Musings on Pop Music, Part One: Lana Del Rey

Recently I've been thinking about Mitski, an Indie artist who I used to listen to a lot back when I was an angsty high schooler.

Part of what makes Mitski a more divisive artist in the pophead sphere is that she's a bit... self-serious. Not that there's inherently wrong with that, but modern womanhood isn't all doom and gloom, you know?

Compare this to how two of my favorite singer-songwriters, Lana Del Rey and Amy Winehouse, portray the experience of being a woman living and loving in today’s world.

Lana Del Rey first garnered mainstream success with her 2012 album Born to Die after initially struggling to get her music career off the ground. Lana, with her admiration for the classic Americana aesthetic and Old Hollywood, approaches love and life with a flair for the dramatic and a sense of playfulness. “Let's take Jesus off the dashboard/he's got enough on his mind/we both know what we're for/safe to do many times” from her First Time anthem Diet Mountain Dew is one of my fav examples of Lana’s overlooked humor.

The Born to Die track “Off To the Races” is, in my opinion, Lana at her best. In it, she tells a larger-than-life story of a Bonnie & Clyde-esque couple raising hell in the Las Vegas world of sex, drugs, & rock ‘n’ roll. "Who else is going to put up with me this way?" Lana asks cheekily, breaking the fourth wall with a wink and smile.

As mentioned previously, much Lana’s music is a love letter to what falls under the vast umbrella of “American culture”: the boujee New Englanders ("Chemtrails Over The Country Club"), the Old Money Fourth of July patriots ("National Anthem"), the 1970s countercultural poets and artists ("Brooklyn Baby"), the coked-up beachgoers of Miami ("Florida Kilos"), the Californians with dreams of stardom ("West Coast"), and the rural countryfolk ("Tulsa Jesus Freak"). Point to anyplace on a map of the US, and chances are Lana Del Rey has written a song about it.

Her refreshingly irony-free love for Middle America doesn't stop there: in 2023, Del Rey went viral for apparently working a shift at a Waffle House in Florence, Alabama.

slay

Like many female pop stars, Lana has been dubbed a “gay icon”. Much of her fanbase consists of gay men who live for her campy and theatrical persona, as well as her unabashed sexuality (“my pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola”, anyone?) Many gay women are also attracted to her introspective and intimate songwriting style that’s similar to lesbian artists like the Indigo Girls or Melissa Eldrige. Additionally, her surprise appearance at the Dyke Day march (while donning a blue flannel, no less) and her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” which retains the female pronouns for the song’s love interest also helps her reputation as a Friend O’ Lesbians.

However, Lana Del Rey is notable for being surprisingly apolitical. She’ll release a song titled “God Bless America- And All the Beautiful Women in It” or sing about how she fell asleep in an American flag, but her patriotism is in the non-partisan, non-arrogant way, more “This Land is Your Land” than “America, Fuck Yeah!”

The one exception to her general "no politics" rule is her 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which was released a few years after Lana’s short-lived promise to stop using Americana imagery in lieu of Trump’s inauguration. With the title’s irreverent reference to the painter who created idealized portraits of American life, you might assume this would be Lana’s attempt at a Trump Derangement Syndrome, “America is bad, actually” lib redemption arc. Fellow pop star Katy Perry had previously tried her hand at AWFL pandering in 2017 with her self-proclaimed “socially conscious pop” album Witness, which was panned by critics and became the butt of the joke among even the most hardcore of stans. However, NFR! isn’t like that at all. Instead of hollow commentary on how Orange Man Bad, Lana instead created a sophisticated and reflective album about how the world she grew up in no longer exists. This isn’t to say the album is all drab seriousness, not at all- the opening track begins with Lana’s signature dry humor: “Godamn, man child/you fucked me so good that I almost said, "I love you".

"The greatest" is a personal favorite of mine on Norman Fucking Rockwell!. The lyrics portray a sense of disillusionment with the current state of America and the world at large- the general feeling of longing for an era you've never lived through, a homesickness for a place you've never been to. "I miss New York and I miss the music” sings Lana, “me and my friends, we miss rock 'n' roll/I want shit to feel just like it used to/and baby, I was doing nothing the most of all." “The greatest” is the song that could play during the closing credits for the end of the American Empire.

Lana Del Rey with Duke Nicholson, grandson of actor Jack Nicholson, on the cover of Norman Fucking Rockwell!

In her famous 1990 op-ed “Madonna -- Finally, a Real Feminist”, Camille Paglia says that the aforementioned Queen of Pop “sees both the animality and the artifice”. By “[c]hanging her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, "No more masks." Madonna says we are nothing but masks”. Likewise, Lana’s public image is that of an ever-changing woman of mystery who can find glamor and style in the everyday melancholy of life. Who really is “Lana Del Rey?” Is she a character that the singer Elizabeth “Lizzy” Grant created, or simply another way to express herself? This fantastic article by Substacker Roro explains it best:

“When Lana self-identifies as the other woman, she is not simply talking about her relational identity to men, but to her audience itself: she belongs to no one because she is not a real person to be understood, and she belongs to everyone because she is a vessel for their projections. She fascinates us because she is a pure creature of fantasy, freezing herself in these moments of utter glamour and self-romanticisation. We take these images she presents us, like melancholically smoking a cigarette in a red dress, or romanticising the abuse she suffers at the hands of her partner, or being a seductress to older married men, and we attempt to distill them into our own lives. We all desire to become the other woman, to become glamorous fantasy instead of devastatingly monotonous”.

“For all her faults and foibles, I must admit—the lady can really tell a story”.