{"id":12091,"date":"2021-08-31T10:53:56","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T09:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=12091"},"modified":"2021-08-31T10:53:56","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T09:53:56","slug":"nightmaring-america-a-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/08\/31\/nightmaring-america-a-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Nightmaring America: A Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a number of years now, I\u2019ve been convinced (too fervently, in the opinion of some of my friends!) that Lana Del Rey ranks among America\u2019s most challenging and skillful of contemporary wordsmiths: a singer-poet with a unique (and often unsettling) talent for cultural imagining.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stylish, intelligent, irreverent, and vulnerable, her music packs a poetic punch, while also drawing on traditions of literature, film, and popular song, ranging from Bruce Springsteen\u2019s glimmering highways of folk-rock to the Beat generation\u2019s boundary-breaking visions of an embodied (and renewed) American spirit.<\/p>\n

What \u201cI really got from [Allen] Ginsberg was that you can tell a story [by] painting pictures with words\u201d, Del Rey has said<\/a><\/span> of her early song-writing practice: \u201cIt just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry\u201d, as a means of personal self-definition. The result has been a body of literary-musical work at once socially subversive and emotionally profound.<\/p>\n

If Arthur Penn<\/span><\/a> could envisage Bonnie and Clyde as icons of a generalised counter-cultural romance in the mid-sixties, painting the seductions of sexual liberation against a lavish panorama of eruptive killing, Del Rey\u2019s albums adopt the motifs and then test the limits of that project (and projection), weaving the visceral mythologies of youthful passion and big dreams into a tapestry, scorched and frayed at the edges, of insidious and often compulsive \u201cultraviolence\u201d. \u201cHe hit me and it felt like a kiss\u201d, simmers her song of that name.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LbT30a7U0Cs<\/p>\n

And lest we mistake such provocations for a merely personal fetish, we\u2019re reminded of America\u2019s own deep-running attachment to such obsessive fantasies. \u201cBlessed is this union\u201d, Del Rey lilts: \u201cI\u2019m your jazz singer, \/ And you\u2019re my cult leader, \/ I\u2019ll love you forever.\u201d On \u201cthe dark side \/ of the American dream\u201d, harm can seem heavenly, and the visions of art become entangled, intimately, with the realities of pain: Ultraviolence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Some critics have objected to this album, interpreting it (and her work more broadly) as a glorification of domestic and patriarchal abuse. Others have accused Del Rey herself of misogyny, infantilising her female personae and reinforcing an already pernicious culture of male intimidation and exploitation against women. For all their persistence, however, these critiques frequently misread (or miss entirely) the complexity of cultural portraiture that Del Rey is attempting.<\/p>\n

Del Rey\u2019s back catalogue stands as a tour-de-force in self-invention, but also offers a subtle (and disturbing) diagnosis of the society she claims, always, as her own \u2013 \u201clike an American.\u201d \u201cElvis is my Daddy, Marilyn my Mother\u201d, she says, in an artistic gestalt<\/em> both parodic in its appropriations and compelling, in its assurance: \u201cJesus is my bestest friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9hCX86y8a9w<\/p>\n

In the USA, that most image-saturated and fame-hungry of republics, Del Rey is a symbol striving to become a myth \u2013 in which we see ourselves in a new light, dreamily nightmared. \u201cEvery time I close my eyes\u201d, she sings (partly in tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald), \u201cIt\u2019s like a dark paradise.\u201d To condemn Lana Del Rey, the singer posits, would be akin to renouncing America itself, love it or loathe it.<\/p>\n

Del Rey, of course, famously featured on the score of Baz Luhrmann\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em>, crooning a two-dimensional, Daisy-esque plea to be loved forever \u201clike a little child.\u201d In its complicated glamour and wounded awareness of the pitfalls and attractions of \u201cburning at both ends\u201d, however, her work may be seen to inherit and examine (with an equal intensity) those same concerns dramatised by Fitzgerald, not to mention Enda St Vincent Millay<\/a><\/span>, the originator of that smoky apothegm:<\/p>\n

My candle burns at both ends;<\/em>
\nIt will not last the night;<\/em>
\nBut ah, my foes, and oh, my friends\u2014<\/em>
\nIt gives a lovely light!<\/em><\/p>\n

There has always been more of Gatsby (whose most usual reiteration has resembled Don Draper in Mad Men<\/em>) than Daisy in Del Rey\u2019s song of herself, despite what her detractors may suggest. Like her, Fitzgerald\u2019s titular everyman is, fundamentally, nobody special, who created the name, wealth, identity, and charisma he is mythically remembered for: something from nothing, and in his case, all for a long-gone lover, out of the past. Lana Del Rey likewise is a carefully curated, highly stylised, all-encompassing fiction (invented by Elizabeth Grant) \u2013 a romance, but one at the same time more palpably real than pop music, her chosen genre, can traditionally contain.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a comparable sophistication of psychological portraiture in the work of both figures. The triumph of Fitzgerald\u2019s late masterpiece, Tender is the Night<\/em>, is not the protracted revelation of Dick Diver\u2019s inner life and escalating crisis, which so fills the novel, but the later, briefer revelation of Nicole\u2019s astute ability to see and dissect the manipulations and (self-)deceptions of her magnetic husband for what they are. Unbeknownst to him, she notes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

[how] something was developing behind <\/em>[his] silence, behind the hard, blue eyes <\/em>[…] it was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface. <\/em>[She saw now that] his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Del Re<\/em>y\u2019s music shines with similar moments of life-altering clarity, seeing in the heroic other she once loved the havoc of destructions he, or their relationship, has become. \u201cBut I can\u2019t fix him, can\u2019t make him better, \/ I can\u2019t do nothing about \/ His strange weather\u201d. Her songs are dramas of mutual recognition and breakdown, of shared compulsions and irrevocable severance, or what Robert Lowell called (in his own poetry) Life Studies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is typical of Del Rey, moreover, that she can cite \u2013 too blithely, in the view of some critics \u2013 both Sylvia Plath (in \u201cHope is a dangerous thing…\u201d) and Billie Holiday (in \u201cThe Blackest Day\u201d) as inspirations for her own work, which also includes a cover of a track made famous by Nina Simone, \u201cThe Other Woman\u201d. \u201cI contain multitudes\u201d, she has said, quoting Walt Whitman \u2013 and it is perhaps this audacious hybridity that generates the aura of authentic originality that surrounds her work.<\/p>\n

Whitman himself is a resplendent ghost, looming at the margins of Del Rey\u2019s amatory vision. \u201cI Sing the Body Electric\u201d is a direct quotation from his poetry, while \u201cMusic to Watch Boys To\u201d might be taken as a riff on that section of\u00a0 \u201cSong of Myself\u201d<\/a><\/span> in which a woman (a stand-in for the author) experiences a sensation of powerful erotic arousal when watching \u201cTwenty-eight young men bathe by the shore\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Walt Whitman.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Del Rey\u2019s song, similarly, is suffused with sexual desire \u2013 albeit prefaced by the vital, and conscious, assertion, \u201cI know what only the girls<\/em> know\u201d (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n