2017 marked the first year that Lana Del Rey actually “deigned” to get political in her music. And yes, it took fellow quintessential white female singer-songwriter Taylor Swift even longer than that to “become political,” though never in song form, unless one wants to count “Only the Young”—which is shrouded in enough lyrical vagueness to not ruffle too many feathers. In any case, it wasn’t a coincidence that Del Rey’s thematic content started to veer more toward a part of the 1960s (her bread and butter for inspiration) that was rooted in protest songs.
So it was that the first single she released from her fifth album, Lust for Life, was “Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind.” Inspired by the threat of “tensions with North Korea mount[ing]” while she had “complex feelings about spending the weekend dancing” at Coachella, the single set the stage for the political overtones of the album that was to come (eventually released on July 21, 2017). And among the more overtly-referential-to-the-Trump-presidency songs on it is “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing,” which is placed at track eleven on the record and is part of a trifecta of songs during that portion of the album that speak to Del Rey’s “peacenik” aura at that time. A trifecta that has “Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind” as its beginning, “God Bless America – and All the Beautiful Women in It” as its middle and “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” as its “finisher.”
Taken together (and even singularly), this trio packs a powerful punch in terms of signifying the fraught political culture of the time. A time when Donald Trump was just taking over the presidency. Obviously, the political culture is even more fraught now, with Trump managing to become the ultimate comeback kid by overcoming the theoretical stigma of numerous felony convictions and continuing to spew the most heinous, racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, yet still securing the presidency in the 2024 election.
Somewhat fittingly, Del Rey delayed the release of her expected 2024 album, Lasso, which technically leaves room for her to comment on the recent apocalyptic events as she did on Lust for Life. But it seems unlikely that she will. Lust for Life was sort of her “blip” for doing that, as she quickly reverted back to her more personal, introspective style on the albums that followed: Norman Fucking Rockwell, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Blue Banisters and Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. In many regards, the unlikelihood that Del Rey will speak on (however “lightly”) the horrors of America as she did in 2017 is for the same reason that many people seem rather quiet right now: the whole thing is too unfathomable, too utterly heart- and soul-crushing to form words. And though Del Rey and others in a position of fame related to artistic creation were able to be more encouraging and hopeful back then, it’s much harder to attempt spreading such messages of hope now, when it’s so glaringly obvious that there is no such thing as justice, a Hollywood ending or any sense of right and wrong in this world.
However, at the time, Del Rey was able to soothe her listeners with a reminder that alluded to the chaos and destruction of the past—cataclysmic periods in history like World War II or the tumult of the Vietnam War backlash during the late 1960s. In other words, political shitshows are not without precedent. But it was more believable then, in 2017, to encouragingly nudge, “When the world was at war before/We just kept dancing/And we’ll do it again.” Despite the “baked-in optimism” of the song, Del Rey admitted to Flaunt magazine in May of ’17, “I actually went back and forth about keeping it on the record, because I didn’t want it there if it would make people feel worse instead of better. It’s not apathetic. The tone of the production is very dark, and doesn’t lead to a fucking happy feeling. And the question it poses: Is this the end of America, of an era? Are we running out of time with this person at the helm of a ship? Will it crash? In my mind, the lyrics were a reminder not to shut down or shut off, or just don’t talk about things. It was more like stay vigilant and keep dancing. Stay awake.”
Obviously, not enough people chose to stay vigilant or awake, otherwise Trump wouldn’t have “snuck” (glaringly so) back into the White House to take control with a vengeance. His reentry into the highest office of the land also comes at the final tipping point to make the right decisions on climate change action that will affect the Earth for centuries to come. Whether humans will be able to survive on said Earth for those centuries to come is looking less and less probable. Because Trump’s nepotism for all causes related to big business means gross policy shifts that favor the deregulation practices of his blueprint, Ronald Reagan. On steroids.
Even so, there are a few voices who have come out to keep encouraging Americans—especially American women—to stay hopeful. To not “give up the fight.” One such voice being Madonna, who has often incorporated the message of needing to “wake up” into her work (starting as “far back” as the 2000s). For example, it was on 2019’s “God Control” that she urged, “This is your wake up call/We don’t have to fall” and then offered the vehement chorus, “We need to wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.” No one heeded the message. Or at least not enough people did. And it’s going to be more difficult to heed any such messages in the spirit of what Del Rey was saying on “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing.”
This included her languorous entreatment, “Cut a rug/Lean into the fuckin’ youth/Choreo, we just want the fuckin’ truth (told by the fake news).” That parenthetical being, obviously, shade at Trump for calling truthful reporting “fake news” (a term he first “coined” in December of 2016). In the chorus she then dolefully drones, “Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?” Rather than totally gut-punching her listeners with the truth she claimed she wanted to hear, she answers, “No, it’s only the beginnin’/If we hold onto hope/We’ll have our happy endin’.” But there is no happy ending in real life. No “justice for all.” That Trump is about to put into place policies that will ensure not only this already unpleasant fact, but also make the ending (of humanity as we know it) far more miserable and painful than it needs to be is why it’s even harder in 2024 than it was in 2017 to buy into a song like this.
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