Lana season!

Every time Lana releases a new album I have to blog about it

I’ve just noticed this thing about Lana Del Rey albums: the first five or so tracks usually start off awesome, but then the rest of the album degenerates into a series of tedious and vaguely similar-sounding tracks with lyrics that sound like they’ve been spliced from the cast-offs of the first five songs. Although, Lana Del Rey at mediocre is still leagues better than most of her contemporaries at their best.

In the first five or so songs on every album, she lays out her aesthetic philosophy that articulates the woman that Lana Del Rey (or perhaps she prefers Elizabeth Grant now) is becoming. Born to Die and Ultraviolence announced her aesthetic theme of a vampy Lux Lisbon-esque sexy sad girl seduction that made her the anthem for young alt girls everywhere. Since she’s been putting on the pounds in recent years (though this doesn’t detract from her beauty at all, which is how you know she’s really beautiful), she’s pivoted away from her sad girl image to adopt the persona of the lovely all-American sweetheart. Roses and robins. Living, laughing, loving in Chemtrails and Blue Banisters.

But her latest, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard (released 24 March 2023) still has its shades of darkness, as if she’s struggling to maintain a Laura Palmer-esque double life by blending more confessional and serious piano-based songs with the coquettish trap sounds that launched her career. In its most famous single, "A&W", the standout refrain, “This is the experience of being an American whore," echoes with a discordant hum throughout the rest of the album. Her music is still drawn to the themes of prostitution (of the mind) and seduction, perhaps through some guilty repetition compulsion. Her conflict with the music industry and the men that her career rely on comes up again, as it has in the past, along with the struggle of separating mask/persona (in this case, of the sad girl seductress) from the craft of the sincere artist. For most women, self-esteem relies so much on sexual validation. Even if she was happily invited to discard the mask, why would she want to when the superficial gratification from maintaining that mask is so much more flattering? It’s so much easier on the ego to imagine one’s self as a whore, who’s had to do questionable things to make it in The Industry because one is so beautiful and voluptuous and a woman, on top of also being talented, and nobody would take one seriously otherwise. It's so much easier to imagine all this than to just accept one’s own success. Ensconced within the comfort of one's laurels, even if there's nothing wrong you have to make up something wrong in order to give your personality some dimension and meaning. That was Mitski's tactic with the obnoxiously-titled Laurel Hell.

The intimate psychology which has come to define Del Rey's style is also why, I guess, discussions of her music always take on such intimate terms and invite speculation into her personal life. But it’s also the same intimacy that she rejects, as most women do when they feel they've been found out, like the comfort blanket of their perceived uniqueness has been stiripped off to reveal a girl who looks like any other girl, inspirign a childish lashing-out like in 2019 when Del Rey pretty much told Ann Powers of NPR, "You don't know me!" after the latter wrote an innocuous review of Norman Fucking Rockwell.  Her music invites us to analyse her.

The defensive attitude often appears on her albums and makes for some very whimsical and funny, fun, lines, especially when heard through Del Rey's husky hiss. In Ocean Boulevard, these are lines like “If you want a basic bitch, go to the Beverly Centre,” or “Your mom called, I told her you’re fucking up big time". With these lines she’s effectively given Instagram caption material to hordes of young women out there who think they’re unique despite borrowing their attitude from one of the most successful female artists in contemporary music. But if every woman’s captioning their selfies with “If you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Centre,” then who are the basic bitches who are supposedly at the Beverly Centre, if not them?

This defensive stance often also takes the form of a child-like pleading, like in "Kintsugi", where the Daddy of the Oedipal seduction drama becomes the fix-it-all Daddy who’s supposed to know the solution for everything and tell me what to do in his assured, grown-up voice. But the way she sings for Daddy still hints at seduction, the helpless woman’s retreat deeper into helplessness by reclaiming the childhood title of being Daddy's little princess. The song that sees Lana at her most vulnerable is "Fingertips", which I find nearly unlistenable. I’m sorry (and when it comes to Lana, I truly am sorry), but I just can’t take a song seriously when one of its verses begins with, “Will I die?” And then proceeds to mention, in quick succession, as if name-dropping or sad girl starter-packing, medication, institutionalisation, and suicide.

The title of the album and the allusions to her own feelings of insecurity suggest a vulnerability, a precariousness in the world, but at the same time many of the lyrics have a cloying confidence. LDR is both large and small at once, hopping through different personas in order to land on revelations. In the album, she variously imbues the persona of the whore, the mother, the girl-child, the woman, trying them out to see how they fit her. The persona that stands out the most to me is that of Jane from Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, who feels like the core of the album: the misunderstood mother separated from her child who turned to a world of prostitution (like the spiritual prostitution, the stolen child is also something that Lana feels spiritually, since she doesn’t actually have a child). But the actual song on this album that is a direct reference to Paris, Texas is a disappointment.

LDR is one of the contemporary Western world's greatest artists and stylists. She’s one of the only ones daring to sing about womanhood and the relations between men and women with any honesty, allowing her to avoid her fellow contemporaries’ fates of flops and sellouts. (After all, who remembers either Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters or Lorde’s Solar Power? But people are still playing “White Dress”.) Yet I can’t help but wonder why a woman with such a strong aesthetic sensibility as hers and such accomplishments as she’s accumulated still falls into the same trap of romanticising her life as if it’s this unique wellspring of inspiration, though she largely resembles any other girl in her manias and daydreams. Why is it so hard to accept that it's her talent that makes her individual? I think Ocean Boulevard is somewhere on a scale of Very OK to Good; after about five play-throughs I’m pretty much done with it. I guess if anything, it revealed to me that no matter how successful one is, how widely admired and well-paid  (I had to sing for the prince [of Monaco] in two hours), womanly derangement is really a universal feeling that comes for everyone, along with its mechanisms of child-like unreason and naivety. If you want to make it, you have to give it all up. No looking back.