A Literary Analysis of Lana Del Rey in Lyric Essay
By Stuti Jane, Trailblazer Blog Writer
I've often said that Lana Del Rey can switch faces as quickly and effortlessly as she can switch albums. It's as if one persona, one person is not enough for her, and her desire is to capture the entire world in one lifetime. In fact, that's exactly how it feels listening to Lana: caught between two worlds, fiery and passionate, burning, and the hollowness of never truly being in either.
I feel that Lana’s music captures the coexistence of despair and euphoria, the two extremes so loud in their collision that it feels startling, sudden, and far too bright. This is not a peaceful reconciliation: it is violent, dangerous, and all powerful. It captures a feeling so much bigger than yourself, you feel it could wrap the whole universe.
A carefully constructed, melancholic dreamworld, Lana strips together feeling after feeling, reference after reference, image after image, until she has an entire world of her own.
Lana once said that she feels a connection to visual art like no other; one she’s never felt through music. In fact, her songs themselves feel like a series of visuals, something I can see clearer as a movie than as a song. She has a cinematic, almost surreal connection to the visual, an ability to paint pictures with music so vividly, so lifelike, that I can almost feel like I’m in a theater. Her obsession with aesthetics, with looks, is not a reflection of her tokenization, but rather her connection to the theatrical.
Constructing her own, soapy and heavily melodramatic and melancholic version of Old Hollywood and cinema through mysterious alludes and literary references, Lana effectively revolutionized this aesthetic. With Lana's dark hair, chopped hair, somber eyes, and signature cherry red lips, Lana allowed herself to become a muse, not a character. She became a background figure for the story to take place, a tool.
Lana Del Rey’s world is carefully painted, stylized: I imagine it to be somewhat like Norman Rockwell’s. It is immersed in her feelings, painted by them, as if the events and words are colors, are she mixes them together to create the perfect shade. There is always this sense of dreaminess, of airiness about the works, as if she is somewhere far, far, away, not fully of this earth.
Her debut album, born to die, is perhaps the most visually intense: striking, unique, and entirely foreign. The lyrics themselves are pictures : blue jeans/white shirt, drinking cherry schnapps in the velvet night, a dark paradise, wreathed in melodrama and motion. It gives the sensation of wind, of whiplash, playing like an old mafia movie, or an old western: laced with Americana and Wild West references, a thrillingly fast tale of gangsters, drugs, and doomed romance. Her words are eerily specific, describing her leather belt, buttoned blouse, red lips and cigarettes. This is a technique we see often in Lana’s work, her ability to draw around the picture, to describe everything but the thing itself, to make the emotion more intense, more intimate. It seems to be a picture of a longing to be free, perhaps giving up everything to be, only to realize you have been trapped in your new life as well.
The Lolita references, while seemingly overtly intense and slightly troubling, seem to be more clear on a rewatch: the tragedy of the piece, of a character that grew up too fast and too violently. “She says you don’t wanna get this way, “ she croons, “famous and dumb at an early age.” Carmen seems to provide backstory, provide a sense of depth to the work, while Dark Paradise most clearly explains the work: describing a world so horrifying, so sorrowful yet so deathly beautiful, she feels unable to move on from either life. Grief, she says, is the one reminder to what you’ve lost, the beauty there once was.
Off to the Races is the most explicit reference to Lolita (yes, even more so than the song Lolita itself) and interestingly enough, also the most visual and descriptive of the pieces, the only one in which we are given a full and sufficient narration. Her intention, we can only guess, but I do feel that it almost brings this storyline to the fullfront, allowing us to understand a terrible (if not truly her fault) decision, before walking us through the psychology behind this seemingly nonsensical belief system.
Video Games is gorgeous, descriptive yet just vague enough to provide a sense of doom, a sense of horror to what was already a ruined love affair. And in many times during her music, during a hush or a promise of love, there is a note of desperation, of wistfulness in her voice, of grief.
“Will you still love me when I’m young and beautiful?” she ponders with a dreamy lilt. Unfortunately, she already knows the answer to the question despite her hushed vocal declaration “I know you will,” as if she’s clinging to false hope. —I.K.
Paradise is a slight shift, as if the story remained the same, but the setting changed. It feels like a continuation of Born to Die, perhaps providing less context and continuing on the same trajectory, and we wouldn’t know until later albums how much we would miss this version of her music. Yayo is perhaps our first sign of a later evolution of style, one first glimpsed during Video Games. It’s Gods & Monsters, though, that truly makes this album worth listening, hearing the pain in her voice as she describes “her innocence lost.” It feels like a song about survival more than anything else, ( “me and God/we don’t get along/so now I sing” ) and what you lose doing so, describing herself in the beginning as an angel, but one who found herself living with monsters. “This is heaven, what I truly want,” she sings, before pausing ever so slightly to add, in a helpless tone, “it’s innocence lost.”
If Born to Die were an explosion, then NFR is a serenade; longing, wistful, and yearning, it feels like a dream or a distant memory, sweetened with nostalgia. It truly sounds like a painting by Norman Rockwell himself: a colorful, watercolor fantasy. The sadness and joy blur together into one bittersweet hug, a memory that’s faded and grown a halo with time.
This is what Lana Del Rey is at her most authentic: a long, 9 album love letter to the feeling of ecstasy during grief. Pain, as I often like to note, somehow makes everything feel brighter, stronger. It’s the coming back to life, the giving up that drug, that hurts.
The most well known album of Lana’s, Ultraviolence, is a jazz powered journey that is perhaps most clearly a product of music and not of paint. Lana’s experimental abilities truly come into focus, as her ability to not only mix genres but to entirely invent them becomes truly apparent. The album seems strangely still, colorless, but not in a negative way; rather, it is the only one of her albums that seems to focus on sound, not texture or color. Dreamy yet gritty, unaffected yet explicitly sad, Ultraviolence is perhaps the easiest to decode, and the least subtle in its allusions to trouble and abuse.
Lana is, of course, guilty of romanticizing her pain, but who isn’t? I often like to say there are two worlds that I’ve lived in, the human one and the one of desperate people. And in the latter, it’s like rules are gone, dead. You are incapable of seeing or feeling light, and your only way of seeing beauty is in the blackness.
But there is a danger to romanticizing her work without fully understanding it. I will always stand by the notion that it is not pain that Lana seeks to glamourize, but rather understand, and that beauty can be found wherever there is emotion: painful or not. This does not make that pain worth striving for, but rather the ability to feel emotion clearly and without static, the ability to love beyond bounds, the ability to lose and feel loss.
