Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey

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  • Norman Fucking Rockwell!
    Norman Fucking Rockwell!
    Norman Fucking Rockwell!

    100 Best Albums Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humour that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, Norman F*****g Rockwell! is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so funny,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. "It's about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. "So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah.' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on Rockwell, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record”, she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it”, is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey's own life to make us question, again, what's real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me”, it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pin-up girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

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About Lana Del Rey

Though she’s got the name and look of a ’60s-era Hollywood star, Lana Del Rey could only have emerged in the internet era. At a time when social media was giving people the power to curate their identities and present idealised versions of themselves online, the struggling singer-songwriter once known as Lizzy Grant (born in New York in 1985) reinvented herself as Lana Del Rey for her epochal 2011 single “Video Games”. The wistful orchestral ballad (and an accompanying Super 8-style video that heralded the ubiquity of soft-focus Instagram filters) introduced an artist who delighted in breaking hearts and the internet alike, knowingly using coquettish sex-kitten cliches as a means to probe male behaviour and, by extension, the American id itself. Not only did the song prove it was possible to cultivate genuine mystique in the age of oversharing, but it also carved out a space for languid, Twin Peaks-worthy arty pop amid a Top 40 normally reserved for jacked-up pop anthems. Since then, Lana has always kept listeners guessing. Informed equally by classic-rock mythology and modern hip-hop attitude, she can casually name-drop Lou Reed in a dream-pop serenade (2014’s “Brooklyn Baby”) as effortlessly as she communes with R&B futurist The Weeknd (2017’s “Lust for Life”). More than a mere retro stylist, Lana embraces nostalgic all-American imagery only to corrupt it through subversive—sometimes profane—anti-love songs while elevating pop-cultural detritus into high art: On 2019’s Norman F*****g Rockwell!—an epic masterwork that scales the heights of Elton John’s early-'70s classics—she makes room for a cover of Sublime’s ’90s stoner-funk anthem “Doin’ Time”. In the 2020s, she’s remained effortlessly provocative at every gripping turn—with the sweeping, self-referential yearning of 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters and the sprawling, unfiltered intimacy of 2023’s Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, in which she dubbed her candid, stream-of-conscious process “meditative automatic singing”. As she continues to build the mythology of Lana Del Rey, she seems to be slowly, gradually blurring the line between her art and her Self.

HOMETOWN
United States of America
BORN
21 June 1985
GENRE
Alternative

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