Swan Song: On Lana Del Rey, Los Angeles, and The End of the World
Words: Jordan Passauer
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Los Angeles is a paradoxical place. Edenic idealisation notwithstanding, it’s a city engineered against its own environment. It is eternally engaged in elemental warfare, doggedly weathering constant physical upheaval and insisting on predator apologism. Coyotes roam college campuses and mountain lions haunt the foothills.
The once unruly L.A. river is encased with concrete to keep it from devastating its surroundings. Pollution haze casts the city in surreal, soft light and poisons you slowly. Simultaneously, Hollywood legend exists in stark contrast with the despair and disparity the city is beset with. Los Angeles remains self-enchanted all the same, intoxicated on itself.
Thom Andersen, in his essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, describes the metropolis as the place ‘where the relation between reality and representation gets muddled’. Crosshatching the city’s spinal thoroughfares in all of their limitless, sprawling horizontality after a lifetime of viewing L.A. transfigured through the lens of a camera, it feels at once foreign and familiar, concrete and illusory. Every second street corner has been committed to celluloid, and yet it is constantly misremembered and misunderstood.
Who better embodies this city of contradictions than Lana Del Rey?
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Los Angeles epitomises that romantic American notion of self-invention; the tendency to gloss over history, the desire to be in an ever-changing state of experimentation. L.A. is where a person goes to restart, rebrand, remake themselves; a natural habitat for an elusive chanteuse who is herself a transplant, and has been endlessly criticised for being ‘manufactured’, for being vacant beneath the artifice of her facade.
Lana Del Rey, as co-created by Elizabeth Woolridge Grant and the American subconscious, seamlessly merges memoir and myth. She has been a femme fatale, a diner girl, a starlet, a high school beauty queen, a lovesick side chick, a biker babe, an addict and an artist. She inhabits all these archetypes purposefully, elucidating them and moving through them.
She’s a postmodern pastiche artist, her sound fashioned from a myriad of musical and literary influences, including Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Sylvia Plath, and T.S. Eliot. She has the names of Nabokov and Whitman tattooed on her forearm, and for years inscribed her social media biographies with a line from the latter’s poetry: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large. I contain multitudes.”
“Lana Del Rey, as co-created by Elizabeth Woolridge Grant and the American subconscious, seamlessly merges memoir and myth.”
It’s a quote that perfectly encapsulates Del Rey’s patchwork nature, from the heteroglossia of her musical catalogue and aesthetic decisions, to her incoherent politics, noncommittal religiosity and flimsy feminism. Her enigmatic indecipherability enthrals some and incenses others; she was subject to a deluge of incredulous think-pieces in the nascence of her stardom, by critics who deemed the world-building and narrative art of her discography to be deceptive and dishonest.
With her obscure origin, ambiguous accent and shape-shifting mystery, she was the antithesis of the authenticity-obsessed 2010s pop landscape, which made for a rocky reception after “Video Games” and the accompanying home-made music video went viral. The internet tasked itself with unearthing her past and exposing her ‘true’ story, where she really came from; a boring, banal question that is of little consequence in the grand scheme of the Lana Del Rey canon.
She has long employed accent and affectation as a palette to draw from, the sounds of people and places that inspire her seeping into her voice. Her vocals are as much vessels of meaning as her lyrics. In her earlier albums, a higher pitch often signifies insincerity, performance. Take “Off to the Races”; within a singular song her voice oscillates conspiratorially between a shrill, unnervingly girlish shriek and a low, dark, syrupy drawl, letting the listener in on her secret, showing her hand.
At various points in her career, she sounds completely different. She is partial to a Transatlantic inflection, often in the same breath that she lifts hip hop slang. She sang about waitressing and trailer park love with a Southern accent in the 2000s, under sobriquets such as May Jailer, Lizzy Grant, and Lana Del Ray with an A. She swapped out a vowel and precipitously dropped the Southern drawl in favour of a pronounced New York accent around 2010, now concerned with gangsters and Rikers Island; it’s audible throughout the Born to Die and Ultraviolence albums (and when he calls, he calls for me, not for you).
Del Rey also has a tendency to slip into a Miami-Latina accent that has endured into this decade, especially when she performs in Latin America. In “West Coast”, she sings: He’s crazy y cubano como yo, la-la (He’s crazy and Cuban like me). Cuban she is not. Latino fans drily, diligently defend her chameleon accent, her appropriative stage name with its rich, Spanish syllables, and her self-identification as Latina: “she’s literally my tía, her name is Lanita,” they say. This nickname, tongue-in-cheek as it is, is an affectionate one, and Del Rey bears it with pride, singing it into her latest record, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd: “That’s why they call me Lanita, when I get down, I’m bonita.” When she played to the biggest audience of her career this August in Mexico City, the crowd chanted “¡Lana, hermana, ya eres Mexicana!”
This affinity for Latino culture coexists uneasily with her veneration of white America’s mythology. All the stylised Americana of her juvenilia was not a solely aesthetic choice, and beneath all that blue-jean, all-American symbolism, her patriotism is undeniable. She “believe[s] in the country America used to be”, per the “Ride” monologue, as only a white woman could. The bygone era she romanticises was of course rife with white nationalism and division, but it took Trump’s political regime to leave Del Rey disillusioned, leading her to discard the American flag as a backdrop to her performances. “Is this the end of an era / Is this the end of America?” she wonders aloud on the tail end of 2017’s Lust for Life. In 2019, she released “Looking for America”, a solemn, sincere lamentation of her own ‘version of America’ in the wake of two consecutive mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, “one without the gun, where the flag can freely fly”
Del Rey loves America, that much is clear. She is enamoured with American lives, with the unadulterated beauty of open roads and small-town diners. But it’s in Southern California that she finds her favourite muse, even as her gaze turns eastward, meandering through flyover states on 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club.
Lana Del Rey and Los Angeles bear many resemblances: they’re both retrospective and referential, preoccupied with the past, and yet they’re both regarded as futuristic icons in our cultural imagination; Lana as the trailblazing genre-definer, L.A as the city that eschews convention in favour of a unique urban trajectory, with its lack of a centre and the haphazard chaos of its warring ecologies.
Del Rey’s Los Angeles is concerned with the glamorous and the grotesque, with love and with heartbreak, with fame and with tragedy. From the westside-set Paradise EP and the California cool of Ultraviolence, to the Old Hollywood allure of Honeymoon and the tense apprehension of an L.A. summer she captures so perfectly on Lust for Life, her catalogue has become an essential entry in the greater California songbook upon which she modelled her own sound.
It’s 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her undeniable magnum opus, that solidifies Del Rey as a lady of the Canyon in her own right, and crystallizes her vision of California as a microcosm of a doomed nation. The evocative album cover art depicts the California coastline ablaze in the background, an omen echoed in “The Greatest”, the prescient centrepiece to NFR!, an elegy for America. “L.A. is in flames, it's getting hot…,” she sings. “If this is it, I'm signing off…”.
“The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself,” wrote Joan Didion in “Los Angeles Notebook”. There’s a century of material to prove it, from the vast canon of California literature that has long sentenced L.A. to a sudden, fiery demise, to Hollywood’s pyromaniacal penchant for setting itself alight, gleefully incinerating the iconic Hollywood sign Del Rey sings about scaling on Lust For Life’s title track in countless films.
Perhaps it is the pervasive feeling of finality that permeates Southern California Del Rey is so taken with, the inherent risk of living in a place that is plagued by cataclysmic natural disasters. The wildfires, the earthquakes, and the unforgiving drought all serve as reminders of the fragility of life in Los Angeles, prompting its inhabitants to ponder their own mortality perhaps more profoundly than the average person. It’s unsurprising that Del Rey, an artist who named her debut album Born to Die and was once derided as a provocateur with a death wish, finds L.A so captivating.
It’s hard not to think of the end of the world faced with the beauty and brutality of this modern Babylon. There’s an apocalyptic undercurrent to L.A. life, a sense that the city is teetering on the brink of annihilation; a hedonistic lotus land on a precarious fault line is such a natural target for the wrath of God. Surveying the desperation in all its forms, from the social prostitution of Beverly Hills bon vivants, to the volatility and violence of the downtown area, it seems abundantly clear that all the excess and extremity cannot be sustainable. Del Rey knows that it isn’t. “The culture is lit, and if this is it, I had a ball”, she sings with insouciant fatalism, resigned to the end she knows is inevitable. She isn’t looking to escape. She’ll be at home in Los Angeles when it fulfils its own eschatological prophecy, among the first to go.