In the last of the fourteen songs on her album "Norman Fucking Rockwell", Lana Del Rey sounds as timeless as ever. Only one piano accompanies her on "Hope Is a Dangerous Thing For a Woman Like Me - But I Have It", we even hear the pedals crack softly. The chord progression is familiar, Lana Del Rey often uses it. Even on the same album - "Mariner's Apartment Complex" begins with this harmony. Many know her from the dark love song "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak from 1989.
Del Rey makes it slower than Isaac. This reinforces the impression of danger. Little is as resistant in late capitalism as taking out speed. And the last song reminds us once again that the artist also paints a new self-portrait with the new album: She is now a poet. She makes many words. Maybe the instrumentation is so sparse and the songs so long: Never before have the pieces been so much vehicle for the presenter.
With the hit producer Jack Antonoff Del Rey has designed long songs, "Venice Bitch" reminds at the end of German Krautrock and lasts almost ten minutes. Antonoff, who also produces for Taylor Swift and Lorde, subtly orchestrates. Piano, acoustic guitars, the electric ones come out without the fat amplifier sound. There are a few strings, gentle winds, some old electronics. The audio upgrade standard meets the highest demands. But Del Rey is more than music.
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Pop icon Del Rey: She is now a poetHer lyrics stage a turn towards a shirt-sleeved feminism. For the Californian siren this is somewhat surprising - the feminism, not the Volksnahe.
Late youth as an alcoholic
Del Rey sings about her late youth as an alcoholic - so far, so well known. But she compares in "Hope is a Dangerous Thing ..." with the writer Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963 voluntarily from life. Plath, famed above all for her poetry, is an icon of feminist poetry because, despite the pain, she was also able to express the highest sensual pleasures. Never be the only victims of sexist oppression, always remain creator.
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Lana Del Rey
Norman Fucking Rockwell!
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Vertigo Berlin
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EUR 17.39
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Even the title song conjures not only the man as an outsider and sharp types. "Norman Fucking Rockwell" is about the self-pity of a bad poet, who - after all - is pretty good in bed. The proper name does not appear in this song, Norman Rockwell appears only in "Venice Bitch", the ten-minute, an ode to sexual intercourse. One can ask oneself whether the enjoyment of female subjugation is self-empowering or at least retrogressive.
Incidentally, Norman Rockwell was an American magazine illustrator who idealized the figure of the average American and his family. "Paint me happy in blue / Norman Rockwell", Del Rey sings. Blue means sad, as paradox too happy - but blue is also the color of the working class in blue man , the blue collars . Feminism from the factory that no longer exists.
The gangster bride of pop becomes political
Often Del Rey has a reputation as an anti-feminist. Too much American average idyll, too conventional gender image. A kind of female Bruce Springsteen, but without his sense of mission. In late 2011, she became the gangster brat of Pop, who told in the Polaroid filter of the dark side of the American dream. It was called retro. The new album shows how short this diagnosis reached then.
It was the time when everyone really had a smartphone for the first time, monitoring each step. And Del Rey was the first singer to dream of footsteps in the dark again, of the life before the compulsion that she had, as much glamor as it had to be, shamelessly romanticized. But after all, she dreamed of a little more freedom, and less control, which is rapidly increasing in digitization.
Anyone who has done more than holidays in the US and not only in the coastal metropolises, knows the European astonishment about the pronounced American longing, not to be regulated. They are left and right of the middle. Lana Del Rey's nostalgia referred to her lack of nostalgia for a lack in the present. But she was always aloof from political positions. This time is over now.
The double video for the two songs "Fuck it I Love You & The Greatest" reveals that even the most out-of-date nostalgia can no longer avoid the polarized present. First, it's about the delimited Californian feelings in the face of the ocean and after the consumption of heroin. But "The Greatest" then tilts in pure crisis diagnostics, in the insight of their own powerlessness before climate change. Or in front of Kanye West, who supports Trump. The siren does not sing for everyone anymore.