Her most creatively unburdened album, Chemtrails felt instantly timeless - cementing her place in the modern canon alongside her Laurel Canyon idols, the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. March’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club was the opposite of radical, but served a crucial purpose in reconnecting Del Rey with her roots as a singer-songwriter in the American tradition. Lana Del Rey: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot The critically beloved Norman Fucking Rockwell, from 2019, was her most complete reinvention yet, turning her into a folk-rock troubadour who’d never seemed more human. On 2017’s Lust For Life, Lana rebooted her image once again, adopting an optimistic, Woodstock-inspired outlook for our uncertain age.
2015’s Honeymoon indulged in jazz and soul, opening herself back up to the possibility of happiness. And then, with her 2014 sophomore LP Ultraviolence, she burned it all down, trading the hip-hop beats for fiery psych-rock guitars, on songs where she had no interest in coming off as sympathetic.
In 2013, “Young and Beautiful,” her theme from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and the Cedric Gervais remix of “Summertime Sadness” made Del Rey a reliable hitmaker, and a household name. The Paradise EP and her epic “Ride” video soon followed, expanding on Born to Die’s themes of romantic fatalism, while galvanizing an emerging cult fanbase that hung on her every word.
“Lana Del Rey” became an instantly identifiable aesthetic, the same way the likes of David Lynch, Mad Men, Margaret Keane, or Amy Winehouse had before her. Del Rey took the girl-group, Nancy Sinatra pop stylings of the ’60s, and fused it with modern cinematic production and a glamorous, Hollywood-inspired image, to create a kind of hyper-real 21st century Americana. What is love, and why do we feel so irresistibly impelled to sing about it? How do we use poetic language to express and navigate the difficult paradoxes of erotic feeling? How does erotic feeling, in turn, serve us as a vehicle for thinking about the existential problems of self and other, individual and society, human and divine? Does love blind us (and if so, to what, exactly?), or does it, as so many of its champions have insisted, open our eyes to truths about ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit that we had previously failed to recognize? And lastly, what do we hope to gain from having captured our sensations and thoughts in a song or poem and placed them before the public or the beloved’s eyes?Īlthough far from comprehensive (as if that could even be done with such an inexhaustible topic!), this seminar will explore some of the rhetorical strategies employed and central problems posed, dissected, and potentially answered by love lyrics, from the fragmentary remains of Sappho’s verses composed around 600 BC, through selected works by some of the major poets of the English tradition (Mary Wroth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats, and Hart Crane, to name a few), to contemporary songs by musical artists including Regina Spektor, Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, Father John Misty, and Lana Del Rey.Lana Del Rey on Finding Her Voice and Following Her Muse: 'I Have Never Taken a Shortcut'īorn to Die, her 2012 major-label debut, arrived with impossibly high levels of both hype and trepidation, to decidedly mixed initial reactions.
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