And I bring this up because of all the acts for which I expected this wouldn't be an issue, Lana Del Rey was on that list. Yeah, my issues with her have been well-documented - see the reviews of Ultraviolence, Honeymoon, and Lust For Life for the lengthy and contentious details - but she routinely sold a ton of albums, never quite matching her debut but still consistent. And with this album, right from the first singles she was releasing she was getting the sort of widespread critical acclaim she hadn't seen properly in years, even from outlets who never gave her the time of day... and yet she started releasing her first singles nearly a year ago, and the album had already been delayed until the end of summer. Hell, up until last week I wasn't even sure it was going to come out, let alone that it would drop and receive the most critical acclaim she's ever seen in her career! And given that I had purposefully avoided any single had released, the most I really knew going in was how her primary collaborator on production was Jack Antonoff, an intriguing choice if only because whenever he toys with backwards-looking Americana he can hit a decent stride, so I was fascinated how that'd play in the writing. So alright, we probably should have gotten this album a year ago, but what did Lana Del Rey deliver with Norman Fucking Rockwell!?
You know, I feel like there's both more and less to say about this album than what has actually been said, and man, I really wish I could have avoided all the 'discourse' around it the past couple of days so I could have had a cleaner listening experience. Instead, we have an outlet embracing ridiculous hyperbole for all the clicks calling her one of 'America's greatest living songwriters', followed by Lana Del Rey herself clapping back at a pretty thoughtful and descriptive NPR piece claiming that she's never had a persona behind her and that she doesn't relate at all to the iconography or observations made about her music. Which would have been a truly fascinating statement until you stop to give it a second thought and realize the mountain of deflection and cognitive dissonance built into it, a whirl of misplaced hype and gleaming but slipshod iconography that Lana Del Rey absolutely benefits from - and make no mistake, she knows that - but if she wants to strip away the overwrought layers, break the separation of art and artist that most critics have centered in order to explain away their love for the melodramatic contradictions about Lana Del Rey and her music, I'll cut to the foundations... no matter how hopelessly cracked they might be. And so while I'm still going to say way too much about this project, let's not mince words: Norman Fucking Rockwell! is a good album, featuring real growth by Lana Del Rey as a songwriter - growth that seems compromised everywhere else, from her vocal delivery to her compositions to any sense of thematic coherence on a listless slice of critic bait. I'm not remotely surprised that people find themselves compelled to write thinkpieces about Lana Del Rey and her art, but at least for me, that compulsion faded during the Honeymoon four years ago.
Now before I get in deeper here, I want to clarify that "critic bait" is absolutely a loaded term, but I'm intending it with a very specific context and one that I've found exasperating from Lana Del Rey damn near her entire career: the elevation of underweight, middlebrow melodrama content with bombastic swells in the execution, with the most self-awareness coming through an undercurrent of nihilism or irony. Hell, throw in scattered classic rock iconography, smear it with post-modern word and mood association, and then say 'America!', and tons of critics eat this shit up, especially from Gen X. And make no mistake, Lana Del Rey is far from alone in this territory - from the majority of LCD Soundsystem's career to Kendrick Lamar making a song with U2 to significant chunks of Taylor Swift's 1989, from The 1975's 'Love It If We Made It' to Lana's spiritual peer and occasional collaborator Father John Misty and especially Pure Comedy, this is a tried and true formula... and yet it's one that increasingly rings hollow for me and has nearly always felt empty coming from Lana Del Rey. Maybe because of how transparent it can feel - I certainly understand the appeal of the blatant classic rock references and obvious literary touchpoints and the attempts to call upon broad 'American Dream' iconography, all pressed through a gauzy, glamourous sheen - but it never seems to match the more intimate scale of the character portraits that at long last feel the most fleshed out they've ever been. But keep in mind that Lana Del Rey herself has emphasized these are her stories and that she's chosen to paint these pictures as large as she has, to crank up the dramatic weight in her solitary experience...
Which might not be a bad way to contextualize the album, frankly. If you strip out how heavy-handed the vintage reference points are in trying to give these songs misplaced weight, there is emotional complexity in the writing. For one, it seems like she's finally willing to put the asterisk next to the allure of the toxic relationships that have been her stomping ground, less enamoured with machismo and more willing to highlight the fractured, broken men who'll project upon her to deflect from themselves. And since she's spent the past four albums cutting to a clearer idea of who she is, in both vices and virtues, the character portraits are more stark, to the point where you start wondering if she's indeed talking about real people. Take the title track - which along with 'Mariners Apartment Complex' and 'Venice Bitch' and their liberal Father John Misty references can't help but make me wonder if we now know who met him in the hotel in 2017 and touched off the events that led to God's Favorite Customer - but none of it is a flattering picture of the self-loathing man-child artist spewing bad poetry and who sees her as fucked up as he is... when in reality, she might be okay for once and can be stronger, except for, you know, continuing to be with him. But it's that nexus of creative ego centered around Los Angeles that this album spins and spins, where Lana will reference her addictive past on 'Fuck it I love you' and how she might still be a mess on 'Love story' before seeing seeing her partner spiral into deflective drug addiction on 'Cinnamon Girl', where it's clear there's more being left unsaid there and on 'California' than what makes the record, if only to preserve his ego. And you can tell there's a reliance on that yearning as the album circles further and further, longer and longer, repeating the same give-and-take and a lot of the same metaphors, where what she misses most is the sense of idle stasis as the world decays around her - we'll come back to this - and yet by the end of the album, she sees hope. Which on the surface, for as sprawling and tenuous as any thematic throughline to this album is, I actually agree - she has no reason to believe that in her relationship or its overdrawn extrapolation to her world at large will get better, especially for someone who has chosen to live among her monsters rather than slay them, but in a change from Lust For Life, she sees a glimmer at the end of the tunnel, and it's a better ending.
But here's the problem: dig even a little into the roots of that 'hope' and the choice of her iconography and you realize many of the old vices and pretensions haven't gone away. She misses the balmy air of doing nothing because she's had that privilege to luxuriate in it or walk away to sleep with common people, enjoying the same idle detachment that is afforded those who can live within the lie of the American dream or slip out to buy a car in the middle of the night. It's the big reason why I've never been able to buy into her satirical intent: texturally it feels 'off', and there's no real element of serious risk to give it any teeth. Thank god she moved beyond the scrappy pretensions to noir on Ultraviolence and Honeymoon, but even in the face of real world environmental damage, news that has shaken her partner badly, her hope is tinged with gallows humour. It's why the outro of 'The greatest' and then following it with 'Bartender' lands with no impact for me - she references cultural burnout and Kanye West and signs of the apocalypse, and how she's not like the women of the valley who'll wear black at the parties and wear white to meditate in the garden - later following it on the closing track how she's not like the debutantes that put on pretty smiles, given her messy history with alcohol and fractured parental relationship how she finds a way to fight and cope with those old demons. But it's hard to imagine her as that far removed from those parties or debutantes where she's found the most pleasure, or that if 'Life On Mars' is no longer just a song, she wouldn't have a space on the shuttle over if she wanted it. Because really, the only serious transgressive element that comes through is the conflation of her lightly toxic, spiraling relationship with titanic American iconography - which as a show of ego is transgressive, don't get me wrong - but it's also the same throughline she's been working since Born To Die, and given she never leaves that bad boy who can't really hurt her given she's already hurt - which puts the question mark back over 'Mariners Apartment Complex' - all we get is the same shrinking, insulated, backwards-looking, conservative line she's always given. And even if you expand the metaphor, highlight the parallel between the American Dream and all those emotionally damaged, flailing, broken boys, it's not like she's leaving that either. Funny how we never get that subtext or deep dive, eh?
But that's never been the point of Lana Del Rey's music, especially on this album when she's leaning into the meandering, grooveless soft rock that characterized a listless subset of 60s and 70s pop and folk that really doesn't earn any label of psychedelia. Yes, 'Venice Bitch' meanders for nearly ten minutes with its muddy sputter of guitar and synth resting on a cushion of fluttering strings, but if you're going to call back to that era of psychedelic rock you'd normally see some impassioned shredding or blaze of glory, and we sure as hell aren't getting that. But again, what's challenged discerning critics who still like her music is how she can make those questionable themes and framing seem seductive and inviting through moody elegance, which is one reason why I've wished she'd just go all out into bombastic melodrama... which also doesn't really happen here. This was where I had the hope Jack Antonoff would provide more momentum and flair to the production, and yet since he was unwilling to compromise the atmosphere he took a back seat, leaving Lana Del Rey firmly in her comfort zone for scattered results. Don't get me wrong, there are some striking or even beautiful moments here: the strings breaking into the subtle exasperation of the piano ballad that is the title track, similar to how they flesh out the cleaner acoustics of 'Mariners Apartment Complex', the aching melancholy of the lower strings on 'Love song', the tenuous balance between tenderness and some of the heavier smolder she's ever had on 'California' - easy album highlight - or even how 'The greatest' tries to be the big meaningful 70s power ballad and if it wasn't for how the melody weirdly feels reminiscent of ABBA's 'The Winner Takes It All' and Sam Smith's 'I'm Not The Only One' it could have worked. But on the flipside, I'm not going to ignore the questionable production choices, like how the vocal and percussion fidelity is never consistent, or how Lana del Rey still remains a limited singer, especially when she dips into her higher or falsetto range, or how this album has no concept of consistent momentum, especially at the end and most of which hits a brick wall on 'Fuck it I love you' that epitomizes most of these problems coming right after 'Venice Bitch'. And when you follow it with 'Doin' Time', a pretty rote Sublime cover that strips out all the grit and scratching - and keep in mind I've never liked Sublime in any capacity - it's a significant hurdle to get to many of the better songs on the album! And yet paradoxically, a song like the roiling, fractured elegance of 'Cinnamon Girl' flips many of those flaws into elements that work, even if the synth spurts get distracting, or how 'The Next Best American Record' tries to imitate the groove with a shattered, humidity that can't quite match 'California' right ahead of it.
But to shorten all of this - too late - I want to circle back to Lana Del Rey's statement that this is her, none of this is a persona, and it never has been. And for Norman Fucking Rockwell! at least, I believe her, and I'm not looking for any moralistic excuse to condemn her - frankly, I've grown past that, and her writing has grown as well. But that doesn't mean it's not performative, especially given the intimate scope of these stories channeled through the amplification of the iconography and music she embraces, and the dissonance comes in how much you believe the execution of those stories match their content, especially through the overheated melodrama that has always rang as her strongest lane. And thus with Norman Fucking Rockwell!, it's hit-and-miss, and for as much as it is framed as revelatory both to her and her world, she can't truly compromise that veneer, and I'm left thinking that on a song like 'Settle For Being Used', Karly Driftwood captured that raw, vulnerable picture of complicated femininity just as well, if not better. As did Lydia Loveless on 'Real', and Lori McKenna on 'Halfway Home', or Dessa on pretty much all of Chime or Neko Case did with Hell-On or Emily Scott Robinson did on all of Traveling Mercies. And thus... light 6/10, recommended most for the fans or the curious. And while I've probably said too much here... even if it was her point to leave the question in the air, why am I left feeling that Lana Del Rey didn't say enough?
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