FEATURE:
Doin’ Time
Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! at Five
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PERHAPS the finest album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Melodie McDaniel/Billboard
from Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell! was released on 30th August, 2019. I wanted to mark its upcoming fifth anniversary. Ranked as one of the best albums of 2019 by multiple publications and websites, Del Rey’s sixth studio album reached the top spot in the U.K. and U.S. Recorded at a wide range of studio around the U.S. (mainly Los Angeles) – and a couple in the U.K. -. Del Rey’s masterpiece scored wide acclaim from critics. Five singles were released from the album: Mariners Apartment Complex, Venice Bitch, Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It, Doin' Time, and The Greatest. Next month, Lana Del Rey releases her tenth studio album, Lasso. It is interesting thinking about the period after Norman Fucking Rockwell! was released. After the release of her sixth studio album, things took a huge turn for Del Rey:
“During a new interview, Del Rey was asked about where she currently stands from a creative perspective, to which she responded: “The music took a huge turn from Norman, and it’s been going down that path aggressively. I’m going to continue going where I feel the only next stop is, but I think it’ll be in an Americana vein.”
“The hard thing, in your personal life or in public, is that you can lose the idea that passion should be your true North. And, instead, safety should be. That’s the biggest pitfall. Being scared into making safe choices. Having a little bit of a cool-off period from the heat that might have been in a bad way, I got to reevaluate things. When there’s a little space, you get to choose. Then things get good,” she added to The Hollywood Reporter”.
In 2021, Lana Del Rey released two incredible acclaimed albums: Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters. Whereas Norman Fucking Rockwell!, in terms of sound, was Soft/Psych-Rock with some piano ballads, Chemtrails Over the Country Club is more of a Folk, Country Folk, and Americana record. It was clear Del Rey moved consciously in a different direction after Norman Fucking Rockwell! Not in a bad way. I will wrap up after getting to some reviews. This is what NME wrote in their five-star review of one of the most celebrated albums of 2019:
“In Lana Del Rey’s Twitter bio you’ll find a quote from Walt Whitman’s 1892 poem Song Of Myself. It’s an unsurprising move for someone who’s spent much of the last decade carving out her niche as a 21st-century pop poet documenting, much like Whitman did, her own perspective of America.
The quote itself – “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes” – feels like an apt one for this point in Del Rey’s career. Since she broke through with ‘Video Games’ in 2011, she’s been pegged as music’s resident “sad girl”. In 2017, she challenged that label as she beamed at the world from the sleeve of her fifth album ‘Lust For Life’. The narrative was that she was happy now but, as Whitman himself alluded, life doesn’t have a single focus and no one is consistently one thing through it all
On ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’, Del Rey is many contradicting things. She is hopelessly in love and resigned to misery, an emotional crutch and a “fucking mess”, willing to forgive the men in her life and disappointed in those who orbit in the same circles as her. It’s an album of emotional ups and downs but one that feels, perhaps thanks to her past habit of filtering things through a world of old Hollywood glamour and soft-focus romanticism, like her realest one yet.
There’s nothing soft or romantic about this record’s opening lines. “Goddamn manchild/You fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’,” she sings on the title track, gentle piano rolling beneath her. As she continues, she paints a fuller picture of the target of her words – a fun and wild “self-loathing poet” who blames his inadequate words on the news. As with many of the men in Del Rey’s songs, she openly acknowledges his flaws with a wicked sense of humour, but seems OK to stick it out with him. “Why wait for the best when I could have you?” she asks at one point, as if finding someone better who doesn’t make her feel blue isn’t a realistic option.
On ‘Love Song’, a gorgeous track that drifts on stroked piano notes and the ghostly echo of strings, things are a little better. “Oh, be my once in a lifetime,” she murmurs serenely, as if she’s whispering her desires to a sleeping lover. ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’, which swells and strips back like the tide, and the dark, driving ‘California’ find her offering to hold someone up and guide them through gloomier days (“You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are/When you’re lying in my arms,” she promises on the latter), while ‘Happiness Is A Butterfly’ has her almost nihilistically accepting a tragic fate. “If he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst/That can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” she asks with the air of someone always expecting the worst. “If he’s as bad as they say, then I guess I’m cursed.”
Overall, ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’ isn’t a surprising record – it’s a logical next step for Del Rey to take in a journey that’s seen her grow from hip-hop-flecked pop to bohemian folk. It would be easy for it to feel like Lana Del Rey-by-numbers but she avoids that trap by making something filled with beauty that subtly moves her sound on, ushering her into territory marked “timeless”. For anyone who thought her team-up with Jack Antonoff, a now omnipresent figure in big female pop records (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and this album’s producer, would mean the Bleachers frontman’s brand of crystalline euphoria being injected into the mix, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything here feels entirely Lana, exactly as you’d want.
Just because ‘NFR!’ isn’t entirely unexpected doesn’t mean there aren’t any moments that catch you off guard though. For starters, there’s a pretty faithful cover of Sublime’s ‘Doin’ Time’, originally recorded for a documentary about the Long Beach ska-punk band. Del Rey’s version has more of a mystical air to it, but still contains echoes of the original’s dubby grit woven into its witchy atmosphere.
Then, there’s the little utterances that are littered throughout the record that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid to with anyone else but feel odd given how closely linked the person singing them here is with nostalgia and vintage Americana. On ‘The Greatest’ (maybe one of the greatest songs she’s ever written), she sings, “the culture is lit and I’ve had a ball” in a tone that could be incredibly sincere or eye-rolling sarcasm. As the album comes to an end, she throws in a quick nod to modern technology, purring, “Hello, it’s the most famous woman you know on the iPad” on the tender waltz of ‘Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have – But I Have It’.
That she veers from the ultra-modern to references to Sylvia Plath and photographer Slim Aarons, and from Laurel Canyon folk to trembling psych solos, on an album named after American author and illustrator Norman Rockwell only seem to prove the point she’s trying to make in her Twitter bio. Lana Del Rey is large – she contains multitudes, and the way she balances and embodies them on her fifth album is nothing short of stunning”.
I will move on to a review from Pitchfork. In 2019, the album arrived at an interesting and changeable time for American history and identity. The relevance of Norman Rockwell as the album’s title and focal name. In relation to his viewpoint of idealised America. Lana Del Rey, in 2019, perhaps at a point where she no longer could present herself as Americana. These almost stereotyped images of America and American life. The more I listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell!, the more that I think it is a reinvention and new phase for Lana Del Rey:
“In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead. For a woman whose songs are like miniature syllabi in American Studies—saturated in references to jazz, girl groups, heavy metal, Springsteen; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; money, power, glory; excess and loss; Whitmanian multitudes—it felt like an act of defiance.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana at her deepest, and it arrives at a time when the history of America as we know it is being rewritten. Norman Rockwell himself illustrated idyllic images of American life and its history, spending 50 years with the Americana propagandists at the weekly Saturday Evening Post. His best-known works used a wondrous narrative style to center comfort and simplicity: A pastoral idea, painted and personified, of the American Dream. Lana neatly cuts through that outmoded fantasy with an emphatic fucking hyphen mark of irreverence, or enthusiasm, or both. As Lana revives American myths, with an empty deadpan that would make Lou Reed proud, she also exposes them. Like the Beach Boys, she’s looking for America; like Elvis, she’s discomfiting; like Dylan, she’s a trickster, and we are all potentially fooled.
Lana is one of our most complicated stars, a constantly unresolvable puzzle—someone who once called her own work “more of a psychological music endeavor” than pop. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! that ground-swelling complexity coheres to reveal an indisputable fact: She is the next best American songwriter, period. Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk—equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and 2019 parlances—Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity. “I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic,” Lana once said, and she exalts each syllable more than ever here. Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour—singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. The stakes have never been higher.
Sometimes Jack Antonoff productions seem to fly because they have been given a trampoline or a children’s bouncing castle. But here, with delicacy and grace, he and Lana find new wings in minimalism, fresh air to breathe, a structural relief. From its cascade of opening piano notes—“God damn, man child” are felicitous first words and the national mood—Norman Fucking Rockwell! achieves levity, tension, and a disarming self-awareness. The languor of Mazzy Star and downbeat skitter of Portishead meet the easy pop-rock breeze of Carole King on 1971’s Tapestry, or the searching resilience of Joni Mitchell on 1972’s For the Roses. It feels like a wall has come down, like Norman Fucking Rockwell! is less to do with camp, and more to do with real life; less to do with scripting the incandescent character of Lana Del Rey and more to do with human complexity; less about aesthetics than being. You can hear the room everywhere, and for all the spectral harmonies and cinematic splendor, it sounds like Lana alone, embracing classic Angeleno isolation.
Lana’s pillars are intact before you even hit play: glamour, eccentricity, the absurd, wit. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she proclaims on the title track, with a raised eyebrow, and this forthright song grows more savage from there. On a nine-and-a-half-minute lullaby called “Venice Bitch,” she sings the line “fresh out of fucks forever” like a lilting lady of the canyon—in pop tradition, Lana treats California like a conceptual promised land, and here is the smoggy sprawl, stretching into a neo-psychedelic ballad for a new age of acid festival jams. She curses like the sailors on the cover. She employs old-school lingo on the one hand (“Catch ya on the flipside”) and a narcotic slur on the other. And there is no other pop star who could palatably cover Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” and turn its mall-reggae into something so balmy and sweet.
Above all, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the sound of a heart shattering and reforming just to shatter again—of troubled people attempting to navigate the mess of love. Her ache is from empathy: for our crumbling world, for the down and out, for lovers at war with their minds. “If he’s a serial killer/Then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl that’s already hurt?” she sings like a crime novelist on “Happiness Is a Butterfly,” which is to say it is fleeting, setting herself up for a kind of heartbreak so torturous it should be possible to have it surgically removed. Many of these exquisitely narrated songs contain reminders that the trappings of masculinity—breaches in communication, emotional stiltedness, fear of vulnerability—come from the same toxic status quo as systemic patriarchy. On the wrenching “California,” Lana processes as much: “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are,” confessing in a tumbling rush that “I shouldn’t have done it but I read it in your letter/You said to a friend that you wished you were doing better.” Each word is on a pedestal; the song exists to amplify them. Her faint country warble wells more with each verse, and it’s devastating.
Radiating new dimensions of sensitivity and eloquence, “Mariners Apartment Complex” is a towering peak on Norman Fuckng Rockwell!, a four-minute drama about fateful potential romantic energy. But its turbulent grandeur could speak to the whole Lana Del Rey story. “You took my sadness out of context” and “They mistook my kindness for weakness” are bold refusals to be misunderstood. Referencing Elton John with her pristine declaration “I ain’t no candle in the wind,” a phrase originally inspired by the early deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, is a patent embrace of life from a woman who once wrote, “I wish I was dead.” When she sings, “I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?” it could be a mic-dropping rebuttal to the ludicrous standards she faced from the start (and the overblown, Internet-engineered Lana outrage that now seems sexist and pathetic). The Hollywood author Eve Babitz once wrote, “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Lana’s evolution follows suit. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is the sort of ballad that makes teens want to bang on pianos and spill their souls.
Lana zooms out to find her zenith. A piano ballad to close down the bar at the end of the world, “The greatest” collapses time, as if Lana is writing the zeitgeist on a typewriter, her lines raving up with fevered reference to rock’n’roll and depression and a proverbial “Kokomo.” Turning the weight of a generation into light, her words crest like the white of a tidal wave—“L.A.’s in flames, it’s a getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone/‘Life On Mars’ ain’t just a song/Oh, the livestream’s almost on”—and they feel on arrival to have existed forever. As ever, Lana regards the despondency of existence as a realist, offering a funhouse reflection of the way we live.
Call her Doris Doomsday: “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she resolves with ecstasy and fire, a lightning rod of humor, sadness, and perception; flip jadedness and abiding love. Fanning the flames of a culture ablaze, Lana sings each word like a prayer, finessed with conviction and smoke, chaos and control. “The greatest” is a galaxy-brain moment in the pantheon of pop, and it belongs to a generation fully aware we are at risk of being distracted into oblivion, Juuling towards early death while watching Earth burn.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the apotheosis of Lana Del Rey, songs of curiosity and of consequence, darkness and light, a time capsule of 2019, proof that a person cannot escape herself but she can change. Lana has said hope is dangerous because of her own experience, because in Hollywood she “knows so much.” Hope is dangerous because women are rarely taken seriously, from matters of authenticity to cases of assault. Hope is dangerous because the world fails women, and the bigotry to which American power is currently pitched ensures it. Lana calls herself “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution,” witnessing “a new revolution,” with “monsters still under my bed that I never could fight off.” What makes this final song of survival so cutting is the palpable difficulty in her delivery. When she lands on “a gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off,” it sounds like an oblique image of corrupted power, as upsetting as it ought to be, one to finally drain her of hope. But she still has it. In a piercing falsetto we rarely if ever hear from Lana, perhaps saved for her most pressing truth, she touches the sky: “I have it, I have it, I have it.” And when she does, you believe her".
I am going to finish with a review from The Independent. Heralding an album where Lana Del Rey was at her most assertive, they observed how Norman Fucking Rockwell! sat somewhere between the minimalist and incredible Trip-Hop of her earliest work, and the “scuzzy desert rock she has toyed with over the years”. Norman Fucking Rockwell! is this modern masterpiece. I hope that it gets a lot of celebration and new love five years after its release:
“Lana Del Rey has always been obsessed with the past. Hers is a sound rooted in nostalgia, a paean to everything she was born too late to live through: old Hollywood, Sinatra, beat poetry, Sylvia Plath and Fifties Americana. At her best, she mines something fresh from it all. At her worst, she wallows in it. Her new album Norman F**king Rockwell, named after a 20th-century American artist, does both.
Co-produced by Jack Antonoff, as is now decreed by law of all female pop stars, the album is sultry and soporific, sitting somewhere between the minimalist trip-hop of Del Rey’s early days, and the scuzzy desert rock she has toyed with over the years. The drum beats are scarce, the piano, harp, and Guns N’ Roses guitar solos are many, and the melodies are more like musical mood boards. She sings of iPads and dropping pins, and it is almost startling that she has even heard of such things.
Often, Del Rey’s music has offered up a sort of anachronistic passivity. Her breakout single, 2012’s “Video Games”, was an infatuated ode to a deadbeat who drank beer, played computer games and yelled at her to “get over here”. “I like you a lot,” she sang on 2015’s “Music To Watch Boys To”, “So I do what you want.” An optimistic reading would suggest a faint sense of irony bubbling under the surface of such sentiments. A less optimistic one might accuse her of glamourising subservience.
This time around, though, things are a little different. “God damn, man child,” is the album’s first line, a statement of intent sung over bleating brass and harps. “I’m a star and I’m burning through you,” she sings on “Love Song”, which sounds like an alternative universe “Wonderwall”. And on the excellent “Mariner’s Apartment Context”, she declares – just as Leonard Cohen and George Michael did before her – “I’m your man.”
This is Del Rey at her most assertive – personally, if not politically. Those hoping for a barbed protest record in keeping with Del Rey’s newfound public activism (last year she called President Trump a “narcissist” who “believes it’s OK to grab a woman by the pussy just because he’s famous”) will be disappointed. But it is gratifying to hear her take control. Aside from “Happiness Is a Butterfly”, that is. “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” she asks. Crikey.
The singer-songwriter’s nomadic personality is reflected in the vast scale of reference points on her new record, In a Galaxy. It’s technically a follow-up to 2014’s The Wild, the Wilderness, but the newfound boldness on this new work is startling.
Since that first record, Mushonga has begun to incorporate themes of empowerment into her work. On “AtalantA”, she showcases her muscular vocals, which are capable of switching between an airy lilt to a deep, emotional moan, as she sings lyrics inspired by the Greek hunter goddess who refused to marry. In a Galaxy is a record that takes you far beyond the borders of the world you’re familiar with, and into something altogether more colourful”.
On 30th August, the phenomenal Norman Fucking Rockwell! turns five. Even if some felt that Lana Del Rey did not expand her horizons and take on a new persona, there was a definite move from the kitsch patriotism and the flag draping (to paraphrase one reviewer) to something more intriguing and dystopian. Reflecting America now as it really is rather than harking back to a vintage age. It was a fascinating and much-needed step forward. Some put other Lana Del Rey albums ahead of Norman Fucking Rockwell! when it comes to rankings. To many, her 2019 release is…
HER absolute best.