You could say Lana del Rey is getting better at singing about old men, old money, and old-timey things— but she’s just never been bad at it. She’s an expert in playing this beautiful game of very sad MadLibs, and a decade into her career even Bruce Springsteen is calling her “simply one of the best songwriters in the country, as we speak.” Enter her seventh studio album, produced by close collaborator, Jack Antonoff, Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Here her gift for romanticizing the mundane and glamorizing the traumatic shines in what might be her most intimate and precocious collection of songs yet, which explore Del Rey’s ever-more-complicated relationship with fame.
Our patron saint of nostalgia, Del Rey finds herself, as she has before, and as we all are now, longing for the good old days, real or imagined. On the album’s opening track, “White Dress” she fantasizes about being a bright eyed nineteen year old waitress in Orlando. She lusts after the simple pleasures of “Listening to the White Stripes when they were white-hot” and “just listening to Kings of Leon to the beat,” back when she wasn’t famous. On “Tulsa Jesus Freak” she even dreams of leaving Los Angeles for Arkansas. The very next track, “Let Me Love You Like A Woman,” reminds us that she’s, “Ready to leave LA.” And on “Wild at Heart” she finally plays out her fantasy, “I left Calabasas, escaped all the ashes.”
Online, Del Rey is far less old Hollywood vixen, and much more your mom on facebook, often posting filtered selfies and captions that invoke the same corny energy as “Live Laugh Love.” Scrolling through her Twitter feed or Instagram is reminiscent of an early 2000s Tumblr page. But she also has a penchant for controversy and biting back at critics. In the last year she’s found herself in hot water a handful of times. Last May, Del Rey posed a “question for culture” on her Instagram where she complained that many of her women of color counterparts in the industry were not criticized for glorifying abuse or sexuality in the same way that she has been. Twitter exploded when she wore what appeared to be a mesh and utterly ineffective face mask to a book signing last fall. In an interview with BBC Radio 1 she implied that Trump was not to blame for the storming of the capitol. And in a since deleted caption, from her unveiling of the cover of Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey defended her inclusivity by saying that “her best friends are rappers. My boyfriends have been rappers.”
Just this weekend Del Rey, in an Instagram story, responded to a Harper’s Bazaar article from January, “Lana Del Rey Can’t Qualify Her Way Out of Being Held Accountable.” She acknowledged the claim that her career was based on cultural appropriation and vowed to challenge these notions on her next album ‘Rock Candy Sweet,’ due out June 1. But followed that up by honing in on a passage that called her inclusivity defense unnecessary, Del Rey responded, “You’re right it would have been unnecessary if no one had significantly criticized everything about the album to begin with. But you did. And I want revenge.” In many ways, she’s driving herself out of Los Angeles.
Throughout Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Del Rey seems to be seeking an escape from celebrity (and critics) and from everything she’s ever chased on earlier albums. In 2012, she preached that “Money is the anthem of success,” now it’s her nemesis. She had an affinity for California as recently as her last album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!; now she can’t wait to leave. On her debut, “Video Games,” she was “Livin’ for the fame”; now it’s her demise.
Early in Del Rey’s career she rose to fame aspiring to the very things that she now professes to loathe, like fame and fortune, emulating the likes of Priscilla Presley, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Marilyn Monroe. For so long, Del Rey, the First Lady of Music, has lyrically and aesthetically represented a bygone era of America. The Lana Universe is built on Elvis, Blue Jeans, Jesus, Coca-Cola, and cocaine. She writes about god and country so much that her affinity borders on parody. But in the post-Trump aftermath, Del Rey’s American dream has shifted. She’s traded in the glitz and glamour for minimum wage, “washing her hair, and doing laundry.” She longs to return back to basics, back to a middle-American dream, perhaps even back to being Lizzy Grant. “It’s beautiful how this deep normality settles down over me,” she proclaims on the title track.
Of course the irony of it all is that Chemtrails Over the Country Club, will only further cement Del Rey in the zeitgeist. It has already received an overwhelmingly positive response online from critics and fans, with a 9.0 Metacritic average. The final track on the album is a moving cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free” which originally appeared on her 1970 album ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. Del Rey, joined by Weyes Blood and Zella Day, close out the album: ”Now me, I play for fortunes / And those velvet curtain calls / I got a black limousine and two gentleman / Who escort me through these halls / I’ll play if you’ve got the money.”
For her entire career, Del Rey has walked the thin line of adoration and cancellation. So far, her fans can’t quit her, and thus she can’t quit fame. But maybe that’s the price of her brand of fame. And, sure, it can be lonely at the top, but if there’s anyone equipped for the job it’s Del Rey. After all, it’s her trademark sadness that’s gotten her this far.
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