The best albums of 2019, No 1: Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!
When Lana Del Rey arrived in 2011, anyone who bet on her becoming one of the decade’s defining artists would now be quids in. As sublime as her debut single Video Games was, her debut album, Born to Die, was flimsy, laced with hiccupy hip-hop affectations and surface obsessions (Hollywood, bad boys, putting a red dress on and then taking it off again) that didn’t suggest much potential for maturation. How nice it has been to be proved wrong.
In 2017, the New York Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli tweeted: “Serious Q, why does everyone seem to unequivocally love Lana Del Rey now? What changed?” What changed is that an artist perceived as a dilettante, thanks to sexist assumptions about her aesthetic and background, turned out to be one of pop’s grafters. She leaned into the image that had aroused suspicions, creating an identity so indelible that when she swapped her pout for a grin on the cover of 2017’s Lust for Life, it was as startling as finding a green can of Coke.
More significantly, Del Rey deepened her craft, producing six albums in nine years, each better than the last. In pop’s big league, only Drake matched her productivity, although he might wish he had her increasing creative returns. Her themes became more provocative, while her sweeping, lunar balladry pushed beyond cliched noir. Here was someone who knew exactly what she was doing – and when other people tried it (see: Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams), something was clearly missing. There were hundreds of crooners, but only one Frank Sinatra.
Del Rey’s image and artistry perfectly aligned for the first time on this year’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! (NFR), a supremely confident declaration of self. Unlike Lust for Life, with its unconvincing forays into trap, Del Rey’s stately sixth album is completely out of step with contemporary trends: as if a Brill Building stablehand went west on a Laurel Canyon recon mission. Those sounds are more than just another layer of Americana cosplay (though they are that, too). On NFR, Del Rey asserts a newfound sturdiness after a wayward past of teenage alcoholism and yielding to men who take her sadness “out of context”. “Maybe the way that I’m living is killing me,” she gasps on Fuck It I Love You. “But one day I woke up like, ‘Maybe I’ll do it differently.’”
And so she offers herself up as a compass (“I’m always going to be right here,” she declares on How to Disappear) and a catalyst: “the kind of girl who’s gonna make you wonder who you are and where you’ve been,” she gasps on Mariner’s Apartment Complex, each rich, piano-led verse a threepart rising chord progression that rings with stability, as if laying foundations, bricks then roof. She swaps her old fascination with danger to indulge in all-American domesticity: on Venice Bitch, her lover’s “in the yard, I light the fire”. The songwriting schools that Del Rey harks back to were the product of such homely idylls: Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s work together; Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s work about each other (their relationship informed Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Our House, alluded to several times on NFR). Their work has become canonical, beyond reproach – adding another layer of durability to Del Rey’s resolve.
NFR only earns its rich frame of reference because it is also the apotheosis of a Lana Del Rey album. Of course, her intentions don’t stick: “I moved to California, but it’s just a state of mind / It turns out everywhere you go, you take yourself, that’s not a lie,” she sings on Fuck It I Love You. A certifiable lineup of blokes ranging from flaky to cruel blows through as sure as the Santa Ana winds – yet she sings with unimpeachable poise. On prior albums, her subjugation to bad boys has been repetitive to the point of distraction. Here, she and producer Jack Antonoff make it visceral: the ragged vocal harmonies coming apart on Fuck It I Love You suggest a woman fighting all her better instincts; the enticing decadence of Venice Bitch, with its breathy choruses rising like whipped cream, the illicit pleasure of giving in to them. She sighs tartly at how disorienting sex can be (the title track’s “you fucked me so good I almost said ‘I love you’”), then seems to send herself up on Love Song, a song so guileless it could only be selfaware. Her voice is dewy as she revisits a favourite cliche: “Lying on your chest / In my party dress / I’m a fucking mess.”
These aren’t blind devotions: Del Rey’s obsession with American archetypes, once dismissed as superficial, has matured into an acute understanding of how they are created and frustration at what they conceal. This summer, she released Looking for America, a song explicitly about gun control written in response to several mass shootings, but left it off the album. Its omission is judicious: on NFR, she airs her grievances with American ideals insidiously, seeding a more potent degree of subversion. She is often consoling lost men that they don’t have to fulfil macho ideals: on California, she tenderly tells a lover, “you don’t have to be stronger than you really are”; but a disgusted, grotesque edge enters her voice in the chorus where she rifles through all the west coast cliches that she knows he expects of her. The Next Best American Record is similarly uneasy, cataloguing a blinding obsession with perfection that amounted to nothing. Critics made too much of NFR’s barely-there politics on its release, but still it glowers with the indignation of being sold a lie.
And yet, Del Rey understands the facade. She loves these men (and the US) despite their flaws – the title track’s “self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all” – and is even moved by their efforts to hide them. NFR’s most romantic song, How to Disappear,
lapses into a brassy sway and festive bells. She affectionately eyes the elusive guys on the boulevard, at the training yard, smothering their fears in beer and violence. “I love that man like nobody can,” she sings, sounding genuinely overcome. “He moves mountains and pounds them to ground again.” It’s not a reach to think that her admiration is rooted in empathy: contrary to her petulant denial of critic Ann Powers’ assertion that Del Rey uses persona in her work, she inarguably has played with facade. She knows well that it can be a screen to hide behind – or a broken mirror.
Perhaps Powers hit a nerve because NFR is Del Rey’s least guarded album: she pledges to embrace “the darkness, the deepness,” as she sings on Mariners Apartment Complex, “all the things that make me who I am”. The album ends with a pledge to keep that guard down, Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have it. It’s dangerous because she might get taken advantage of. And she does – by the aforementioned rogues, and the litany of mischaracterisations that leave her practically “writing in blood on the walls ’cause the ink in my pen don’t work in my notepad”. But staying open is what makes the art, and the art is where she wields control. “Your poetry’s bad, and you blame the news,” she shrugs at the title track’s “goddamn man-child”, withering at the idea that anyone could be so passive and uninspired.
The headlines only penetrate NFR once, at the end of The Greatest, a gorgeous, valedictory ballad that builds and builds, yet never yields to the inevitable collapse. “Hawaii just missed that fireball,” she mutters. “LA is in flames, it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blond and gone / Life on Mars ain’t just a song.” It’s a eulogy for the privilege of not having to care, of missing the days where she was “doing nothin’ the most of all”. It’s been interpreted as a song about helplessness, but I think it’s about what comes next: understanding your purpose and setting aside naivety. It’s another subtly defiant assertion that Del Rey is here for the long haul, no matter what. You don’t move to California oblivious of the big one.