Norman Rockwell was America’s greatest propagandist. The majority of his early work was a gauche exercise in the picket fence ideals of white America painted during a time where water fountains were segregated and corporate strong men beat any notion of unionization out of their workers. His America lived in red and white checkered diner countertops, boyhood baseball games and all the other blue collar idylls of Hometown, USA. Draped in a tattered American flag herself, pop icon Lana Del Rey flips the Rockwellian vision of a rose tinted United States on its head with her latest album, “Norman F****** Rockwell.”
Lana has always embraced the aesthetics of Rockwell’s idealism in her previous albums. However, her brand of patriotism felt more like a weathered stucco as the underlying depression and substance abuse spilled through its cracks. Lana’s America is populated by binge drinkers and obsessed ex-boyfriends in dusty desert towns. A land where the American dream slinks through hazy Los Angeles back alleys and is rediscovered at the point of a heroin needle. In this latest album, Lana further develops this world by stripping back the kitsch Americana camp as she shines a spotlight on a more genuine American underworld of the heartbroken, the lost and the aimless.
The self-titled track, “Norman f****** Rockwell,” opens the album as a violin and flute arrangement reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” begins the song. Then the piano pours through. Lana croons, “Goddamn, man-child.” With just the violins, flutes and piano backing her reverb-soaked vocals, she laments her inability to change her boyfriend’s mood and begrudges him for dragging her down with him. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news/But I can’t change that, I can’t change your mood,” she sings, “Cause you’re just a man/It’ just what you do/Your head in your hands/As you color me blue.”
“Venice B****” is a sprawling nine minute psych-pop piece, a maze of fuzzed electric guitars and heavily layered vocals performed by Lana. “Fresh out of f**** forever,” she delivers in a deadpan hopscotch verse. All over the song she references great American artists, a common motif throughout her work. Once again she invokes Rockwell in this line, “Paint me happy in blue/Norman Rockwell” and a reference to poet Robert Frost here, “As the summer fades away/Nothing gold can stay.” Lana’s vocals very quickly fade to the background as producer Jack Antonoff builds an expansive psychedelic landscape over the final eight minutes of the track, with Lana dropping in every so often to remind listeners how razor sharp her lyricism is.
The final piece, “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – and I have it,” is a piano ballad with Lana at her most personal on this album. The line “Hope is a dangerous thing,” repeated multiple times in the song, is a line from “The Shawshank Redemption,” where the full line is, “Hope is a dangerous thing to have. Hope can drive a man insane.” For Lana, her insanity is something that she seems to have come to terms with, or at least has coped with. “Don’t ask if I’m happy, you know that I’m not/But at best I can say that I’m not sad,” Lana writes. In the verses there are upsetting references to Sylvia Plath and writing in blood on the walls, but it seems for now that Lana Del Rey is okay.
In this latest album, her sixth full length LP, Lana Del Rey once again proves her songwriting chops as she allows the listener to peek into a broken America she has constructed through her poignant lyricism and unmatched wit.
Image from Lana Del Rey via YouTube
