Despite the various directives from our healthcare commissars, pop sensation Lana Del Rey spent the past year traveling. And unlike those commissars, she actually likes what most of this country offers.
Her new album, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, is a spiritual successor to 2019’s Norman F—ing Rockwell!, on which Del Rey lamented the decline of her adopted state, California, and the millions of men there seemingly incapable of appreciating her boundless affection. If the 19th-century refrain was “Go West, young man,” ours may turn out to be “Rent a U-Haul before it’s too late.”
Wherever Del Rey goes, heartbreak follows. In “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” she begs her Christian lover to “sing me like a Bible hymn” and tells him, “We should move back to Arkansas.” She’s happy to accommodate his taste for cheap gin if it means an escape from Los Angeles’s smog and botox. (The Tulsa Jesus Freak is likely Sean Larkin, a former police officer who hosted Live PD, a COPS rip-off yanked from the air in the wake of George Floyd’s death last summer.)
Won’t any man let Lana love him like a woman and hold him like a baby? That question, as in Del Rey’s past albums, often drives her to substance abuse or to mythologize amateur boxers and mysterious men in dive bars. Sure, these guys aren’t the most reliable, but at least they’re men. Good luck finding those in coastal California.
It’s a refrain we’ve heard from Del Rey countless times, and yes, it can be a bit exhausting. She’s an “old soul” in the age of Instagram and butt implants, a cute sentiment that sometimes grows tired when you consider you’re listening to the boy problems of a celebrity. If she were a man, she’d be your friend who spends too much money on shoes, holds the door open for every woman he sees, and then complains about how no one on Tinder appreciates nice guys anymore.
But Del Rey is wise enough to recognize that the country’s celebrity culture drives all of us mad, not just those who can cut the line at trendy nightclubs. And that’s where she’s most relatable. Her journey out of Los Angeles is an acknowledgment that the regular folk, with their bibles and bottom-shelf liquor, may be on to something. Del Rey’s California, with its never-ending forest fires, smog, and narcissism, appears to be the subject of divine wrath.
The album’s opening track, the delicate piano ballad “White Dress,” brings the listener back to Del Rey’s time as a waitress in Long Island, when she felt more honest and free. In her telling, being a sex symbol in a small-town diner is a lot more liberating than having your photo on the cover of Rolling Stone, something young women should think about before creating an OnlyFans account.
There’s an impulse among some of Del Rey’s fans and critics to project their own social values onto her and her work. These efforts usually end up only half-right. Yes, her belief in the complementary nature of the two sexes is central to understanding her romantic woes. Yes, much of her work is an implicit rejection of the “girl boss” attitude of contemporary feminism.
A traditional woman or prude, however, Del Rey is not. She embraces her sexuality in a way that’s more tasteful than Cardi B but would still make a midcentury nun faint. For Lana, sex is power. She just acknowledges that men have power, too.
As much as she coos about wanting to be left alone, Del Rey seemingly revels in the controversy she brings. The album title alone, Chemtrails over the Country Club, is a not-so-subtle wink to the kind of conspiracy theorists our government has deemed an existential threat to the republic. During one of her first promotional interviews for the album, she expressed sympathy for those who participated in the Capitol riot.
“I know this is a long answer, but I think this is really the most important thing I’ll say in this interview. I think, for the people who stormed the Capitol, it’s disassociated rage,” she told the BBC, before saying she didn’t even think then-President Donald Trump meant to incite violence. “They want to wild out somewhere, and it’s like, we don’t know how to find a way to be wild in our world, and at the same time, the world is so wild.”
The disavowals from music critics were swift, and although Del Rey offered a milquetoast clarification of her comments, her album still shot up to No. 1 on the charts. It’s one worth listening to — for its flashes of beauty, of course, but also because Del Rey is one of the few remaining artists who doesn’t hate half the country. Her love for America is the source of much of her pain, but luckily for us, it makes for great music, too.
Joseph Simonson is a Washington Examiner political reporter.
