Lana Del Ray's sixth album suggests music that's more organic and acoustic beyond anything she has attempted so far.
Better known as a cool, classy chanteuse, Lana Del Ray is getting seriously committed — another surprise in an extraordinary career, writes Jonathan Dean.
On August 5, in reaction to the shootings in Ohio and Texas, the singer Lana Del Rey wrote a track called Looking for America and released it the very next day. Like much of her material, it is a spectral ballad that sounds both six decades old and recorded just yesterday, as dated as a retro-filtered photograph on Instagram.
Dabbling in nostalgia is exactly what has made this new American icon so successful but a direct protest song is different terrain for her. Sonically, as usual, it could have been by Billie Holiday or Nancy Sinatra. Lyrically, though, Looking for America could only have been written this century.
"Pulled over to watch the children in the park," goes one line. "We used to only worry for them after dark." This is some upgrade on God Control, another anti-gun offering this year, by Madonna, which had the lyric, "The only gun is in my brain" and was so crass that it offended survivors of recent US atrocities.
Del Rey, though, is cool, the sort of person who uses deceptively minimal effort to end up, over time, having maximum impact. In Looking for America, her lyrics are evocative, rather than blatant and, as usual, there doesn't seem to be much about her delivery that is loud at all. This is not to say she shuns a spotlight — big pop stars with ad campaigns and meticulously created images rarely do. Rolling Stone magazine, though, recently claimed she was operating on a par with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Such comparisons make more sense now she is peering out as much as she used to look in.
Her imminent sixth album looks like being her classiest yet. It is, gloriously and amusingly, called Norman F***ing Rockwell, after the painter. Coming from a singer who has long traded on images of her country's idealised past, it might seem cheeky to cuss one of the most renowned chroniclers of just that. But this isn't a rejection of the influences that made her; it's more like a boast. A sly boast, yes, but a boast all the same.
"[The album] is about this guy who is a genius artist, but he knows it and won't shut up about it," she has said of the title track. "So often I have ended up with these creative types, and they just go on. And I'm, like, 'Yeah, yeah.' But there's merit to that, also. They are so good. And I just like the track so much, I went, 'Okay, I want the record to be called that too.'"
In other words, under one reading, Del Rey knows she is really good at what she does and is fed up with people suggesting otherwise. Detractors have plagued her since 2011, when she released Video Games, one of the decade's most beautiful, unadorned songs. Dullards have repeatedly questioned how "real" she was. All pop stars are constructs: it must be so tiring to question the authenticity of one while believing in another. Del Rey's credibility has been challenged ever since someone discovered she once released music under her real name, Lizzy Grant.
Apop star with an alias? What witchcraft is this? The argument, to rake over old ground, went that Del Rey, whose songs were serious and smart, felt "indie", whatever that means, but given that she had just signed to a major label, slightly lowered her voice and had a rich father, she could be nothing more than a conglomerate construct, like Pepsi, surely?
A lot of this nonsense was because she is a woman and people refuse to believe women can be their own creations, let alone write great songs. But Del Rey didn't help herself. "I wanted to be a band but the label I was with and the team I had around me absolutely wanted me to be a solo artist," she once said — fuel to the twitchy finger-fire of keyboard warriors. And an early performance on Saturday Night Live was, to be accurate, so atrocious that questions surfaced about whether she could actually sing.
On SNL, the New York-born California resident sounded like she came from the Midlands; other TV shows from the time suggest she was just having an off day, which we all suffer, albeit not in front of eight million viewers. Indeed, watch her headlining the biggest festivals this year, from New Orleans to Suffolk, via Poland and it is pretty clear that questioning her live gigs was part of a campaign to drag her down, one that arose thanks to a concoction of sexism, snobbery and a burgeoning online commentariat that suddenly had lots of pages to fill.
The name Lana Del Rey was chosen to riff on the actress Lana Turner, a screen icon from the 1940s. The surname is either an old Ford or a coastal region of Los Angeles. "My music is cinematic, so we wanted a name that reflected the glamour of the sound," she says. Hollywood, and film noir in particular, defined her look and sound from the outset; her fantastically lush third album, Ultraviolence, was so string-laden and sultry, it belonged on a night-time drive through the winding canyons of Beverly Hills, probably just after a murder.
But as albums four and five rolled by and reached the top of the charts, the typecasting set in. Lust for Life (2017) was heavy on random guests ranging from the Weeknd to Stevie Nicks but mostly its topics were, as always, toxic relationships and narcotics, taking in beaches and dresses, death and a random American geographical location. These sequels to her best hits were never bad but it didn't matter how much the choruses soared, the connection had worn thin.
So far, so different for Norman F***ing Rockwell (Looking for America was written after the album was finished). Its singles suggest music that's more organic and acoustic, with melodic lifts and sonic invention beyond anything Del Rey has attempted so far. Venice Bitch is nearly 10 minutes long and spends seven of those noodling like a Neil Young studio out-take from the late 1970s. Even more interesting is the album's closer, with its tattoo-worthy title, Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It. Another mini epic, it sees the singer more raw and weirder than ever, with lines like "Don't ask if I'm happy, you know that I'm not" and another about God in a coffee pot.
The best track from the album, though, is its simplest, Mariners Apartment Complex. Del Rey's most immediate song since Video Games, it once again brings to mind Neil Young but this time from Harvest, with its timeless autumnal chord changes and wistful optimism; it offers beginnings rather than her trademark endings.
Most crucially, from cheeky cover to frisky title, Norman F***ing Rockwell is the first time the singer has challenged the image that has helped and haunted her for a decade. Again, reinvention is nothing rare in pop but that does not make it less interesting when it happens. Looking for America, for instance, suggests a performer who has built up a following and is now compelled to speak out about what affects her. "I know I'm not a politician," she said, when releasing the song, "and I'm not trying to be, so excuse me for having an opinion, but …"
Everybody has a "but …" moment, when something political just bites too hard to ignore it. For Del Rey, one of the biggest-selling female artists of all time, to make a statement so publicly is more than just a hook in a month of record promotion. She also refused to play in Israel when she learned Palestinians could not attend. Such moves are bold in a divided world, where you can sell more by remaining apolitical.
She is 34 now, though, the age at which a comfortable musician should be thinking as much about legacy as chart hits. Reflecting on how she will be remembered, Brooklyn Baby, a Del Rey song from 2014, seems key. "They judge me like a picture book," she sang. "By the colours, like they forgot to read." That has been her struggle, but if these new, deep, different songs are anything to go by, the days of being judged are coming to an end.
Norman F***ing Rockwell is out now
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
OPINION: There's enough for old-school and new-school fans alike.