When women’s empowerment has gone fully mainstream, seemed alternatelyĭisgusted and enthralled. To a posture of submission that critics and other listeners, in an age Particularly on her first two albums, Del Rey seemed so fully committed Life,” her new album, a certain set of idols-money, beauty, violence, This was a dreamy, degraded way of looking at things until “Lust for To find a Del Rey song that doesn’t mention fireworks, cherries,ĭiamonds, Hollywood, guns, roses, or driving around and getting high. Was performing under her given name, Lizzy Grant, you’d be hard-pressed “Paradise.” Including the large cache of demos from the period when she “My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola / My eyesĪre wide like cherry pies,” she sings on “Cola,” from her 2012 EP Throughout the last six years, Del Rey has remained fixated almostĮxclusively on love and America, and her favored references touch onīoth things simultaneously. The national anthem is as good a metaphor as any for the blind, If Del Rey’s entire project is an experiment inĪll-encompassing narrative obedience, this song is proof of concept to Pleads on the chorus, repeating the line as the chords shift to sudden, Neck.” Del Rey’s two governing aesthetics, love and country, collapse VisuallyĪnd lyrically, the imagery is simple: rich men and beautiful women įreedom through submission-“wind in my hair / hand on the back of my Romance: golden late afternoon on Chappaquiddick champagne andĭiamonds blue hydrangeas, red dresses, endless green lawns. It is a hyper-specific distillation of American Production in which Del Rey plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy

That video was leaked in June, 2012, shortly before the release of the Idea that, as Berger wrote, women are “born, within an allotted andĬonfined space, into the keeping of men.” She has fully allied her performance with the Will do very well / I can tell, I can tell / Keep me safe, in his bell Pleasure of her own image as viewed by an as-yet-imaginary audience. She’s isolated-she has the look of someone who’s locked herself inĪ hotel room-and she wears that expression again, luxuriating in the Singing for the camera between clips of Elvis, fireworks, and Air Force video thatĪccompanies it, Del Rey dances in a dress that looks like a cupcake, Sounds like the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” The demo is rougher, with a crunchy,

TheĪlbum cut is a sweeping, kitschy, string-section fantasia its opening Song that appeared on her début album, “ Born to Die,” from 2012. My favorite Del Rey song is the demo version of “National Anthem,” a As tends to happen, she was both rewarded Those images but, like them, she was “offering up her femininity as the She controlled the process, unlike the women in Him.” It is an expression that Del Rey wears as she stares at the camera To the man whom she imagines looking at her-although she doesn’t know “It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm “Is not the expression remarkably similar in each case?” heĪsks. “La Grande Odalisque” and a photo from a nineteen-sixties girlie Images for comparison: the 1814 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting Once artificial and authentic to the world we live in. Women, Berger argued, live in a state of self-consciousness that is at Social media would lend a new dimension to his thesis, Berger wrote thatĪ woman’s “own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense ofīeing appreciated as herself by another”-namely, by a male viewer. The image she was creating that, to many, she inevitably seemed fake.īut artifice is not the same thing as dishonesty. “gangster Nancy Sinatra,” as she herself put it. She was a moll, a starlet, a Stepford wife-a Murmurs her music into the front-facing camera of her phone.) She pouted as she sang, wearing lace and gold and crosses, looking likeĪ self-composed collage.

music videos that made her famous,ĭel Rey intercut Webcam clips of herself with archival footage ofĪmerican iconography: palm trees, Vegas neon, roses blooming, police, In “ Blue Jeans” and “ Video Games,” the D.I.Y. Rendered through a narrow set of intertwined cultural tropes. Seeing,” Berger wrote that a woman is “almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Since she entered the pop ecosystem, in 2011,ĭel Rey’s career has been defined by extravagant self-consciousness, Lana Del Rey always makes me think about John Berger, the writer andĬritic who died this past January, at the age of ninety.

Lana del rey paparazzi photo