“God damn man-child, you fucked me so good I almost said I love you”
As the opening line suggests, there is nothing soft or romantic about this record. In her fifth album, Lana Del Rey sets the record straight. She no longer sings about the ideal, the American Dream like before.
Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter who designed the iconic Saturday Evening Post Magazine magazine illustrations. He depicted an idealistic America — and Del Rey rejects it. So, she says, “Norman Fucking Rockwell!”, like how a millennial would exclaim about a problematic icon he or she adores.
Yet, despite the wreckage that is 21st-century America, her sound does not remind anyone of defeat. Instead, her lyrics suggest defiance. Even in “Venice Bitch”, where she is ‘fresh out of fucks forever’, the duration of the song screams rebellion. It is ten minutes long, and Del Rey leaves the electric guitar to linger on simply because it seems fitting. This album pivots gracefully between the chaos and the calm, the unconditional love she has for her country, and her fiery hatred for its questionable actions and values.
As brutal as the themes may be, Del Rey executes them exquisitely. There is almost something luxurious about entrapment in “Doin’ Time” and the Sublime cover defines the aesthetic of the album. Perhaps “The Greatest” — political and poetic at the same time — encapsulates the culture crisis of today in one line: ‘Kanye West is blond and gone’.
Yet, she positions this side-by-side with buoyant nostalgia. In “Fuck it I love you”, Del Rey’s haunting voice picks up its pace and pleads us to love unabashedly. And perhaps her last song on this record — ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman to have it — but I have it’ — inspired by feminist poet Sylvia Plath, sums up to one thing: have hope.