Lana Del Rey, Are You for Real?
Artwork by Grace Dixon
My thoughts are about nothing, and beautiful, and for free...
— Lana Del Rey, “Salamander”
Gays and girls worship Lana Del Rey because of how persistently she ambiguates the boundary between sincerity and irony. I heard that you like the bad girls honey, is that true? My friend Z tells me that she can’t bear Lana because it reminds her of the communities built around white femininity she left behind in high school. For her, there’s no ironic distance: she lived too deep inside Lana’s world for her to love Lana at the requisite distance.
We plead this question at her over and over again; are you for real? How much do you embody a species of oblivious white womanhood, and how much are you constructed to critique it? Or: is your hardcore sincere embodiment of an eternally-pubescent hippie simultaneously the critique of the same, because it reveals to us the essence of this archetype of the American Woman? Do you, Lana Del Rey, plead guilty to being a parody of yourself?
The toughness to my unending softness / A striking example of masculinity / Firm in your verticality. She plays the boy/girl game with such unfashionable conviction it makes you wonder whether these oldest, most fervent myths of gender binaries have ever really changed, or whether they’ve been undead in plain sight all this time. All my schooling in feminism, queer theory, and intersectional politics hardly make me immune to the romantic draw of such a vision of the American Woman, so my consciousness as a Lana listener is split between the critical and the mythological.
We crave the purity of that archetype. I don’t know anyone who says they love Lana Del Rey without confessing it, an abashed thrill running across their eyes. Up until her most recent album of spoken-word poetry, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, I lapped up everything she put out like it was a bottle of Coca-Cola at the local roller derby.
Blame this seduction on the marketable gravitas of Americana, or my nostalgia for three years lived in San Francisco, two in Ithaca, and one in Atlanta, but the desire drove me back and back again to her signifier-stew, in which all the doom and dreams of the Myth of America intermixed. It’s not subtle: I get down to beat poetry / I get high on hydroponic weed / my boyfriend’s in a band / he plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed. Instead of subtlety, Lana seeks density, constellating a smorgasbord of Americana signifiers that, engorged with enormous cultural potency, are brought to life by the barest mention.
By condensing all of the symbolic pleasures of 20th century America—he was ’70s in spirit / ’90s in his frame of mind—and singing of them in her breathless, irresistible sigh of a voice, Lana’s reaching for the rewind button to get us back to a time when America was hegemon and time itself wasn’t so out of joint. The figure of Lana Del Rey—not, mind you, Lizzie Grant—is a modern mythographer who persistently fails to rise above the myths in which she’s irrevocably embroiled.
But it’s not all drippin’ peaches n’ cream in Lana’s vision of America, and the dark sides of its contradictions keep me hooked. Her music conveys the fundamental sense of an emptiness behind the plenitude that the American Dream promises: the bulk of America’s cultural productions is built on shoring up a mass of cultural signifiers against a deep anxiety around inauthenticity. America inherits the decadence of the late British Empire, perfecting it into a panorama of beaches, fast cars, and boys with too much time on their hands and too much love locked up too deep to speak of it.
Norman Fucking Rockwell was her crowning achievement because you couldn’t disambiguate between Lana Del Rey’s own emptiness and her performance of an apocalypse-courting all-American nihilism: the culture is lit, and if this is it, I had a ball / I guess I’m burned out after all. The signifiers cannot escape the shadow of coming catastrophe and so become an anxious refrain, a hedonist’s prayer to pleasure in our End Times.
Her theory of desire is a circuit between culture and self for which she functions sometimes as a cynic, though mostly as an idol. Who else is better suited to trace the passage from privilege into extinction? We didn’t know that we had it all / But nobody warns you before the fall. Lana’s our coal-mine canary of the apocalypse—but what happens when she stops singing?
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the name of both Lana’s first book of poems and the spoken word album that consists of excerpts from the longer book. Here, I’ll be discussing just the album version because the (largely but not always) ambient musical choices that she and collaborator Jack Antonoff make are worth considering in the lineage of her pop albums.
Violet is free verse, the freest verse: far more loping and talkative than Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, two of the album’s vague forebears. At times it breaks into rhyming couplets in lullaby rhythms, but most of it is effectively conversational prose. On first listen, it feels as though all the implied space for the listeners, into which one can project their own vision of the American Dream, has been filled out by Lana herself. Take this verse from the first track of the album, “LA Who Am I to Love You”:
LA, I'm a dreamer, but I'm from nowhere, who am I to dream?
LA, I'm upset, I have complaints, listen to me
They say I came from money and I didn't
And I didn't even have love, and it's unfair
LA, I sold my life rights for a big check and I'm upset
And now I can't sleep at night and I don't know why
Plus, I love Zach, so why did I do that when I know it won't last?
Her style is confessional poetry without content: you’re never quite sure what she’s confessing, nor is it clear that she herself knows. The dullest bits are when she’s defensive about being treated badly and becomes yet another pop star whining about the misrepresentations brought about by fame.
Authenticity demands that the artwork is a direct channel into the artist’s soul. Such a thing as the truth—and art’s communicability of such a truth—is never more than an effect, an authenticity-effect we can never prove and yet never ceases to fascinate us.
One can trace a lineage of artists who never ironize authenticity, but give it to us seemingly unconcealed: Elliott Smith, Adele. Or there’s a lineage of artists, from Bob Dylan to Arca, who play with the authenticity-effect, distorting and mutating the self through their artistic personas—though we know well enough by now that performativity is hardly a sign of inauthenticity. Lana straddles these two lineages, loving to live in the undecidable boundary between them.
Whereas Lana the persona was born in a firestorm of authenticity debates—is she real or not—Violet raises questions of indulgence: how much is too much? These are two eternal questions of taste and criticism that reveal ancient expectations of what art ought to be.
But our allergy to indulgence demands that the artist make enough room in their soul-baring for our souls to engage theirs. There’s a careful balance that has to be struck between effective intimacy and aesthetic distance. In Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, Lana abandons the mythological-melodic throne she’d built so carefully for herself, shrinks down to a human scale, and leaves us with a mess of tropes that is sometimes stunning in its awkward earnestness:
The way that I feel with you is something like aching
inside of my stomach the cosmos are baking
a universe hung like a mobile
the alignment of these planets unique
in me the earth moves around the sun
The metaphors come on heavy and thick, Lana’s eyes cast heavenward with all she’s inherited from hippiedom. Her invocations of yoga and Eastern spirituality conjure up an image of Lana at the cultural buffet table, sampling from hither plate and yonder dish.
Throughout the album, Lana forges an image of quintessential white womanhood that, thanks to her complex and catchy performance of it, is newly palpable to us as listeners.. Poetry is the vehicle by which she annotates this subject position, filling in the outlines so we can see the full range of this kind of whiteness: its allure, its ugliness, its obliviousness, and its romantic hold on us. The things we thought were beautiful, Standing stoic blue and denim / Eyes not blue but clear like heaven, show that they’re gilded by ruin.
The last track on the album is the best; it sets Lana’s reading over a schizoid tape loop of overlapping voices that mutter “people love my stories, people love my visions”:
I've moved on, gone scorched earth
And now I'm left wondering where to go from here
To Sonoma where the fires have just left?
South Dakota?Would standing in front of Mount Rushmore feel like the Great
American homecoming I never had?Would the magnitude of the scale of the sculptures take the place
of the warm embrace I've never got?Or should I just be here now
Bare feet on linoleum
Slicing vegetables onto water that I will later turn
into stew
There’s nothing else, really. America the promised land is a haven only for the husk of promises shucked, discarded. Lana stirs her soup, her bare feet on the linoleum floor. But what does she know of her role in the burning world?
Essay
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October 13,
2021
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8-minute
read
Fan Wu
is a tireless fantasist in the shape of a communicating vessel. You can read his writing online at Koffler Digital, baest, MICE, and C Magazine. Please get in touch with him for fun or philosophy at fanwu2@gmail.com.