Sometime in early 2012, I was petting a llama while on a 16-hour acid trip in the Incan ruins of the mountains of Cusco, Peru. When I eventually made my way back to my hostel, I saw that the boy I had spent all of that summer desperately in love with had just changed his status to “in a relationship.” That was the moment when I found Lana Del Rey, or rather, she found me. I crawled into bed and put on “Video Games” to soothe my broken heart and monumental hangover, and played it on repeat until she lulled me to sleep. Lana’s dreamy electronic pop ballads have always felt like a heartsore comedown, and she continues this on her fifth studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell. Except this time, the boy who let her down is America.
Since her 2012 breakout album Born to Die, Lana Del Rey has been the queen of broken dreams, an artist who manages to make listeners feel unwavering hope and destitute hopelessness at the same time. On her new 14-track album produced by Jack Antonoff, Del Rey examines the comedown after the death of the American Dream, dissecting it as she would an ex-boyfriend and tapping into a feeling of pain and bewilderment so many of us are experiencing.
Del Rey told Vanity Fair earlier this year that the album name was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the state of the American Dream. “It was kind of an exclamation mark: so this is the American dream, right now,” she said, adding that “this is where we’re at—Norman fucking Rockwell. We’re going to go to Mars, and Trump is president, all right.” The album is named for the iconic 1940s illustrator known for his patriotic depictions of America during World War II, a time when it seemed that America at least attempted to market itself as standing for some ideal.
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Del Rey has been criticized for not being politically outspoken enough. Since then, she has come out against President Trump and criticized Kanye West’s support of the president. On the song “the greatest,” she sings “L.A. is in flames, it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blond and gone / ‘Life on Mars’ ain’t just a song / Oh, the lifestream’s almost on.” Her voice drips with despair as she sings, “If this is it, then I’m signing off.” This is Lana at her most blatantly political, continuing in the vein of “Looking for America,” a song about gun control that dropped earlier this month.
In the song “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” it’s hard to tell if the person Del Rey is trying to forget is an ex-lover or America itself. “Shaking my ass is the only thing that’s got this black narcissist off my back / She couldn’t care less, and I never cared more,” she sings, as if trying to escape the horrors of current-day America yet avowing her commitment to it at the same time. Some have interpreted her use of the word “black” in those lyrics as racist; Del Rey maintains it was not intended as a reference to race.
She is angry and confused yet never too preachy because she is upfront about her self-destructive tendencies and how she has herself to blame. At one point she calls herself a “24/7 Sylvia Plath” and says she is “a modern day woman with a weak constitution ’cause I’ve got monsters still under my bed that I could never fight off,” addressing the helplessness that today defines the national mood.
Her last album Lust for Life was a collaboration-filled extravanganza featuring the Weeknd and A$ap Rocky, among others. This album is Del Rey unfiltered and not trying to impress anyone. Her California aesthetic serves her well here, as she draws parallels between the anxiety of the present moment and the dread that permeated Laurel Canyon in the ’60s, where dreams might come true or Charles Manson’s followers might murder you while you sleep. “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst thing that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt,” she sings in “Happiness Is a Butterfly.”
Her commitment to nostalgia is appealing in an age of instant gratification. But it is her acknowledgement of her own shortcomings and her sense of hope that has always saved her from seeming too indulgent. Earlier this month, Del Rey said when she wasn’t writing music she was “just at Starbucks talking shit.” Listening to the song “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” it seems that when she’s not at Starbucks, she is quietly inciting the feeling of revolution.
