Norman Fucking Rockwell!: Coexisting Hope & Despair
To me, a good Lana del Rey song would send me to sleep and give me edgy inspiration upon further examination. The next morning, as it usually turns out. It should come as no surprise that “The Next Best American Record” was the first song from Norman Fucking Rockwell! that I fell for — the nonsensical lyrics are fun to decode and the song always leaves me in the perfect slumber.
When “Mariners Apartment Complex” first dropped, I was as overwhelmed by the raving reviews as I was intrigued by the new, more atmospheric direction, as opposed to the gradual popification from Honeymoon to Lust for Life. The subsequent 10-minute “Venice Bitch” and “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it” continued to mark an unconventional rollout, but a one-year release campaign was still surprising. Once released, though, the album commanded massive praise. Critics have called it a “pop classic” and Lana “the next best American songwriter.” They also loved associating the album with the American dream and other aspects of the nation’s iconography, then slabbing on the label “Lana del Rey’s persona” across it. Now, it’s not that I’m not interested in the “nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger,” but I think the album is more personal than that, more personal to Lana and more personal to one’s own story. Personal love. Personal hope. Personal despair.
Love and pain continue to be intertwine in the album. “Like if you hold me without hurting me,” she sings on “Cinnamon Girl,” “you’ll be the first who ever did,” which furthers the dark and shattered love as depicted by “I’m a fuckin’ mess, but I, oh, thanks for the high life” in “Love song.” The pain is renewed in “Happiness is a butterfly”: “if he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt? I’m already hurt.” But beyond these painful moments, the record promises hope — namely on “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” where Lana admits she’s neither happy nor sad, but at least hopeful. “How to disappear” captures a similar sentiment:
The California sun and the movie stars
I watch the skies getting light as I write
As I think about those years
As I whisper in your ear:
I’m always going to be right here
No one’s going anywhere
It paints a comforting picture of yearning and promise — as if warpped in California sunset, reminiscing what the summer of 2019 was like and simultaneously dreaming of what the summer of 2020 could have been.
“California” is the more complete version of “The Next Best American Record,” with similar qualities and lyrics that actually tell a story this time. “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are, you don’t ever have to act cooler than you think you should” conveys, through the contrast between an extravagant welcome-back party and someone long gone, a message of carpe diem. Lana misses a lot of things in Norman Fucking Rockwell!: Long Beach, New York, the music. She misses a “crazy love” and someone who hates the heat and got the blues. Now in her thirties, she’s no longer the girl who writes about decadent youth and superfluous melancholy. The album is growth. Even if not the Best American Record, it would be her personal masterpiece, her Best American Record.
I’ve been thinking about Norman Fucking Rockwell! a lot lately. Partly because I need help falling asleep when days start to blend together; partly because the album feels especially present. Only now have I started to grapple the byproduct of this psychedelic sound, a world descending into chaos, a one last sentimental look back at what life used to be and what’s no longer there. The yearning for the past mirrors the urge for normalcy in a global crisis.
Yet it’s not just the despair that resonates with the current times, it’s also the hope. It’s getting warmer in Los Angeles (which makes me miss, somewhat, the chilly mornings when I had to wake up at 6 to attend Zoom University — how masochistic of me). Summer is coming, the best batch of loquat is ready for picking, the Costco line with six-feet-apart markers seems a bit shorter. After all, it’s not just you and me who are not going anywhere: “no one’s going anywhere,” as Lana famously said, “the culture is lit.”
“And if this is it, I had a ball.”