On the weekend of April 15-16 in 2017, the strange festival-turned-Instagram “influencer’s” wet dream that is Coachella found Lana Del Rey among the ranks of the audience (for some reason lowering herself to hanging out with Katy Perry, to boot–is it just because Del Rey can’t help but get wet for all things Californian?). At the same time, North Korea was taunting the easily tauntable Donald Trump with how much bigger and more advanced their ballistic missiles were. Trump, so easily susceptible to another dictator talking about his phallic symbolism being more powerful, responded by further provoking North Korea with phrases like, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
In essence, it was a classic insistence of a small-dicked man insisting his dick is bigger than another small-dicked man’s. As such, many U.S. citizens suffered the anxiety-inducing effects of their overtly flirtatious in its tenseness back and forth. Del Rey was just one such citizen who, at the very least, in all her white Catholic schoolgirl privilege, saw fit to acknowledge the inner struggle of partying it up among the drug-addled as a repeat of her favorite era–the 60s–played out like the Cuban Missile Crisis anew. As such, she stated at the time, “I find it’s a tightrope between being vigilantly observant of everything going on in the world and also having enough space and time to appreciate God’s good earth the way it was intended to be appreciated.”
Since appreciating God’s good earth obviously means consorting with the basic bitches of Coachella, Del Rey offered the universe in exchange for having a fun time that weekend as “the world was at war” a little ditty she was inspired to write while watching all the “kids” around her. Thus, she stopped on the side of the road to Instagram the germinal process of coming up with the song that would transform into the most throwaway track of Lust for Life, “Coachella-Woodstock In My Mind.” In that earnest a capella way that only Del Rey can exhibit in her video posts, she delivered us the lines, “I’d trade it all for a stairway to heaven/I’d take my time as I climb up to the top of it/I’d trade the fame and the fortune and the fuckin’ legend/I’d give it all away if you’d give me just one day to answer one question/I’d give it all away if you’d give me just one day to answer one question.” It is at the end of her ditty that she pans to the towering sequoias of California to remind us about “God’s good earth” again. Thus it was there, on State Route 18, that Del Rey had a vision of utopia as only an honorary hippie-dippy Californian can.
Cut to just over two years later and Del Rey still has her political inspiration mode down to a science with a new offering that has arisen in the wake of the shoot ’em up “wild wild west” terrorism of the past weekend, in which the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton have everyone in the U.S. convinced that is the availability of guns that is at the core of this, to politicians, “pesky little issue.” This time, the caption to her video was: “Hi folks came back early from Montecito with my brother this morning and asked Jack Antonoff to come into town because I had a song on my mind that I wanted to write. Now I know I’m not a politician and I’m not trying to be so excuse me for having an opinion–but in light of all of the mass shootings and the back to back shootings in the last couple of days which really affected me on a cellular level I just wanted to post this video that our engineer Laura took 20 minutes ago. I hope you like it. I’m singing love to the choruses I recorded this morning. I’m going to call it ‘Looking for America.'”
The title itself suggests that maybe, if we all squint hard enough, we can still find some semblance of what that concept–that abstraction–used to mean. That if we all look into our hearts and realize America is, to quote Miranda July, me and you and everyone we know, maybe we can all come together once and for all and truly put the “united” in United States. And that’s nice, even if totally naive in the same way as Kendall Jenner participating in a Pepsi commercial that posited police would calm down at Black Lives Matters protests if only someone handed them a Pepsi.
Just as was the case with “Coachella-Woodstock In My Mind,” California plays heavily into the core of the song as Del Rey opens with the line, “Took a trip to San Francisco/All our friends said we would jive/Didn’t work, so I left for Fresno/It was quite a scenic drive/Pulled over to watch the children in the park/Used to only worry about them after dark.” Showing her evolution of just how into California a California transplant can get, she mentions Fresno. Fresno. No, this isn’t just some passing love affair with the state–this is forever. And so is her commitment to the possibility of peace. Alas, we all saw how that worked out for John Lennon.
As she worries over “the children” in “Looking For America,” so, too, does she on the precursor to it, fearfully lamenting, “What about all these children/And what about all their parents…And what about all their wishes/Wrapped up like garland roses/’Round their little heads/I said a prayer for a third time.” Although it’s lovely to see that she can turn the pain of a nation into a pretty song yet again, one might do well to warn her (and those who can’t help but swoon over her flower child-infused message), “You can’t always get what you want.” But if you try sometimes, you get what you need–which is, God willing, this song on a bonus track version of Norman Fucking Rockwell.
