For a long time, it seemed as though, like all of us (or at least those with any creative sensibility), Lana Del Rey was trying to get as far as she could from the place where she grew up. Hence, an allegiance to California, specifically Los Angeles, that would pervade the majority of her records after Born to Die. Although the New York City of her twenties would come to be a place of myth in so many ways as the result of an unavoidable cocktail of sentimentality and nostalgia for a moment in time that can never really be re-created once one has transitioned into her thirties, it didn’t appear to be able to pull her back with the allure of the “community of artists” she had originally been seeking there. The one that she had instead found in L.A. Along with the privacy and solitude she craved for her “muse.” A muse that comes in all forms (most predictably, painting) in the “Ride”-esque “double video” that is “Fuck It I Love You” and “The Greatest” (which surely has to be a nod to one of LDR’s greatest inspirations, Cat Power).
Overtly explaining her 2012 departure from New York, Del Rey suddenly expresses the notion that it’s not all golden sunshine living out west in singing, “So I moved to California‚ but it’s just a state of mind/It turns out everywhere you go‚ you take yourself‚ that’s not a lie.” Someone as well-traveled as Del Rey ought to know. Yet the more one travels, the less in touch she becomes with herself anymore. Whether she’s doing it for the thrill, the pure enjoyment or as a constant means of escape. Subverting pastiche as she so often likes to do, Del Rey peppers in the classic pop lyric, “Dream a little dream of me” in between demanding, “Make me into something sweet/Turn the radio on, dancing to a pop song/Fuck it, I love you.” The sweetness of the past blending with the uncouthness of the present, as it were. One spent in an L.A. “in flames.”
Still, despite its current crumbling state, there are some things about California that never change regardless of epoch–like it’s surfing and skating stereotype, both of which Del Rey cashes in on in several scenes of the first half of the Rich Lee-directed video. Her once clear-cut love affair with the Golden State is at odds with statements that address herself as though she’s a drug-addled dauphine watching her physical self detached as her spirit floats above her body, evinced by: “You moved to California, but it’s just a state of mind/And you know everyone adores you/You can’t feel it and you’re tired.” It wouldn’t be that far out of the realm of possibility considering all the times she refers to drug use in her work, including yet another nod to heroin (apart from her 2017 song, “Heroin”), “shoot up my veins” and “if I wasn’t so fucked up, I think I’d fuck you all the time.” Her use of the word “neon” also alludes to her days of drinking and a love of the surreal quality that comes with the drunk-eyed tendency to see everything in blurred lights (and not just the glowing ones outside the bar). With this in mind, it’s only natural that the California sky in “Fuck It I Love You” is colored in a hallucinatory absinthe neon green that has apocalyptic undertones, to be sure. Even her eyeliner as she takes the stage of some dive is punctuated with a pop of neon green above the standard black line. With a literal neon sign above her that reads “Blues Nights” (with neon green and pink palm trees to her left and right). And as any LDR fan knows, blue is a constant color of evocation in so many of the chanteuse’s songs.
The type of blueness in “Fuck It I Love You” isn’t sad, so much as almost grudgingly appreciative of the Pacific in all of its oceanic blueness (for maybe California itself is what she’s saying “Fuck It I Love You” to). Which is why the sense of foreboding that underpins the song feels particularly weighty, with one instant of Del Rey slung over her muscly beach surfer’s back while on the board giving way from fun to terror as she points in fear at something in the sky. We never see what it is. But we do see the heavens grow increasingly radioactively green and Del Rey looking more fraught before she and her co-surfer crash and fall onto the floor of the green screen, dipping us back into the very real water to drown before transitioning to a new seaside location for “The Greatest.” The shores of Long Beach and its port, to be specific.
More overt in its melancholy and yearning for a New York past that can’t be replicated in California, this track finds Del Rey remaining at the same bar in between traipsing through the famed storage containers housed within the Long Beach Terminal. She’s wistful and ruminating, recalling that moment in her past she just can’t seem to shake when alcohol was her entire world, hence the phrases, “Don’t leave‚ I just need a wake-up call/I’m facing the greatest/The greatest loss of them all/The culture is lit and I had a ball/I guess I’m signing off after all.” Signing off from alcoholism, ergo New York, that is. For it has to be said that to remain in New York while also sustaining some semblance of sanity is to become an alcoholic (which seems antithetical to staying sane, and is). Her lament over not only losing the sweet release of the drink is directly tied to losing New York. To ultimately leaving it to find that final death blow sense of calm.
Throughout her peacenik period in California, Del Rey still can’t seem to quell the thoughts, “I miss New York and I miss the music/Me and my friends‚ we miss rock ‘n’ roll/I want shit to feel just like it used to.” Well, alas, it can’t–and hasn’t, if you’ve noticed Del Rey hanging out with The Pastels that populate her Instagram. To this point, she, at the very least, admitted to being a basic, copping to Billboard, “Oh, I am! I’m actually only that. I’ve got a more eccentric side when it comes to the muse of writing, but I feel very much that writing is not my thing: I’m writing’s thing. When the writing has got me, I’m on its schedule. But when it leaves me alone, I’m just at Starbucks, talking shit all day.” However, to console her New York lack while talking shit at Starbucks instead of on the Bowery with the homeless (who have since been evicted by whatever condo or high-rise is setting up shop next), one thing that seems universal on both of the “best coasts” of the U.S. are hipster jukeboxes with the likes of Bon Iver and The National on its rotation. Mercifully, Del Rey flashes us other options as well, including Janis Joplin’s “Kozmic Blues,” Dennis Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blues” (pointed, and, again with the fucking blue), Sublime’s “Santeria” and, duh, “Doin’ Time,” David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and “Life on Mars?” (also name checked in the song just like Dennis Wilson), Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye” and “Grace,” Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” (yet another song Lana has covered), Ritchie Valens’ “Now You’re Gone,” Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “Yesterday When I Was Young.”
But these songs are not enough to soothe her, to make her forget that thing she’s lost. That irreplaceable feeling from her past. Exiting the bar (with a suggestive neon phrase outside that urges, “Eat More Fish”), Del Rey passes a boat called Beach Carnage. It’s still no match for the one she ultimately boards, called Wipeout. The latter of which can only be yet another allusion to that time in her early history when she took a tumble down the rabbit hole in her lust not for life, but for drugs. In riding Wipeout at the early hours of dawn, Del Rey makes a symbolic declarative statement that she has conquered her once overarching demon (alcohol, and, by extension, New York) and made it her (Venice) bitch. This could likely be why she’s fresh out of fucks forever, a prime example being her recent candor about her lackluster attention to detail to her once grandiose album artwork, telling Billboard, “‘Every time my managers write me, ‘Album art?,’ I’m just like, send!’ she cackles, pantomiming taking a selfie. ‘And they just send the middle finger emoji back to me.’ Thus, we have our explanations for the artwork to the singles “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but i have it” and “Doin’ Time.”
Before that boat ride, though, let us cut back to the bar, where Del Rey perspectively looks down at us while continuing to stare at the song choices on the jukebox, flashing us some kind of arcane glance of self-realization. Maybe she’s made peace with the loss of New York. Both as she knew it and in the present, thanks to her ostensible lifelong commitment to the West (bitch, can’t even go to any other places on the East Coast besides deliberately off the beaten path Jones Beach for her Norman Fucking Rockwell Tour, sparing all the dates for CA and the Pacific Northwest, therefore, by default, Vancouver). Giving in to giving up that part of herself she still romanticizes, Del Rey ends up serving drinks behind the bar (American flags, of course, peppered behind her in the background). For if she can’t get joy from alcohol anymore, at least she can give it.
Yet altruism isn’t always at play in “The Greatest.” Even if “maliciousness” is only very subtle, it comes in Del Rey wearing a somewhat offensive jacket that reads “LOCALS ONLY” on the back of what will now surely be her sold as tour merchandise “Venice ocean wave” jacket. For with these words, Del Rey flouts the idea that she herself is not part of the influx of gentrification that has left Los Angeles as culturally bereft as her very own New York City. In this regard, maybe it’s no wonder she’s become a schizo. For both cities are, at this point, pretty much equally shitty. Luckily, she’s rich, so it’s harder to notice.
