I’m saying Lana’s not God, nor a god, but her new album does remind me of Garth Greenwell’s recent viral piece on complex art and his longing for a secular restoration of a belief in imago dei. I think there can be something lost when we don’t reckon with art that moves us from people who sometimes trouble us (I have a line, but it is not, I’m learning, with Lana).
That was but one of the religious feelings I was reminded of—and experienced—while listening to Lana’s latest record. Maybe it’s a crack in my own professed beliefs. But, as Lana sings by way of a Leonard Cohen scripture, “That’s how the light gets in.”
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