Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Finally an interesting pop song arrived,
Whoop-de-fucking-doo
For Valentine's Day, Lana Del Rey released her next single from her forthcoming album Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? (I know, it's a mouthful).
The song “A&W” isn't a reference to the American fast food restaurant. It stands for “American Whore”. I don't know if it's a personal thing or a collective thing but music sounds much better in 2023. “A&W” stopped me in my tracks. It's a seven-minute self-excavation in two parts. The first lives in a sun-spotted chamber of 70s piano and soft guitar with Lana's voice floating above in nostalgic mode as she recalls how far away childhood is:
I haven't done a cartwheel since I was nine
I haven't seen my mother in a long, long time
The song is about a woman who lives in an inconsequential hotel room “at the Ramada” where she invites her lover/s. It's unclear whether she's describing the encounters as sex work, but her perspective on the chorus suggests that this makes no difference to a world that has always judged her, and women for owning their own sexuality:
Call him up, come into my bedroom
Ended up we fuck on the hotel floor
It's not about having someone to love me anymorе
This is the experiеnce of being an American whore
She makes reference to Forensic Files and Teenage Diary Of A Girl, the latter is a film in which a younger woman is exploited but also freed by her relationship with her mother's boyfriend. She contrasts her former innocent self with an icon who has been oversexualized by the public, and one deserving of gossip, humiliation and – in the third verse – even acts of sexual violence.
I mean, look at me, look at the length of my hair, my face, the shape of my body
Do you really think I give a damn what I do after years of just hearing them talking?
If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it, didn’t ask for it? Didn’t testify, already fucked up my story.
While part one climaxes and Lana's voice becomes more prominent as she sings about being a ghost, the track beneath her disappears and morphs into a gothic chopped-n-screwed electronic meditation that zips back and forth like a broken spool of film, before part two introduces a hip-hop hook and a lyrical reference to 1950's R&B oldie “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop”, centering Lana's focus on a man with drug dependency. The rhythm of it is as intoxicating as the tryst she’s describing.
Love me if you live and love, you can be my light
Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high
She raps along as trapped in the cycle as Jimmy is. Jimmy is the name she's always given to a romantic interest of hers. We assume he's fictional. But for Lana, fiction or not, she's ahead of the narrative on this track.
The other week, I decided to listen to Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey's second LP. It came out in 2014. I have a relationship with that record that mostly has to do with me moving to Hollywood, and finding a sonic partner in the ambience of the record, but not the lyrics. I hadn't listened to it in a long time. And when I revisited it, it hollowed me out. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, what I hadn't registered when I was just using it as a soundtrack for sunsets over the freeways. I loved the sound of that record.
I remember the first time I heard “West Coast” as a demo in the offices of the NME – the dense drums and blues-y surfer guitar licks immediately invited me into a world I hadn't met on her first album Born To Die. I remember visiting downtown Hollywood, and seeing a giant monochrome poster of Lana over Sunset Boulevard, and she made sense to me in that moment. But I was guilty of getting lost in the artifice of Lana Del Rey, because that was how she was portrayed by the music press: superimposed, vacant, aloof. But there's so much in Ultraviolence that strikes me as alarming. Albeit the lyric from the titular song (“he hit me and it felt like a kiss”) was supposed to be a nod to Phil Spector's girl band The Crystals, the album is laced with stories about abuse dynamics. That title track is drunk in love with an abuser. On “Shades Of Blue”: “But I can't help him, I can't make him better/And I can't do nothing about his strange weather.” On “West Coast”: “I can see my baby swaying/His Parliament's on fire and his hands are up… Ooh baby, ooh baby, I'm in love.” When she talks about being the mistress to a drug-addicted bad boy on “Sad Girl” or “Pretty When You Cry”, it was considered “humorous” at the time. But with sober ears, there are unanswered questions. Mainly: while the album had a concept, why was this the concept?
The reviews came in and were positive but they didn't answer that question, instead focusing on how “coquettish” and sexual her voice was. The Guardian, Clash, Pitchfork, The Independent, Entertainment Weekly, Spin… all had one thing in common. All of the critics there who wrote about Lana Del Rey were men. During the early 2010s, when I was embarking on a career as a music journalist, this was a battle that every single young female in the industry wielded: how to be a serious thinker about music, serious enough to usurp the dinosaurs who had been writing women songwriters as one-dimensional characters for an eternity. There's no room to contextualize the art of women if men are doing all the talking. And at that point they were. And at that point, the mystery around Lana Del Rey was that not a single person with a similar perspective to her was allowed to dissect her output. So Lana Del Rey was just an object of male desire, who was good at rhyming “national anthem” with “standing ovation”, etc, and who reminded them of the 1950s film stars they never saw fully into either. Dan Auerbach, who produced this album, and was one half of the Black Keys, was only the previous year contending with allegations of domestic abuse by his former partner. It's astounding to me now to think that nobody commented on the creative pairing for this album. But of course, pre-Me Too, men wouldn't write about that. The idea of power dynamics was still under the carpet. And what was to gain from bringing up awkward context? No solidarity badge there.
Ultraviolence is an album featuring a protagonist who has lost most of her power at the whim of junkie Hollywood heart throbs who abuse women they claim to love. And for Lana the writer, unfortunately she too often satisfies the typecast here and isn't able to gain footing from a perspective of being on the other end. She wasn't ahead of the narrative at that time. In fact, she was offering up a glamorized view of pain for men to salivate over. The lyrics, however, are too nuanced to not be written from a place of experience. I gasped re-reading this paragraph from the Pitchfork review:
These songs don’t ask you to respond in any particular way; they evoke heartbreak one moment and they’re ridiculous the next, and those qualities don’t cancel each other out. It’s entertainment, camp, and the ambiguity of it all, nurtured by the cool distance of Lana Del Rey’s image, is a huge part of the music’s appeal. Those who really hate what she’s about—and there are a lot of these people—look for something in music that she has no interest in providing. To enjoy what she does, you have to give yourself over to her media-saturated fantasy and put the everyday on hold, and you also have to lay aside pop radio’s typically sunny affirmations.
It's perplexing. Why the assumption that these songs don't demand a reaction? That Lana Del Rey didn't mean something by what she was creating? That seems more “ridiculous” to me. What was once interpreted as “cool distance” could now be understood as a level of necessary dissociation, or a matter-of-fact self-admission. But really the clincher is this idea that Lana was for escaping, so there was no point in weighing yourself down with the context of her inspiration.
I had a lot of misplaced anger at Lana Del Rey for a long time as a young writer. But I wasn't to be mad at her. I was to be mad at the way she was being written about. I remember at a world-renowned magazine I formerly worked at, she was to feature on the cover. It might have been one of her first ever international magazine covers, and she was shot in bridal wear with a tiara on her head and some fake blood oozing from her crown. The mooted coverline was something about how Lana was the artist of the moment “but why is she hurting?” I remember being incapable of explaining my gut reaction to that, which was one of disgust, and thankfully it didn’t wind up being the coverline. I was the only female in that office, and I wasn't interested in men rubbing their knees over the damsel in distress who needed them to save her from this enigma of pain, shame and trauma. At the time, I think the best retort I could come up with was: Why can't you just celebrate her success?
Looking at the men who wrote about this record. Lana Del Rey has always been characterized by the music press as some sort of mystery. Where does the artifice end and the human begin? What is real and what is fantasy? In recent years, it's been satisfying to see critics taking her output more seriously, and by that I mean treating her as a human being who emotes and has authentic experiences. Granted, her songwriting has evolved, and Norman Fucking Rockwell was the moment an omnipresent popstar became an American songwriter with a radical perspective. In 2011, nobody would have anticipated that the glamorous puzzle behind viral hit “Video Games” would be one of America's most interesting lyricists and performers. But she endured, and when I hear “A&W”, I hear an artist who is finally taking to task the cost of that endurance.
It's not about having someone to love me anymorе
This is the experiеnce of being an American whore
I hear it over and again, and I wonder: does Lana mean it's futile searching for public validation as a woman?
I'm invisible, look how you hold me.
I'm invisible. I'm invisible.
I'm a ghost now, look how you hold me.
In She Said; the book by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey (the two New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal), they set out a scene in which women had never held more power in modern society than in the months before the scandal broke. Across the board in medicine, science, politics, the arts, and business, women were at the top of the ladder. But their realities were as hidden from view as they'd ever been. And as the volume and scale of those stories made itself known, there was no consensus on how to help women feel more seen, more protected, more understood. There may be no change for the “American Whore” but there's something urgent and validating about hearing Lana Del Rey tell her public that her fame has also at times been her erasure. I’m glad she kept writing it.
Great analysis. I'm consistently disappointed by reporters missing the mark when writing about Lana Del Rey. Sure, it takes a certain level of intelligence, depth, and self reflection to understand her. But I believe what critics are really missing is her ability to express all forms of herself – the manic side, the love sick, the addict, the artist, and the woman getting coffee at the gas station in sweats. What people are missing is that you can be "all the things" and it doesn't mean you are lying to the public.
I'm also always blown away by the criticism she gets for simply having a stage name, when I've never seen a man get the same hate.
Overall, LDR is a freaking lyrical genius who speaks to the darkest depths of the soul – and frankly, many people cannot handle the darkness.
I honestly pay little attention to “music reviews”.
Either the music speaks to me or it doesn’t . Not so much the lyrics but rather the emotion and how voice and instruments intermingle in a way that captures my imagination . I took a listen to a sample of Lana , although not my “style” of music (more of a blues, garage band , boogie guy) I was very intrigued . Will give it a listen later . Thx for the post .