It’s been a year of Lana Del Rey harkening back to 2012. And why shouldn’t she? It’s the year she came up in the mainstream, the year when Biden was still acceptable and sentient as vice president and the year, presumably, when the world actually ended (and what we’re all in now is some increasingly bad simulation—or so we tell ourselves for comfort). Del Rey’s “throwback vibe” to the year her debut album was released began with her headlining Coachella performance in April, during which she rode toward the stage on the back of a motorcycle (a nod to her “Ride” video), newly svelte and rocking long, honey-blonde hair. In effect, she very specifically recreated the body and hairstyle she had in 2012 in time for the show. As if that weren’t enough, Del Rey emphasized her point by projecting a hologram of herself onstage during “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it.” The hologram in question was wearing an updated version of the gown Del Rey sported during her forever infamous SNL performance on January 14, 2012 (the date her Coachella billboard called out when asking, in a parody of “Jesus freak” advertising, “Has anyone else died for you?”).
With her latest single (and her first of 2024), “Tough,” Del Rey continues her “Make 2024 2012 Again” campaign by pulling from “Summertime Sadness” and “National Anthem” mood boards (complete with a grainy, “home movie”-style look). Most especially the latter. But there is a touch of “Summertime Sadness” in terms of the “in nature” setting that serves as the backdrop for “Tough.” Someplace “down-home” in order to suit Del Rey’s impending “country music” transition (though this doesn’t sound like much of an indication of that). The location could be anywhere in the South, really, but Georgia seems the most likely milieu furnishing these backwater roads, considering Quavo’s ties to Atlanta. Wherever it may be, the “Anywhere USA” look of it is the point. And since Del Rey is determined to staying faithful to her Americana shtick, the intent of the video, co-directed by Wyatt Spain Winfrey (who has a few Migos videos under his belt as well), Quavo and Del Rey, is one that speaks to the “wide open with possibility” aura of the United States. Which, as many have seen plenty of in the past decade, is pure myth rather than reality. And it’s a myth that’s getting harder and harder to sell. Even so, it’s apparent that Del Rey still wants to. That she’s still holding tight to the part of her “Ride” monologue when she insists, “I believe in the country America used to be.”
Indeed, she lays her usual “selling America” angle on thick with one of the first images of the video homing in on an American flag. But not just any American flag—one with Del Rey’s effigy placed at the center and the caption “American Queen” underneath it. Clearly, Del Rey has been spending too much time with Kim Kardashian after shilling for Skims because it’s a decidedly Kardashian mentality to assume that the U.S. population is better off revering celebrities rather than trying to make politicians or other would-be “great minds” into figures that might be even remotely aspirational. No, instead, everyone knows by now that worshipping beneath the flag of fame is perhaps even more American than racism (while racism, in turn, is “as American as apple pie”).
And, talking of the R word, Del Rey’s unfortunate Instagram post from January of 2021 can’t help but come to mind with her latest “rapper” team-up. That was the word she used as a catch-all for Black people when she said, “My best friends are rappers, my boyfriends have been rappers” in a post promoting Chemtrails Over the Country Club, which she was sure to call out as having plenty of people of color on the cover, “without even trying to.” As she was adamant about declaring, she had simply always been “inclusive” in her work before it was chic/practically mandated if one wants to stay relevant in the entertainment industry. But few examples of Del Rey’s supposed “inclusivity” (as opposed to, say, appropriation—which runs rampant in something like her short film/extended music video, Tropico) spring to mind from those early years except for A$AP Rocky, who so generously agreed to appear as a modern-day JFK in Del Rey’s “National Anthem” video.
Apparently, this was the year he was on his white woman bullshit, for he was also dating Iggy Azalea before the two broke up in mid-2012 and he then went on to date Rita Ora (both women being examples of C-list musicians in the industry before A$AP graduated to the crème de la crème that is Rihanna). It didn’t seem to matter that he was romantically entwined, for he made it rather convincing that LDR was the Jackie to his Jack in this updated version of watching America crumble in real time.
In truth, “National Anthem” was far more honest, visually, than “Tough” could ever hope to be in terms of what each says about the United States. A country in perpetual decay. The signs of that decay can’t even be hidden by the “sunnier” portrayal of America—and rural America in particular—in “Tough.” For, right from the get-go, as Quavo pulls up in his Hummer (no fucks given about the environment, even still) to collect Del Rey, he clocks a sign on the fence that reads, “Posted No Trespassing Keep Out.” Not only does it smack of the kind of signage used during the heyday of Jim Crow laws to keep “coloreds” from entering certain spaces, but it also makes one shudder to think about what kind of red state bullshit the duo was willing to endure for the sake of this video’s production.
Del Rey then enters the frame in that angle/pose/facial expression that echo the ones she gave in “Summertime Sadness.” All of the sudden the two are embracing, getting right into trying to exude the kind of sexual chemistry that has gotten numerous media outlets speculating as to whether or not the two are more than just “musical partners” at this point in time. That same speculation would befall Del Rey and A$AP in the 2010s, with the latter admitting, “I first had had a crush on her from seeing her on the internet—I fell in love with her voice the first time I heard it. I probably heard it in July, August for the first time, I think it was ‘Blue Jeans.’ And from then on, I’m like, I love her!” Del Rey had already mentioned in an interview with Complex that A$AP was her favorite “rapper” (that word again). Over a decade later, that answer seems to have changed to Quavo, with the two sharing the kind of intimacy and sexual tension that “National Anthem” exuded.
But while “Tough” has the same meandering, plotless nature of other Del Rey videos from recent years (including “Norman Fucking Rockwell/Bartender/Happiness Is A Butterfly,” “Let Me Love You Like A Woman,” “Arcadia” and “Blue Banisters”), “National Anthem” was narrative and statement-heavy. Even “Summertime Sadness,” with its lesbian suicide plot, was as well—especially compared to this. What Del Rey seems to be saying, as usual, is that she lives in a willfully insulated bubble wherein America isn’t the festering turd it’s become, but a place of natural beauty to believe in. Quavo, for whatever reason (maybe sexual interest), is along for the ride—even though he’s the one driving the fossil fuel-emitting Hummer.
As for Del Rey, she’s been trying to manifest a collaboration with Migos for quite some time before Takeoff was shot dead in 2022. The next best thing for her, one supposes, is this: Quavo (maybe Cardi B wouldn’t have wanted Offset to work with her based on how “cozy” this video looks). And it seems Quavo was happy to let Del Rey take the wheel for the most part on lyrics, with the majority smacking of Del Reyisms such as, “Tough like the stuff in your grandpa’s glass” and “I’m cut like a diamond shinin’ in the rough”—this latter lyric not only being a roundabout tie-in to A$AP Rocky with its Rihanna nod (“Shine bright like a diamond”), but also a callback to her Marilyn-inspired inflection on “National Anthem” when she asks, “Um, do you think you’ll buy me lots of diamonds?” Indeed, as she sits in a meadow-like setting with Quavo sensually fingering his necklace, it feels like that’s the question she’s internally verbalizing.
In another round of scenes, Del Rey and Quavo sit on a porch, the latter in a rocking chair and the former sitting on his lap while strumming a guitar (again, it’s some loose part of her country rebrand). Around the two-minute-twenty-second mark, the video’s tack shifts into something decidedly “American Pie”-like—meaning the Madonna video from 2000 wherein director Philipp Stölzl shows scenes of “average” Americans throughout, often alongside Madonna dancing with unchoreographed gusto in front of a giant American flag (Madonna was touting that emblem of the U.S. long before Del Rey). Much of the video was, in fact, filmed in the Southern United States. Because that’s where people tend to aim their camera when they want to show the “real” America.
Del Rey and Quavo, too, proceed to show their viewers “slice of life” instants showcasing the same kinds of “average” Americans (though slightly less interesting than the ones Madonna drummed up). This includes a man mowing his lawn, two men lighting up cigars, a woman sitting on a chair with her pregnant belly exposed, a man’s entirely tattooed back, Lana standing next to a shotgun-toting man with a gray beard (more signs of her Republican nature) and a little boy rubbing his eyes while standing on the grass. In short, if this is America, it’s unclear why Del Rey and Quavo are doing their best to romanticize it. But hey, like LDR says, “Life’s gonna do what it does/Sure as the good Lord’s up above.” Except that “the Lord” being up above is hardly sure at all.
Parading the “iconography” of America—including a house with a giant cross proudly displayed on the exterior and a slew of Mack (or Mack-adjacent) trucks they pass by on the road—Quavo and Del Rey wander the South like a crimeless version of Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) and Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) in Badlands. And in the final scenes, they switch into a different vehicle: a red Chevy (“Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry”) pickup truck with dice hanging from the rearview mirror (very “LDR aesthetic” of course).
Del Rey’s “road obsession” has taken many turns (pun intended) over the years, and it’s certainly made her the “Queen of Cars” even over Charli XCX. The motif of constantly wandering in search of a sense of place is, to be sure, a decidedly American feeling. Thus, Del Rey sings, “Here, say where you come from/It’s not what you wanna do, it’s what you’re gonna do/Now, it’s no place to run.” Tapping into the idea of how Americans are taught to “make something of themselves,” regardless of where they’re from, Del Rey ignores the reality that where you come from does matter in terms of securing what the U.S. deems “prosperity.” Where and how you grew up affects everything about your life trajectory in the U.S. More and more, Del Rey is fond of perpetuating an image of herself as a “simple country girl” who grew up in poverty in Lake Placid. Hence the line, “If you come from where you come, then you were born tough.” Try telling that to someone like Del Rey’s “bestie,” Taylor Swift, who grew up in a comfortable, dream-supported environment (yet has the gall to say, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”). But the truth is, you’re not exactly tough if you come from a place like Scarsdale. Nonetheless, Del Rey wants to deny her own non-tough roots, therefore can’t see something like that (perpetuating her “pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” “lore” in a similar way on “Let Me Love You Like A Woman” when she announces, “I come from a small town, how ‘bout you?”). Plus, with Quavo by her side for assured “tough credibility,” Del Rey is certain no one will argue with her about that moniker.
And yet, a certain headline from The Cut in 2014 comes to mind when thinking about how LDR bills herself as “tough,” and that is: “Self-Proclaimed Gangsta Lana Del Rey Shops With Her Parents.” An act about as “gangsta” as going on a scenic nature drive, making idyllic stops along the way. But since “gangsta” is all about projecting the image of “toughness,” maybe Del Rey can still subscribe to it based on the scenes and people she’s associating with in “Tough.” And what’s more American than projecting an image built on smoke and mirrors?
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