Why I feel uneasy declaring my love for Lana Del Rey's music

As the American artist releases her new album, ‘Norman F***ing Rockwell!’, Helen Brown examines how easy it is to misread her lyrics as ‘antifeminist’ – and how she offers hope amid self-destruction

Del Rey is a divisive figure

On a long drive through the dark last week, I listened to the new songs from Lana Del Rey’s sixth album on a long, repeating loop. Norman F***ing Rockwell! contains a little more guitar grit than previous records, but the swooning nostalgia of the sound is unmistakably Del Rey.

Earlier in the trip, I’d steered the radio away from news of burning forests and Brexit. The cool blues of the music were pure relief. The repetitive rise, curl and fall of the melodies, the sad/sweet solace of her voice washed over me like waves. I felt my breathing slow with hers as she continued to dive into her “darkness, deepness/ All the things that make me who I am”. I’ve not heard it all yet, and already the beautiful, difficult, literate Norman F***ing Rockwell! feels like the record to get me through 2019.

But I still feel a little uneasy publicly declaring my love for Del Rey. Probably this is because the ground has been shifting so fast beneath the feet of musical heroes – from Michael Jackson to Morrissey – that my emotional attachment to music is still in a weird state of flux. And Del Rey is a divisive figure.

Styled as a pouting pin-up from a mythical American underworld, she wrote her first four albums from the perspective of women who dream of nothing more than popping beers for bad guys playing video games. She romanticised domestic “ultraviolence”, had herself choked in videos and recycled The Crystals’ 1962 line, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”.

I notice my male friends are far more willing to celebrate her embrace of this masochism than my female friends. One (female) friend who works with victims of domestic violence loathes her. She says it’s the privilege that I share with Del Rey (who was born into a white, well-off, well-educated family) that allows me to enjoy this stuff. For a long time, Del Rey claimed not to be interested in feminism, which didn’t help my cause in the arguments where I found myself defending her.

I’ve also got a couple of friends (again, women) who feel Del Rey lacks the authenticity they crave in music. They point to the various pop personae she tried on – including Sparkle Rope Jump Queen – before creating one she could sell. They make it a point of pride to quote the Pitchfork review in which critic Lindsay Zoladz dismissed her 2012 breakthrough album, Born to Die, as: “a faked orgasm”.

Well, the accusations of fabrication are easy to dismiss. There isn’t a pop star out there who hasn’t created a persona. I don’t care that Lana Del Rey isn’t her real name and I don’t care that she probably learnt a trick or two about selling fantasy from having parents in the advertising industry. Del Rey didn’t care either. “Luckily, I always thought, F**K YOU!” she says in a recent interview. And she dealt with accusations that an industry boyfriend helped her up the ladder with the conversation-killing bluntness on the song “F***ed My Way Up to the Top”.

The stuff about her “antifeminism”? That’s more complicated and – as someone who argued for too long that Morrissey’s “National Front Disco” was obviously taking the piss – something I’m worried about reading wrong.

But I do see feminism in the narrative of Lana Del Rey. Born Elizabeth Woodward Grant, in New York, 1985, she once said the monologue on 2012’s “Ride” is “semi-autobiographical” – which makes it worth quoting.

“I was always an unusual girl,” runs the song. “My mother told me I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.” Her childhood included singing in church and being packed off to boarding school, aged 14, to recover from alcohol addiction.

At 18, she picked up the guitar and began playing in nightclubs as Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena, and other characters. She was signed by an independent label in 2007 but her debut album was shelved, and she threw herself into working with the homeless and on drug and alcohol outreach projects. She’s not just a rich kid imagining the self-destructive characters in her songs: she spent five years listening to them before bringing their voices out of the shadows. On the new album she still sighs that: “Spilling my guts with the Bowery bums/ Is the only love I’ve ever known/ Except for the stage, which I also call home.”

As Grant found her way towards the sound she wanted, her dad helped her buy back the rights to her shelved record. While the naysayers claim the Lana Del Rey persona was created by record label execs (because how could a woman possibly rebrand herself?) she has always been clear that the character’s her own creation. The Del Rey part is after a vintage Ford and the Lana is in tribute to glamorous – but deeply troubled – film noir star, Lana Turner.

Del Rey’s fascination with film noir is relevant. The genre rose to prominence in the Thirties and Forties, as the Second World War shifted women’s place in the culture. While magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell was painting patriotic images of hearty female factory workers like “Rosie the Riveter”, Hollywood was turning out films which portrayed these newly ambitious, independent women (like Turner’s character Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice) as a danger to men. With cigarettes between their lips and guns in their handbags, they resisted the conventional roles as good wives and mothers and the movies punished them with brutal deaths. Yet their wit, strength and sexiness have outlived their fictional demises in the cultural memory.

Meditating on them in the 21st century, Del Ray created a pop persona who looked and sounded like a dangerous noir heroine, but embraced the submissive attitude of the Forties housewife. Although she said feminism didn’t interest her, she provoked an uncomfortable debate about the ways in which society still divides us into Madonnas and whores – on Twitter as on vintage celluloid. Her songs laid bare the dangerous seductions of either option. She was sharp and unflinchingly funny about how our sexuality was marketed back at us: “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola…” she sang.

On her breakthrough single, “Video Games” (2011), she wallowed in surrender to a man who ignored her. There were harps and funeral bells. A few years earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain’s Amy Winehouse had done something similar, channelling the man-mad melodrama of the Sixties, falling out of bars without her shoes while telling the press all she wanted to do was become a good wife and mother. She died three months before the release of “Video Games”.

Between them, they created the perfect soundtrack for a confusing period during which women were buying into Cath Kidston’s retro “pinny porn” and devouring EL James’ BDSM bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). In retrospect, maybe it was a time when women felt safe enough to explore their totally normal masochistic fantasies the way men could. (Think of Ryan Adams’: “Come pick me up/ F**k me up/ Steal my records…”, although Adams is another musical hero I’m being forced to re-evaluate.) And it was a time when many women of Del Rey’s privilege and generation – perhaps understandably – didn’t know what to make of, or take from feminism. It was 2014 when Del Rey said it didn’t interest her.

But that mood began to change in 2016 as the #MeToo movement revealed abusers still controlling the culture and Donald Trump was elected. The empowered Beyoncé, who’d spent a decade telling men to “put a ring on it!” released Lemonade, standing over the grave of her faith in pain-free love intoning: “ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks”. Using black and white film and vintage samples, Beyoncé had never sounded so much like Del Rey.

Del Rey also shifted her position. Aligning herself with the poetry of American identity – the Walt Whitman line about containing multitudes is her Twitter bio – she spoke out against a president who was shutting down the freedoms that had thrilled her. She dropped the flags from her artwork. As a musician who’d always incorporated rap rhythms and ideas into her dreamy soundscape, she hit out at Kanye West for his support of the Trump administration: “I can only assume you relate to his personality on some level,” she said. “If you think it’s alright to support someone who believes it’s OK to grab a woman by the pussy just because he’s famous-then you need an intervention as much as he does.”

Like a host of unexpected, self-invented artists before her – think Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan) or Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) – Del Rey came out as a protest singer this month when she released “Looking for America” in response to mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. She sang her dream of a country “without the gun, where the flag can freely fly/ No bombs in the sky, only fireworks when you and I collide”. And she listed the places she no longer felt safe to go: the park, the drive-in movie.

I worried that, lyrically, there might be places she no longer felt safe to go in 2019 either. Would she lose the courage it took to express her vulnerability? The difficult truths about the darker side of her sexuality?

Well, there’s certainly less of that on Norman F***ing Rockwell!. But it’s honest and vulnerable in other ways. On the terrific closing track “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it”, she continues to own her duality. “I’ve been tearing up town in my f***ing white gown/ Like a goddamn near sociopath/ Shaking my ass is the only thing that’s/ Got this black narcissist off my back/ She couldn’t care less, and I never cared more.”

Del Rey offers hope (Getty) (Getty Images)

I sang along to that with pure elation on my long night drive. I was having a blast, even as I tortured myself about the emissions from our car contributing to the apocalypse. Del Rey knew how I felt. On “The Greatest” she croons: “LA is in flames, it’s getting hot/ Kanye West is blonde and gone/ ‘Life on Mars’ ain’t just a song/ Oh, the live stream’s almost on…” The self-destruction she’s always described is now on a planetary scale. Listening to her feels like watching it from space: terrifying and beautiful.

And just when you thought somebody like Del Rey might throw up her hands and suggest we try to get our kicks while we can, she offers hope. On the beautiful “Mariners Apartment Complex”, the woman who once eulogised the thrills of submission tells us we’ve got her wrong. “You took my sadness out of context/ At the Mariners Apartment Complex/ I ain’t no candle in the wind,” she says. “I’m the board, the lightning, the thunder… baby, I’m your man.” The song sees her holding out her hand to a lover, lost at sea. My own hand’s reaching back. High five, Lana. And thanks.

Norman F***ing Rockwell! is out now