COMPLEX UNPICKING OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
Don’t be fooled by the baroque piano or the muted electronica with folky flourishes. ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ is brilliant, writes Andrew Donaldson
One critic has described the sound of the new Lana Del Rey album as “a mellow soft rock”, which, simplistic as it may be, is fair enough: that’s what it does sound like — baroque piano ballads, muted electronica with folky flourishes, hushed lullabies and love songs washed in strings and synths. But the title alone suggests that there is certainly more to Norman
Fucking Rockwell! (Polydor/Interscope Records), one of the year’s most interesting new releases, than a lush elegance. This is as meticulous, as lacerating and as complex an unpicking of the American Dream as any artistic endeavour this side of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.
In West’s 1939 novel, Hollywood is a place where desperation for success and happiness boils over into rage as a film premiere degenerates into mob violence. In Del Rey’s music, dubbed more accurately “Hollywood sadcore”, she draws on 1950s and ’60s Americana to give us glimpses of the failed dreamers who continue to populate that southern Californian landscape: for all the sunshine, it’s a place of dark interiors, like a painting by the Norman Rockwell of the title — but done by David Lynch.
Rockwell, you will recall, was a supreme propagandist. For more than 50 years his idyllic images of a white picket-fenced America and its history adorned the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, a widely circulated magazine aimed squarely at the US middle classes. Del Rey, the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant, now subverts the comfort and simplicity of his imagery by planting a curse in his name, suggesting both enthusiasm and disdain. Ever the millennial troubadour, she’s even directed and released a neatly postmodern “trailer” for the album in which her iconoclastic ambitions are unequivocally bared.
It’s her fifth album, and is available in a number of different double LP formats, including green, pink and black vinyl editions. There are different sleeves, and even a “PG release” with just the acronym NFR for the title and censored song titles. Whatever the version, though, the album is a work of a complex artist who once appropriately described her work as “more of a psychological music endeavour” than mere pop.
Just one query, though: given the strengths of her songwriting — and they are considerable, with echoes of such 1970s Laurel Canyon luminaries as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young in her work — it does seem odd that she’s launched the album with a cover of Sublime’s Doin’ Time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrific version, and fits the overall theme of NFR rather well. But her own stuff is terrific, full of eerie melodrama and gorgeous melodies that somehow draw hope from detached desolation. This really may be one of the year’s best releases.