Lana Del Rey shows no signs of ceasing her Honeymoon promotion with a quick single and video follow-up to “High By The Beach.” The second official offering from her third full-length album is “Music To Watch Boys To,” which, appropriately, offers many scenes of Del Rey doing just that: listening to music while watching some blokes play basketball.
Opening with a typically aquatic motif (Del Rey is L.A.’s honorary daughter, after all), we see sultry swimming/dancing women beckoning in their own subtle way as Lana sits on a chaise lounge with decadent retro headphones on and two gramophones flanking her. The women in the sea are now relegated to a screen-like fish tank behind her–which kind of makes this song more “Music To Watch Girls To”-oriented. Then, at last, we behold a sweat-drenched muscular man with hard nipples slam dunking a basket–now we understand why Lana is acting so serene, as though receiving a spontaneous orgasm from the mere watching of these jocks.
The flower headphones on her ears are soon accented by her flower-embellished guitar strap, after which she joins her fellow ladies in the ocean tank for a swim. The image of a camera is often interspersed to accentuate the overt concept of voyeurism present throughout the narrative of the video.
Lana’s longing looks intensify as we see one of the many men of her dreams sporting a neck tattoo that says “West Coast” (also the name of her first single from Ultraviolence). The camera becomes increasingly prone toward objectification the more lascivious Lana gets, focusing on the two women swimming in the water kissing and then panning up from Lana’s chest to her face to put none too fine a point on the controlled sexual frenzy that’s taking place.
Sipping lemonade, brushing her hair and preening in front of the backdrop of an opening flower, the symbols of sexuality reach a crescendo during the last minute of the video, with one of the concluding scenes featuring a bevy of bouncing girls in bikinis. All in all, it is a continued honing of Del Rey’s West Coast manifesto.
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