Lana Del Rey, like many looking for that “perfect” place in the U.S. that doesn’t exist, is a notorious flitter between the coasts. If not geographically, then at least mentally and in song format. For even from her comfortable perch in Los Angeles (if you prefer, you can think of her as living in the H of the Hollywood sign), she still can’t help but talk and reminisce about New York (hear: “The Greatest”). The city that “raised” her, as it is said often by the musicians who managed to become famous there. For if they didn’t hit the big-time, they likely wouldn’t be able to feel so warm and fuzzy toward the city that usually exhibits nothing but callousness to those who weren’t born affluent and/or with connections already.
In 2014, when Ultraviolence came out, Del Rey had already defected for the West, citing too much recognizablity in NYC. Usually, celebrities like to claim it’s the other way around: that they’re more anonymous in the “great” New York, a town that’s too “cool” to care about such “vacuous” things. But LDR was a different kind of celebrity—the kind who attracted Tumblrcore kids that might spot her on the sidewalks of the Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs. It was making her skittish enough to yearn for la vita Norma Desmond out in L.A. Plus, there’s no denying that the move to the West Coast was a boon for her creativity, giving us the strongest work from her oeuvre, including Norman Fucking Rockwell. Yes, she went all Joni Mitchell (and also befriended Joan Baez). Apparently, the state of California has that effect on people (except Taylor Swift, who seems capable of emulating Joni from any location). In addition to giving them the time, space and sense of “chill” to reflect on the past. Maybe that’s part of what has made Del Rey so capable of affectionate nostalgia for New York in lyrics like, “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…”
Of course, that’s the thing about New York: it will never feel how it did at the “peak” of whatever time you were living in it. Whatever “good vibes” you have radiating outward in favor of that era in your life, it will never be what it was, and likely wasn’t even as “fabulous” as you’re presently making it out in your head to be. Everything about New York is centered around chasing the past, grasping at a moment in time that can never be re-created. That’s how the city has managed to rest on its laurels for decades after its heyday without really doing much except continuing to decline/become a replica of every other American city. The very “cities” New Yorkers so love to look down upon. Many of them populating the West Coast. Derided for being a drought-ridden, constantly-burning purgatory with nothing resembling “culture.” As though a barrage of TikTokers using the city streets as their own personal playground is more cultural. Yes, if youth is wasted on the young, New York is wasted on everyone who lives there. Appropriately, Sloane Crosley put it best when she wrote, “New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty.”
In short, everyone is just looking to check off certain “I did that” boxes before getting back to their regularly-scheduled inebriation. Del Rey certainly knew that about the “Brooklyn set,” having skulked the streets of Williamsburg for her various gigs in the 00s and early 10s before it went full-tilt Condoburg. Appraising, with her writer’s eye, the very ilk that inspired the creation of a new blog (whether Tumblr or otherwise) every day.
That’s why, drenched in gentle sarcasm, Del Rey croons, “Yeah my boyfriend’s pretty cool/But he’s not as cool as me/‘Cause I’m a Brooklyn baby/I’m a Brooklyn baby.” The “millennials unite” sentiment was further accented by her repurposing of the line, “Talkin’ ‘bout my generation.” A very specific sect of it populating North Brooklyn, to be sure. The strain of people that could also declare, “Well, my boyfriend’s in a band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed/I’ve got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry/And my jazz collection’s rare, I can play most anything.” Perhaps what Del Rey didn’t account for was that the majority of these “hipsters” (a.k.a. millennials) would end up making the move to L.A. soon after her.
So much for her own private vita Norma Desmond (granted, everything can remain private when you have the cash to make it so). It’s been infiltrated by the same damn species she was essentially fleeing from in the first place. But you can’t run from yourself, now can you? You’re doomed to attract the same energy wherever you go. Yet for a brief blip when everyone was still so patently pro-New York (in a period called somewhere between Hurricane Sandy and a little bit after Taylor Swift became a tourism ambassador), Del Rey was ahead of her time in remarking upon the West Coast’s greater showcase of true individuality. Indeed, the entire West was founded on the concept of individualism. Breaking out, breaking free, pursuing a dream. In effect, all the things Del Rey wanted when she likely told that same archetype of a boyfriend she was referring to in “Brooklyn Baby,” “Down on the West Coast, I get this feeling like/It all could happen, that’s why I’m leaving/You for the moment, you for the moment/Boy blue, yeah you.” That, in fact, is why “Brooklyn Baby” appears before “West Coast,” a song marking her firm decision to veer away from the “BK life.”
And obviously, she’s been gone a lot longer than a “moment,” with Del Rey probably capable of running for office and winning somewhere in a Southern California town by now. After all, if Sonny Bono could do it… What’s more, it bears noting that Del Rey chose “West Coast” as the lead single for Ultraviolence, an overt sign in favor of her preference for said geographical location. She being among the few East Coastians to truly defect and never look back (save for an occasional “pop-in” for a photoshoot or the obligation of visiting family). And maybe the distance she cultivated from New York was what ironically created her own internal coast war. Seeming to side with California in the long-run as she reflected upon the “subculture” of what was then still referred to as “hipsters” (before that word became hopelessly antiquated) in “Brooklyn Baby.”
The same breed she would likely tell off regarding their contempt for “that L.A. shit,” “If you don’t like it, you can beat it/Beat it, baby.” Because you know all the New Yorkers who live in L.A. now are continuing to faux-seethe about how much better New York is (unless they’re like Miranda’s old friend, Lew, from Sex and the City, billed as having “lost his edge” for drinking the CA Kool-Aid). Trying their best to ignore that, when it comes to American towns, even NYC has fallen prey to the “everywhere is everywhere” phenomenon.
