Few performers have seemed as paradoxical in 2010s pop quite like Lana Del Rey. Few have romanticized the past with as much thoroughness as her. It’s a topic that used to provide heaps of scrutiny on whether she was, in fact, a “genuine” artist. She was going under a stage name, swooning over abusive men, and quoting Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Efforts to be billed as “The Gangster Nancy Sinatra” was a marketing calamity whose notoriety was only outpaced by an infamous Saturday Night Live appearance that kept her off late night TV for nine years. As far as immediate success goes, “Born to Die” had pitted her as a one trick pony with one Rolling Stone critic asking to fire her collaborators. In the age of poptimism and the good vibes of The Obama Administration, she was glibly singing about “Summertime Sadness.” Was she the progressive role model audiences deserved, or just terribly misunderstood?
If “Ultraviolence” is deserving of any 10th anniversary commemoration, it came with two highly publicized incidents. During the Grammy Awards, Best Album winner Taylor Swift invited her on stage and declared Lana Del Rey as one of the most important voices of her generation. By the time she headlined Night 1 of Coachella 2024, she played not only to a packed room but was accompanied by adoring fan Billie Eilish.
Given her love for the past, Lana Del Rey being ahead of her time seems completely nonsensical. And yet as Eilish swooned over her during a duet of “Video Games,” it was clear that efforts to axe her had failed. A lot of the performers who deemed her irrelevant have mostly faded and, in their place, a new generation anticipating every release. Even with limited radio exposure, she has become one of the defining voices of her generation. By following her own muse, she ended up creating a new Top 40 sound that may have not been clear to the party rock era but spoke to those with a profound need for introspection and love of densely layered orchestrations.
This is all to say that in 2024, Lana Del Rey is easy to not take for granted. She has beaten the accusations in ways that many haven’t. By sticking to her guns, she has garnered fans like Swift and Eilish while still having a homeliness that few could hope to achieve. The fact that her monthly Spotify listener count is well over 50 million and she still felt motivated to take up shifts at The Waffle House for fun only showed how eager she was to follow her own path. Any accusation of being the “sad girl” have faded in favor of a pop star who clearly seems to be having the time of her life.
Which is all to say that with each passing release, “Ultraviolence” feels more and more like an anomaly in a career of them. However, her Post-2012 career was so uncertain that it felt like a radical reinvention. It was the soundtrack to the greatest film noir never released. It was a self-edit that removed elements that felt insincere while doubling down on everything that was seen as problematic.
The most noteworthy came on the title song where she declared “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”: a reference to The Crystals’ song of the same name. Having garnered attention for nihilist-leaning pop, those who thought she was problematic before weren’t going to have a shortage of lyrics to pull from. The album is so dour that it may even lean into self-parody. Her songs were growing longer with the opener “Cruel World” running over six minutes and sung with mournful anti-pop. The melodrama was in peak form and captured a world as dark as the black-and-white cinematography that lined the album cover. It was easy to imagine her as the femme fatale singing while cigarette smoke wafted through the air. She was still singing about dangerous men and drugs. Questions of authenticity weren’t only chucked out the window but shattered on the pavement. Lana Del Rey may have had the capacity to sing honestly, but it still existed within the artifice of cinematic textures.
The benefit of a nostalgic worldview is that one day her own sound would feel reminiscent of her time. For as much as “Ultraviolence” feels removed of the same summer that brought Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass, it now exists in the grander picture of an artist whose career was in an identity crisis. By 2013, the backlash to “Born to Die” had worn her out enough to make her contemplate retirement. This is a record that very much feels like an artist in search of identity by forgoing the conventions in favor of her own muse. Gone was “The Gangster Nancy Sinatra” and in its place was songwriting sessions in Santa Monica, CA and collaborations with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. To put the album even more into context, there’s a bonus song called “Florida Kilos” co-written by Harmony Korine for an unrealized project in the vein of Spring Breakers (2013).
It also helped that The Great Gatsby (2013) found her delivering the perfect song for the perfect project. With so much talk of artifice and nostalgia, penning “Young and Beautiful” for the Baz Luhrmann adaptation was a stroke of genius. As a story deconstructing the self-made man mythology, it captured perfectly her larger goals as a performer. To her, music was as much diaristic as it was fantasy. Somewhere in the glamor was the truth. Her emotions may be deemed messy for feminist-minded listeners, but they reflected the complexity of a woman in love with a vision of history that is in itself rewritten to make the flashiest elements shine brightest. Is it romance or criticism? Maybe both?
As a listening experience “Ultraviolence” is arguably the most focused vision she would create until the west coast ennui of “Norman Fucking Rockwell!” Even then, no album in her catalog sounds like this. It’s the sweet release of her biggest impulses to let go of the “sad girl” motif and find something greater on the horizon. It’s a record that works as a long-form commentary on the media’s criticism of her image as it is this playful exercise in truly showing her potential to be as melodramatic and over the top as she could.
To editorialize, “Ultraviolence” isn’t one of my favorite records by her. Given how much better I find her later releases, this record feels borderline self-parody. For as much as it feels like pieces of a whole, the noirish qualities feel superficial. When I listen, I feel like I’m witnessing Lana Del Rey the character. There’s so many small affectations that feel designed to experiment without any greater point to prove. For as much as this is one of the great pop records that can double as a femme fatale manifesto, I don’t know that there’s anything here that I immediately turn to when I think of Lana Del Rey’s greatness. While I think the pivot from “Born to Die” is in itself a reason I admire her, it’s not being done in a way that immediately grabs me. In my opinion, there’s always been a level of winking satire in her songwriting, and it feels either absent or painfully try-hard this time around. Everything is a tad too joyless even as it feels like a record she made solely to mess with everybody.
How could this not be the read when the opening line is “Shared my body and my mind with you/That’s all over now”? This is clearly the record of somebody who has been scorned. The pain she felt is so visceral that in only 12 words, her pouty singing conveys the past two years of torment. She sings of a “Cruel World,” and the metatextual becomes clear as she sings of putting on party dresses and playing the a victim. By the next song, she personifies everything through her familiar lens of abusive men.
Another thing that’s clear early in the record is how deft her vocal register is. Where “Born to Die” feels like it limited her potential, the slower melodies allow her to stretch. While I am not as taken by the wavering cries that open the album, “Ultraviolence” has some truly haunting harmonies over the chorus. There’s a hypnotic quality, as if stuck in a dream. Maybe it’s a nightmare, but Lana Del Rey makes it sound beautiful. You believe her passion for this questionable person as she sings the infamous line. It’s psychedelic, questionably commercial, and captures the deepest recesses that pop likes to forget about. This is the music you’d set to a Lauren Bacall scene. The corruption of film noir can be heard in wavering vocals. Despair is everywhere. For as repulsive as the behavior may come across, the listener willing to embrace cognitive dissonance will find thrills in the seediness.
It continues on “Shades of Cool” which finds her balancing the deepness of the verses with the higher pitched lines of the chorus. The melancholy shines through as the chorus continues, finding her flutter into self-actualization. Even if this is yet another tragic song, her attention to detail allows for it to be among the poppiest songs on the record. While “West Coast” may be the bigger hit, the jerkiness of the chord changes keeps me from appreciating it as much. If nothing else, “Shades of Cool” feels rooted in emotions that are more recognizable. There’s an understanding to her impenetrable subject that is absent from “West Coast.” The later song works as a noirish reworking of California’s sinister tendencies with hushed vocals and queasy harmonies. However, it also comes across like three songs stapled together with listicle-style lyrics.
Another high point in the album that solidifies Lana Del Rey’s image as the great nostalgist is “Brooklyn Baby,” which finds her imagining herself as a beat poet in the 1970s. Her boyfriend plays guitar while she sings Lou Reed. At one point she sings about being from the wrong era, believing that she was born too late. There is regret for not being part of a generation where art was more abstract and expressive. As someone who felt pitted in a 2010s Top 40, Lana Del Rey dedicating almost six minutes to arthouse culture seemed unprecedented. It also made her seem more like a character, especially as she dropped references to The Who towards the back half. It’s a goofy fantasy that works because of how the chorus sways with the familiar hippy-dippy energy that her reference points would have. On a record that I’ve accused of sounding joyless, her declaration of “I’m a Brooklyn baby!” is one of the most joyful performances she’s done in her whole career. Turns out she had a community. It was just not on MTV.
For a record that opens with a tearful ballad, “Sad Girl” seems as much on brand as it does ironic. It’s the type of song everyone was waiting for Lana Del Rey to release, and she does effortlessly. Having that back-to-back with “Pretty When You Cry,” it reflects efforts to both play into her image while commenting on the ways she’s something greater. To the producers’ credit, this portion of the album is easier to enjoy than to process as anything greater. The latter song especially works because of how catchy the subdued melodies are. They become almost slurred together to the point that it’s almost dreamlike. Again, it paints the picture of a woman who is attempting to satirize as well as comment on a reputation of being too “artificial.” I want to believe that there’s a joke here, though her punchlines would be much stronger by “Honeymoon.” Here she’s still too wounded.
This pattern continues on “Money Power Glory” and “Fucked My Way to the Top” where she builds on the image of a femme fatale becoming famous. The anthemic nature of the former comes across in this bittersweet call for the three titular subjects. With the whispering vocals of the next, she laughs at the idea of achieving success through sexual favors. Even as she sings about playing the victim, there is a search for dominance and control. As of this album, her voice is her power and while she hasn’t found its best use, she plays chanteuse so gracefully that the listener is enchanted by her miserable subject matter. Somewhere in the misfortune is hope to become something greater than, as the final song would suggest, “The Other Woman.”
If there’s one song that I love and hold up as a high point of her early career, it’s “Old Money.” Much like the previous songs, it’s another discussion of identity being tied to others. I especially love the way it uses the theme of red, white, and blue within the lyrics. Given her additional reputation as a very Pro-American singer whose nostalgia was built on the country’s ingenuity, it made sense to tie everything together.
This is also the point on the record where we hear about her family life. Between the images of blue hydrangeas and red racing stripes, there’s a few lines dedicated to her parents. Because of how the record is organized, the personal touch is unexpected and finds her finally achieving a breakthrough from the artifice that has defined the record. If one wants to understand Lana Del Rey’s perception of herself by 2014, “Old Money” is the best song to choose. It even touches on the vulnerable theme of youth, worrying that her lover won’t appreciate her when she’s no longer young and pretty. For as much as these are topics she’s sung about incessantly, it’s still powerful when she lands on the ideas in a very focused and unceremonious manner.
As mentioned, “Ultraviolence” as an album isn’t my favorite. Even then, it is the record that made me a fan of her work. Even if I’ve retroactively come to love “Born to Die,” her follow-up features an impressive amount of confidence that I wanted to see build into something greater. The Great Gatsby had convinced me that she could handle cinematic orchestrations, adding elegance that feels out of time. Even as she sings from a very 2010s mentality, there’s something rooted in a romanticism that audiences have for the past. There is a need to understand what’s so alluring about these images and ideas. Maybe they seemed more self-indulgent and reckless when she was younger, but watching the evolution has made her stance in 2024 all the more rewarding.
That is why it’s interesting to see how people respond to “Ultraviolence” a decade later. There are those who will argue it’s her best record. Meanwhile, I think it’s a testament to her versatility that every album since has garnered it own defender as her best.
To me, this record could’ve easily symbolized a new direction she’d go in. I don’t dislike noir pop, but I think it was the exorcising of her early tendencies. Even if she had established a voice by 2014, it was clear that she needed to keep finding herself. I’d argue by “Blue Bannisters” that she took her fascination with artifice and turned the camera back on herself. Of course, it helped that she had lived a significant amount of life by then. She had stories to share and was approaching an age where it was more appropriate to ruminate. There wasn’t a need to fall back on the gimmickry of her early work.
Again, it’s not bad but “Ultraviolence” feels very much like Lana Del Rey the character. It’s the one that everyone had been attacking for two years at that point. They were wanting her career to fail, and it’s clear how desperate she was to find her place within the industry. I think some great ideas appear throughout the track list, but they also feel impersonal – or at least aspiring to a curiosity that hadn’t fully arrived. “West Coast” is most indicative of her starting to use Southern California as her muse. I think she’s written several songs about the coastline that are far better… and some were even found on her next release “Honeymoon” (“High By the Beach,” “Freak”).
Even then, there’s something essential to appreciating “Ultraviolence” as a Lana Del Rey fan. It’s the record that confirmed that she even if she wasn’t going to be “The Gangster Nancy Sinatra,” she was going to try and be around for a while. Whether others see it as self-parody or a genuine masterpiece, I’d argue it’s still the record where she staked her claim. You would either love her audacity or hate her indulgence. No matter what, she wasn’t going to be mistaken for Meghan Trainor anytime soon and, even when she’d produce upbeat tracks, would never be as vapid as Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.” She could make you smile, but part of it required accepting how talented her pretentious vocal patterns could be.
Which is why I think the most fitting tribute to “Ultraviolence” came at Coachella 2024. As she rode up to the stage on the back of a motorcycle, many wondered how she would start the show. As the surf rock-laden guitars of “West Coast” started, the viewers at home could hear the audience singing along. Even if Lana Del Rey questionably forgot to start, she still turned to the audience with a smile and said, “We’re still singing it.” Even if the catalog that followed was for a lot of later work that better balanced her vocals with densely layered productions (thanks in large part to collaborator Jack Antonoff), knowing that audiences still responded to the earlier, more divisive records proved that she had won.
For all of the criticism, taking her body and mind away from them allowed for the start of an independence that would only seek to improve her voice. A decade later, she’s more beloved than ever. While it’s easy to see her questioning youth and vitality in 2013 as a genuine concern, she now has nothing to worry about. She has finally come into her own. For as much as her early career still feels pastiche, her unwillingness to fit into a box has revealed that she was always in her own. It’s a mighty fine one too. Who am I to argue with Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish? It may not always be perfect, but if Lana Del Rey has taught us anything with “Ultraviolence,” the less you care about pleasing others, the more likely you are to make art worth remembering.
Comments
Post a Comment