Most recently, she put out Looking for America, in response to this summer’s mass shootings – a stark contrast to the high old time her solipsistic, dissolute songs were previously enjoying. Suddenly, in 2017, she engaged with the world as it was, endorsing Wiccan moves to place a binding spell on the then new president. Del Rey has drawn on old Hollywood, summer time and a half-debutante, half-gangster’s moll alter ego. Rockwell specialised in highly stylised scenes from American 20th-century life, reflecting myths back to an adoring public before later becoming more politically aware. Rarely has the offer of a party, with “your favourite alcohol off the top shelf”, seemed so unenticing, compared with everything else that’s going on here.įirst, there are the Rockwell parallels Del Rey is clearly angling for, despite the fact that the title track actually concerns a “self-loving” and “resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all”, rather than Rockwell himself. What’s odd, however, is that while California is technically one of the strongest songs (there are actual beats it’s about something tangible) it’s also one of the least interesting tracks on this unorthodox, involving album, named after a devotee of lived American iconography, the 20th-century illustrator Norman Rockwell. “Crazy love,” muses Del Rey, audibly shaking her head at the memory, yet nursing some unspecified guilt. Having often set her tunes in specific locales – Brooklyn Baby, West Coast and Venice Bitch are just three previous stops on the open-top Del Rey bus tour – it comes as little surprise that at the heart of Norman Fucking Rockwell, the fifth of her acknowledged studio albums, Del Rey should be throwing a party for some hot guy, if he’s ever in California again.
I t was probably inevitable that Lana Del Rey would one day write a song called California.
0 kommentar(er)
