I break a lot of rules for Lana Del Rey. One rule is that I should never try and mimic the eye makeup of someone with such differently shaped eyes to me. Another is my Do Not Stan rule, which is an easy one to stick to. I’m usually quite rigid on this: celebrities do not care if you live or die, and if you’ve reached adulthood and buy their self-serious essay collections or go out of your way to defend them from criticism, or come up with mad reasons for why it’s out of deep respect for the history of feminism and queer culture that they’re being paid millions to perform in a country where you can buy yourself a maid, then you are a rube, a fool, a mark.
Having said that. If, like me, you’re an avowed Lana celebrant, then the last week will have been a special time for you. Lana week is a lunar (Lanar) festival, so takes place at different times, and this year it fell at the end of March. Her worshippers observe a strict set of rituals for Lana week, and I can’t pretend they’re not annoying and labour-intensive. We make our hair huge and crack the spine of a fresh notebook just before dawn on the first day; we wear rosey-nude lipstick and red converse, and we wonder if we would look creepy with ribbons in our hair; we tilt our heads and let one single glamorous teardrop on the special copy of Eve’s Hollywood that we only use for Lana week. We’re not stans, no we’re not, we just want to know what the fuck it was that you just said about her. What’s your email address? We just want to talk. It is spring 2023 and the Lana Del Rey defence league has ridden into town.
For someone so associated with lassitude and depression, Lana is fairly prolific – eight records in the decade or so since I first heard “Video Games” and was knocked out by the swoony, abject under-wateriness of it. She provokes a kind of synaesthesia in her biggest fans; the opening sigh on “Lust for Life” can put you in a car speeding through a Hollywood dawn, “Summertime Sadness” smells of night-blooming jasmine, you sniff the autumn woodsmoke in the amber morning while “Venice Bitch” plays in the background. “Brooklyn Baby” perches on the firescape burning its lungs. It’s hard to account for the specific effect she has on her worshippers, or the charisma that slips off her like oil, but it’s not far off a spell or one of those homemade 1940s ways of getting high, whisky in codeine cough syrup. When Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard came out last week, I sent a message as soon as I’d finished listening to it to a friend, who replied “Phoebe, this has no paragraphs”. Alright! So let’s talk about paragraphs. My boyfriend has a theory that Lana is the musical John Updike, and every album she makes is supposed to be functionally a multimedia novel that describes a period in American life, with herself as either the narrating protagonist or the third person observer. Of course she carries on making music long after Updike died and stopped trying to capture it (or if he does continue, this is only known to other ghosts) – Lana has evolved past the need for Updike. I’m very taken with this theory, but I would adjust it slightly to each album corresponding to different American presidencies. Ultraviolence is the Reagan/Bush Senior interregnum; Honeymoon is the first holiday after the war (so Truman, but only for one year). Lust for Life is early-Kennedy, Born to Die late-. And so on. To be clear, this is a figment America, America on the page, not on the screen or other apparatuses of soft power. There’s no interest in any idea of natural hierarchies, or really even conventional or traditional roles, which to me underlines the absurdity of (approving) claims that she makes right-wing art, or the (disapproving) and even more ridiculous idea that she makes fascist art. There is no artificial one note innocence here, no fictionalising of a mythical past to lay the grounds for a murderously wholesome future and the femininity of the music is nothing to do with reproductive labour. Lana records are, more or less, about love and a bit about partying. Sometimes the love is miserable and abject, but it’s always there embodied, the object of it being more or less secondarily. It’s a nameless “boyfriend” that she sings to and about, that she suffers and sublimates for; sometimes she is the boyfriend and she sings to herself.
A little bit ago, I had an important deadline and was getting up at the monk’s hour daily in order to get it done. On the deadline day, my boyfriend charged out to the shops to get me two bags of sweets, and then tracked down Lana’s cover issue of Rolling Stone, and there she was, blooming beautifully and pinkly out of the page, a woman made of ink and lipstick. She’s bigger than she used to be, something which I assume is contiguous with her being in recovery, and I love how large and gorgeous it makes her look, herself but scaled up. It makes her goddess-like, statue-like, ship’s prow-like, and it’s so nice to see it when I’m also having to read breathless accounts of people getting high-status thin on a diabetes medication that’s made rats in lab tests flower with tumours. Not this, I thought, when I read that piece, not this again. I hope she gets bigger and bigger, and I hope she is always swooning and smirking over a piano. The other day I saw a post that was something like “they should invent a Lana Del Rey for men”, but really why should they? She has already invented herself.