Then, Lana loses herself in a five minute psychedelic synth and electric guitar solo and she takes her listeners with her. Everything about this single screams end-of-summer nostalgia from kissing under the bang of fireworks, to the golden sunlight of the day fading away, trying to make the relationship work past the easy loving days of summer. It’s called ‘Venice Bitch,’ like why would you do this to us? Can you make like a 3-minute normal pop song’ and I was like ‘no, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for 10 minutes and get lost in electric guitar.’" And she was so right. I was like ‘yeah, I think this is the single I wanna put out,’ and they were like ‘it’s 10 minutes long, are you kidding me. ” During an interview with BBC’s Beat Radio 1 she says “It was funny when I played for my managers. Why wait for the best when I could have you? Del Rey also uses this song to paint her listeners into the blue world that loving someone who is so self loathing creates.ĭel Rey’s second single from the album is “Venice Bitch. You act like a kid even though you stand six foot two/Self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all. The first song on the album, “Norman Fucking Rockwell, ” is a call out to every boy that thinks he is better than everyone else because he writes poetry and loves Quentin Tarentino, and who Del Rey is not afraid to openly fall for.
It’s hard not to imagine her as the next in line for Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant’s throne. She moves past the R&B/pop influences of her past albums and indulges in the soft rock of the 70s that she is so fond of. Del Rey forces her listeners to look inside of her world through a haze of psychedelic synth. This album places the listener right into the flawed aesthetic of a California dream. Norman Fucking Rockwell! is about unapologetically not giving a fuck. Del Rey has transcended her summertime sadness. I belt out all the lyrics that I’ve come to know in the months since the release into my sadly furnished apartment, ignoring that I’m off pitch and probably driving my neighbors absolutely insane considering this is the third time I have listened to this particular album today. Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! spins on my turntable. More than a mere retro stylist, Lana embraces nostalgic all-American imagery only to corrupt it through subversive-sometimes profane-anti-love songs, while elevating pop-cultural detritus into high art: On 2019’s Norman F*****g Rockwell!-an epic masterwork that scales the heights of Elton John’s early-'70s classics-she makes room for a cover of Sublime’s ’90s stoner-funk anthem “Doin’ Time,” giving it a sultry trip-hop makeover that affirms the mystery of Lana Del Rey continues to be written.I’m lying on my living room floor watching as the first snow falls disappointingly early, coating the red and yellow trees outside. Since then, Lana has always kept listeners guessing: Informed equally by classic-rock mythology and modern hip-hop attitude, she can casually name-drop Lou Reed in a dream-pop serenade (2014’s “Brooklyn Baby”) as effortlessly she communes with R&B futurist The Weeknd (2017’s “Lust for Life”). Not only did the song prove it was possible to cultivate genuine mystique in the age of oversharing, but it also carved out a space for languid, Twin Peaks-worthy art-pop amid a Top 40 normally reserved for jacked-up pop anthems.
At a time when social media was giving people the power to curate their identities and present idealized versions of themselves online, the struggling singer-songwriter once known as Lizzy Grant (born in New York in 1985) reinvented herself as Lana Del Rey for her epochal 2011 single “Video Games.” The wistful orchestral ballad (and an accompanying Super 8-style video that heralded the ubiquity of soft-focus Instagram filters) introduced a femme fatale who delighted in breaking hearts and the internet alike, knowingly using coquettish sex-kitten cliches as a means to probe male behavior and, by extension, the American id itself. Though she’s got the name and look of a ’60s-era Hollywood star, Lana Del Rey could only have emerged in the internet era.