After a brief false start to her career under her given name of Lizzy Grant, the pop chanteuse Lana Del Rey emerged fully formed with her 2012 debut Born to Die. Her music — self-consciously retro, Xanax-glazed, minor-key balladry laden with Twitter-ready punchlines — has not changed much since then. But the critical consensus around its artistic and cultural merit has profoundly, and with it, our conception of what it takes to be a true pop star.
The year Born to Die was released, Pitchfork, at a crossroads between its indie roots and its current status as the millennial equivalent of 1990s-era Rolling Stone, lauded on its year-end list art-damaged freaks such as Swans and Death Grips, fussy indie traditionalists Grizzly Bear and Tame Impala, and the 1990s veteran Fiona Apple alongside cusp-of-mega-stardom performers Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean.
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Lana, as she is now most frequently, mononymically referred to, was nowhere to be found. Maybe it was her decidedly un-indie origins, as a child of Grey Group yuppies who helped launch her career. Or maybe it was the self-consciously sophomoric lyrics of her breakout single “Video Games” (“Heaven is a place on earth with you, tell me all the things you wanna do / I heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?”). Or it could have been a catastrophic Saturday Night Live performance that nearly killed her career in the cradle and sent the era-defining music blog Hipster Runoff into an infamous existential tailspin.
“The indie blogosphere is over the hill. Our opinions are old, tired, uninspired,” Carles, the pseudonymous author of Hipster Runoff, wrote, capping a dayslong Lana-inspired meltdown. “To music and indie purists, Lizzy Grant is the AntiChrist. To indie modernists and loveslaves of internet content, Lana Del Rey is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
The modernists won, and Lana had the last laugh: Six Grammy nominations, multiple platinum and gold albums, the ritual genuflection of younger stars such as Billie Eilish, and, yes, a full-armed critical bear hug, with her 2019 record Norman Fucking Rockwell! named Pitchfork’s album of the year. Her new record, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, released March 24, is poised to continue that dominance after landing to widespread acclaim as, again in that website’s words, “a sweeping, sterling, often confounding work of self-mythology and psychoamericana.”
Need a cigarette? Lana’s 180-degree turnabout from a punchline to an institution is one of the most remarkable cultural stories of the past decade, especially considering how relatively static her aesthetic and musical style have remained. Lana has definitively answered the question her fellow immaculately coiffed, gloomy, torch-singing icon Steven Patrick Morrissey once posed: “Has the world changed, or have I changed?” No doubt, it’s the world.
Speaking of the world, Lana’s stubbornly consistent view of it is out of a big convertible on a long drive through an imagined Americana seen through a digital sepia tone filter (and invariably with a guy named “Jimmy,” “Joe,” or “John”). We get the “Roadrunner Cafe”; “Some friends of mine down in Florence, Alabama”; “Marathons in Long Beach by the sea.” And, of course, the record’s titular tunnel, a shuttered pedestrian walkway under said beach.
Opening track “The Grants” is a weepy, maximalist tribute to a departed uncle and “my grandmother’s last smile” filtered through John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” As she asked in a recent Rolling Stone interview, “Would it probably, plausibly, get to the point where [the music] became a body of work that made me a vessel that was sequestered to the point where only family would have access to the metaphorical tunnel?” (If you torture a metaphor long enough, it’ll confess to anything.)
Placing her family front and center here is a nasty, clever bait-and-switch from one of the best in the business. Hate me for my provocations (and my success), you big meanie — at the end of the day, don’t I just want what everyone else does, to snuggle in the “metaphorical tunnel” with meemaw and peepaw? And if the lyrics don’t seem particularly deep, couldn’t they be so inscrutably personal as to obscure meaning to anyone outside my inner circle (where you, parasocially, long to be?)
On the other hand, Lana’s knack for said provocations is one of the most amusing and effective tools in her arsenal as a pop star. There were her early, garbled comments on feminism when she declared herself “more interested in … SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.” She cryptically posted and deleted a video of looters during the 2020 George Floyd protests. She dated — gasp — an officer. (A personal favorite: She responded to a particularly tendentious criticism of a recent album cover by saying she was “not the one storming the capital.”)
The overall effect has been to keep her in the headlines while coming up just short of cancellation. On Tunnel, her weapon of choice as such is a nearly five-minute “Judah Smith Interlude,” featuring a sermon from the Seattle-based celebrity megachurch pastor. A writer for the Daily Beast attempted to defend her against criticism from gay fans galled by her association with the socially conservative Smith: “Examined against [previous track] ‘A&W,’ ‘Judah Smith Interlude’ plays as wholly ironic,” the author writes. “Del Rey is exactly the type of person who would attend a celebrity-studded mega-church, both for a cleansing of the soul and to lambaste its intrinsic flamboyance with her friends.”
Uh-huh.
Lana’s greatest skill as a pop star might be to inspire this level of Herculean projection-slash-wishcasting from her defensive liberal boosters. Its apotheosis is the rave Pitchfork review of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! — There’s a swear word in the old-timey Americana, get it? — that declared her “one of America’s greatest living songwriters.”
“Whatever it was that brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen together half a century ago, that middle ground is in the solemn mood, hollowed space, and spiritual fortitude of” the album’s closing track, wrote Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly, with zero trace of irony or awareness of the need for an editor. She invokes Eve Babitz, Bob Dylan, and Walt Whitman. Listing off a few couplets of Lana’s refrigerator poetry, she declares that “in the vacant spaces between [Lana’s] dark phrases is the unassailable fact that people bury their pasts in order to endure them.” The operant phrase here is vacant spaces.
Since the beginning of her career, Lana has deployed the same basic lyrical style: Pithy schoolyard rhymes littered with topical references contrasted within a couplet with gloomy nostalgia or yearning. The song “A&W” contains a signal example that interpolates Nelly’s “Country Grammar,” more or less millennials’ equivalent of “Dancing In the Streets”: “Jimmy, Jimmy, cocoa puff, Jimmy, get me high / Love me if you love or not, you can be my light / Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high … Your mom called, I told her, you’re f***in’ up big time.”
It’s catchy! But the sweeping political and cultural import of the Lana songbook has been conjured entirely by critics who are desperate to raise a transgressive Camille-Paglian world-spirit from adolescent composition-book poetry.
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Wherein lies Lana’s victory. She conquered the pop world by waiting savvily for it to come to her. She correctly sussed that the compositional element of music itself could more or less be jettisoned as long as the correct signifiers are in place and got there before damn near everybody else. You don’t have to enjoy it, or even listen to it — in fact, you hardly have to listen to it to enjoy it. But to credit Lana’s modernity by invoking a meme: You do, in fact, “gotta hand it to her.”
Once seen as a glib poseur among indie-world artistes, Lana Del Rey is now second only to Taylor Swift as the avatar of revisionary-feminist pop criticism. Her lyrics were always written to be aggregated, to have Very Deep Thoughts projected onto their Netflix-and-barbiturates stream of consciousness. The dolorous, forgettable, repetitive music itself is secondary to her mastery of the altar at which we all now worship: that of the vibe. The content, you could say, is the point.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
