Lana Del Rey’s America

A ll Lana Del Rey sings about is America. The six-time Grammy nominee, whose eighth album was released earlier this month, is the nation’s last great patriotic pop star. America used to captivate its musicians: From Frank Sinatra’s 1945 The House That I Live In — “The howdy and the handshake / The air a feeling free / And the right to speak your mind out / That’s America to me” — to Jimi Hendrix’s famous 1969 rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock — “I’m American, so I played it. . . . I thought it was beautiful,” Hendrix later told an interviewer — our nation’s frontier spirit has long captured the imagination of artists. But today’s popular art is entirely devoid of this joie de vivre. Even the cultural industry’s anti-Americanism seems dreary, bureaucratic, and played-out — more often a recitation of pre-written corporate lines than a genuine rebellion against the powers that be.

Del Rey is the exception to all of this. The 36-year-old’s breakout hit, a viral homemade music video for her 2011 single “Video Games,” was an early expression of the wistful kind of Americana that would come to define her brand. The single’s dreamy tone, which featured Del Rey’s operatic voice rising and falling over the swells of a background string quartet — “Singin’ in the old bars, swinging with the old stars / Livin’ for the fame / Kissin’ in the blue dark, Playin’ pool and wild darts / And video games” — is accompanied by a warm tapestry of fly-by vintage images that the singer had personally been collecting since she was 17 years old: fuzzy clips of two lovers speeding along an empty country road on a motorcycle, old shots of mid-century Hollywood celebrities, and grainy segments of small-town America. It is a feeling more than an articulable message, recognizable but not entirely accessible to words — a warm memory of an old lover, recollected in the quiet twilight of life. That’s Del Rey’s music. It’s Del Rey’s America, too; a poet’s America more than a politician’s.

Blue Banisters is Del Rey’s second studio album this year. March’s Chemtrails Over The Country Club was a characteristically restless patchwork of memories and characters, ranging in perspectives from a waitress in Florida (“White Dress”) to a lonely spurned lover in the Midwest (“Tulsa Jesus Freak”). Blue Banisters is more personal; the album is sung entirely from Del Rey’s own perspective, rather than those of the half-true, half-imagined identities that her music usually features. But its lyrics follow the same rhythms and themes as her traditional prose, reminiscent of a kind of Beatnik-style spoken-word poetry. Del Rey’s songs are Jack Kerouac’s On The Road put to music. “Honey, if you’re on fire,” she sings on Blue Banister’s “Thunder,” “just keep burning.”

Like the Beatniks’, Del Rey’s music longs for authenticity. But hers is informed not by an interest in utopia, but by a fascination with the romance of grungy day-to-day America. It grasps for normality — for a way to be more genuinely human. Rather than their airbrushed counterparts, her songs woo the underbelly. “Please don’t try to find me through my dealer / He won’t pick up his phone / Please don’t try my father either / He ain’t been home for years,” a deadbeat male lover, sung by Miles Kane, pleads over a seductive, parlor-style slow-jazz beat on “Dealer.” (“Why can’t you be good for something?,” an unusually forceful and hoarse Del Rey responds. “Not one shirt off your back.”) But the pain and ugliness of some moments accentuate the fondness and intimacy of others: “It’s a cruel, cruel world, but we don’t care/ ’Cause what we’ve got, we’ve got to share,” Del Rey sings affectionately to a child on “Cherry Blossom.”

Del Rey yearns for a more human way of life. The singer was born in June 1985, at the height of the Reagan era, coming of age in the brief burst of hubristic idealism between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. She was 16 on 9/11, 17 when U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, and 23 when the Dow Jones went into free fall. Her music shares the alienation and listlessness of her generation, and a distinct nostalgia for the warmer, less complicated America of yore. But it has none of the angry edges of the Millennial worldview. Del Rey does not resent the world that she was born into; she is captivated by it.

Despite years of speculation about Del Rey’s political sympathies — and a barrage of attacks from a professional critic class that sees the singer’s aesthetic presentation as unacceptably reactionary — her music’s response to questions of national identity does not fit cleanly into partisan boxes. At times throughout her career, Del Rey’s vision of what it means to be American has been happy-go-lucky — “You were like tall, tan, driving ’round the city / Flirtin’ with the girls like you’re so pretty / ‘Springsteen is the King, don’t ya think?’ / I was like ‘Hell yeah, that guy can sing,’” she crooned on the first verse of her 2012 hit “American.” Elsewhere, it’s been more tongue-in-cheek: “Money is the anthem of success / So before we go out, what’s your address?,” opened the first verse of “National Anthem,” off her breakout album Born To Die. At still other moments, there’s something darker and more melancholy. In her 2019 “Looking for America,” she sighs: “I’m still looking for my own version of America / One without the guns, where the flag can freely fly / No bombs in the sky, only fireworks when you and I collide / It’s just a dream I had in mind.”

On Blue Banisters, Del Rey is reflecting America as much as she is editorializing — speaking for rather than about our political moment. Brief references to current events pop up from time to time. “There we were, screamin’ ‘Black Lives Matter,’” she sings on “Text Book”; later, she muses, “There’s something in the air / The girls are running ’round in summer dresses / with their masks off, and it makes me so happy,” in “Violets for Roses.” But these moments are not so much explicitly political as they are an expression of a kind of poetic fancy with the solipsistic freedom of youth, from protests to passionate love affairs to children playing in a Los Angeles park.

Del Rey’s political ambiguity has long inspired conservatives’ curiosity. Her unapologetic embrace of womanhood, in particular, has been the subject of countless essays from right-leaning writers, even as it has made her an object of suspicion in the mainstream commentariat. “Del Rey’s confidence in her own femininity, her apathy towards contemporary feminist expectations of what she should aspire to, and her complaints about what has happened to expectations of men and masculinity in general may make her persona non grata to cultural and social elites, but it is precisely what endears her to a subset of her fans,” writes Ben Woodfinden in Law & Liberty. This is likely the reason for the sentimental overtones that permeate much of Del Rey’s music, a homesickness for a way of life — a way of being an American, a woman, a human being — that no longer exists, save for in small residual pockets of the heartland. That’s typified on Blue Banisters in the song “Arcadia,” a fictional town that serves as a not-so-subtle analogy for Middle America more broadly:

In Arcadia, Arcadia

All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries

That pump the blood that flows straight to the heart of me

America, America

I can’t sleep at home tonight, send me a Hilton Hotel

Or a cross on the hill, I’m a lost little girl

Findin’ my way to ya

Del Rey’s complicated love affair with her country — interspersing moments of ecstasy with the ache of heartbreak and rejection — is often communicated through her rocky romance with an anonymous man who she seems to be singing to throughout much of her eight studio albums. “I’m always singing about the same goddamn person,” she told an interviewer in 2013. At least on the surface, that is often the source of the sadness in her music — a sense of unarticulated loss written into the space between Del Rey’s lilting vocals and the paired-back pianos and strings that accompany them throughout Blue Banisters. But there’s something deeper in this sense of loss, something that transcends any one relationship. Whether or not the home that Del Rey’s music pines for can ever be recovered is an open question. “I’ll pray for ya / But you’ll need a miracle / America,” she sings in the final verse of “Arcadia.”

Nevertheless, a child-like, distinctly American playfulness — the rich joy of the wide-open road — pervades the singer’s songs and music videos. That distinct sensation of freedom is only possible against the backdrop of Del Rey’s melancholia, which is why her music often fluctuates between outpourings of uncontrollable happiness and moments of profound sorrow. On Blue Banisters, there is a sense that Del Rey is at least inching closer to accepting her place in the in-between. As she queries coyly on “Beautiful”: “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad?”