Ocean Blvd, by Lana Del Rey, reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor
photo: genuis.com
When I was 15 years old there was nothing more romantic than Lana Del Rey singing “Gods and Monsters:”
In the land of Gods and Monsters
I was an angel looking to get fucked hard
Like a groupie incognito, posing as a real singer
Life imitates art…
‘This is Heaven, what I truly want’,
It's innocence lost.
A decade later, after having finally compiled my own list of transgressions, that song feels more salient than ever, though more painful, and the furthest thing from romantic. Only now do I realize that Del Rey, who is 13 years older than myself, sang those lyrics retrospectively as a dirge for an innocence already lost. A backwards glance repeated on her latest album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? Upon listening, one feels that the album represents an imperfect attempt to reconcile dissonant images of the self; in universal terms, the past, present, and future selves, and in Del Rey’s case, the private and public selves. Though increasingly concerned with loftier, more essential human predicaments than the mere emotional turmoil of earlier work (“Will I die/Or will I hit that ten-year mark/Where I beat the extinction of telomeres?”), Ocean Blvd still features Del Rey’s signatures: erotic melancholia (“fuck me till I’m dead/Love me until I love myself”), and sun-soaked placenames (Griffith, The Beverly Center, Genesee, Long Beach, Monaco, Rosemead). As the headline for Lindsay Zoladz’s The New York Times review put it, “Lana Del Rey Plunges Into the Deep, but Never Abandons the Shallow.'' Indeed, the album strikes a tonal pirouette, balanced on a stylized earnestness – never raw, but always sincere; possessed of honesty made more honest by its implicit form. A perplexed, melancholy record, by turns self-indulgent and self-aware, superficially, Ocean Blvd does lend itself to misconstrual as twee: “I’m swee-ee-eet/Bare fee-ee-eet”, Del Rey sings in “Sweet.” But the record displays an elemental disillusionment with Del Rey's own perennial images, contexts, and mythologies; with the American dream, with the West as land of promise, and with the redemptive power of feminine glamor. The songs contain many sad acknowledgments that the old tricks no longer work. A feeling on Del Rey’s part that she has irremediably deviated from her own script, her roving romanticism no longer effective as the emotional crutch it once was. “Exotic people and places don’t take the place of being your child,” Del Rey sings on “Fingertips”, the meandering piano-driven reflection on familial loss which forms the thematic core of Ocean Blvd. However, despite the critical consensus, Del Rey asserts that she has never been a satirist. Her nostalgia for all things Americana is earnest, as is her pain at falling somewhat out of love with them. Del Rey laments on "Fingertips":
"They say there's irony in the music.
It's a tragedy, I see nothing Greek in it.”
Though grieving the loss of a certain youthful idealism Del Rey does not lay it to rest but conducts an autopsy; eager to write a thorough forensic report on a version of herself it seems has died. From “A&W”:
“Did you know a singer can still be
Looking like a side piece at 33?
God’s a charlatan, don’t look back…
I’m a ghost now, look how they found me
It’s not about having someone to love me anymore
No, this is the experience of being an American whore.”
Therein lie both the obituary of a girl who wants to be loved at any costs (think Ultraviolence: “Jim hit me and it felt like a kiss”), and the announcement of a new woman who though content to be a whore, needs you to know that she is an American whore – ‘plunges into the deep but never abandons the shallow,’ indeed. The most crucial intent of Ocean Blvd is to document the turmoil of an artist struggling to live authentically within the confines of fame, while at the same time refusing to relinquish the highly stylized nature of her work. Much writing about Del Rey either accuses her of being unknowingly ridiculous, or praises her as being deftly ironic. But she is neither Jessica Rabbit nor Joan Didion – she is an artist dispositionally incapable of understanding the dilemma between style and substance. It says more about us than it does Del Rey that we are so unwilling to believe that a woman demonstrably possessed by keen intelligence would unironically sympathize with the sentimental, the romantic, and the glamorous. More than ever does “life imitates art” apply, in fact Ocean Blvd functions as lyrical companion to Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying; refuting the obligation to be “symbolic of any age.”
Unfortunately for Del Rey, despite her reluctance, she is an enormously famous figure, and Ocean Blvd, much like her masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell, presents dialogue between Del Rey herself and the numerous avatars we have devised to contain her. In “A&W” Del Rey regards her own ambivalent role as an iconoclast unwittingly revered as an icon by a reductive public, even the most sycophantic members of which seem incapable of accepting the entire aspect of this incongruous artist: “What went wrong/I’m a princess/I’m divisive/Maybe I’m just like this.” Case in point: the diffuse, low simmer of indignance among Del Rey fans at her inclusion of “Judah Smith Interlude.” The interlude consists of a recording of Judah Smith preaching, set to a piano arrangement by Jack Antonoff, Del Rey’s most crucial collaborator. Smith, infamous for his homophobia, and blatant mega-church profiteering, currently enjoys a chokehold on the piety of Hollywood’s elite. His church offers a fashionable, evangelical alternative to passé Scientology. Yet even the most cursory reading must conclude that Del Rey’s sample is a skeptical lambast. Del Rey and her anonymous companions are quite literally heard laughing and repeating certain of Smith’s soundbites in mocking tone. When Smith describes God as the “rhino designer”, Del Rey audibly chortles, and says “rhino designer?” As Coleman Spilde put it for The Daily Beast:
“While ‘Judah Smith Interlude’ might be a point of contention for fans, it’s ultimately an ironic and inflammatory sendup of commodified spirituality and a reminder that Del Rey’s artistic ethos is firmly about pleasing no one but herself.”
The textual mishandling so prevalent in popular discourse on Del Rey’s work discourages any who hold out hope for our culture’s basic literacy. In that sense, Ocean Blvd is, along with most of Del Rey’s best work, scriptural – requiring delicate and bold exegesis. Ocean Blvd is only the latest in an illustrious strand of albums threatening to bore or outrage any persons seized by sensibilities they are unwilling to temporarily set aside, in this case, for a mere one hour and seventeen minutes. Ironically, nothing about Del Rey’s recent work can be construed as provocative, at least not in the same lineage as pop-culture’s paradigmatic provocateurs. Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Mick Jagger, or Madonna have little in common with either Del Rey’s lyrical content, or her public image. An image not in any way as closely tended, as reliant on attention, or as teleological. An oeuvre totally independent of its ends, the same ends which often confound their originator. Therein lies the crux of Del Rey’s divisiveness: she is indifferent to what we think. In this particular moment, can one fathom a bigger social sin?