Lana Del Rey

Since the year is 2012 I should probably start a thread about this young firebrand who is bringing the Americana to America (?) and I am excited to see where she goes from here, I’m intrigued. I hear she has a video where she not only wears jeans but is also allegedly sexy so that is some scandalous shit and I bet she’s maybe an inauthentic media creation and can we just pause to recognize this storyline that is gonna take off soon cause Jesus h tittyfucking Christ if it was good enough for the Beatles why do people gotta pretend to have something useful to say when they obviously don’t?


Maybe I didn’t need to start this thread but I was supposed to have forced myself to go to sleep two hours ago but instead I’m listening to Lana albums and she is our greatest living songwriter and also it’s back to 2023, so thanks to anybody who stuck out this journey with me and also I’m sorry.

I am starting to think every one of her albums is a brilliant masterpiece and the ones I'm not obsessed with yet are just due to me not listening to them in the right frame of mind. I didn't care one way or the other about Honeymoon but I'm listening to it now and vibing hard.

Bear with me here, I'm gonna freeform a random thought that's popping into my brain...

She's got a lot of songs that are sort of slow and building. And not immediately like "fuck yeah." But songs that are beautiful and wonderful, and that really sound best in the context of an album that you've committed to getting super down with during a roughly hour long period. This makes it tough to make a playlist of Lana songs for the car.

I think that this dynamic is really interesting for Lana, who's always been billed as a pop music artist first and foremost. Even if most of her accolades understand and acknowledge that there is something arty and subversive going on beneath that deliberately constructed pop-star layer, your average listener who decides to get into Lana Del Rey will most likely just seek out the catchiest singles (how do I even figure out which ones these are?) and the version of the Taylor Swift song with extra Lana. And that really does an injustice to her work.

Anyway, that post provided by me realizing that I doesn't know how to order my playlist of LDR tunes I like.

Her Instagram is one of my favorite things in 2023.

Now playing: Born to Die

Me too. It’s really a wonderful album. I didn’t really fall in love with Lana until Lust For Life, and I never had a super obsessed with this album period. But there are really so many awesome songs on it. Cinnamon Radio and diet Mountain Dew are favorites at the moment.

First album being listened to in 2024: Blue Bannisters

^ Twas my second album listened to in 2024 (first was Harshest Realm self titled... really never gets old). Blue Bannisters is fucking incredible. Top tier Lana (whatever bottom tier is is also fucking incredible imo). Hard to pick favorite tracks, but Cherry Blossom, Living Legend, and Thunder are up there.

My life is pretty great and I really can't complain about stuff (but I still will! All the time!! I promise!!!).

I'm very in love with my wife who loves me back... and the relationship is probably deeper and better than any one I've ever been in. With that outta the way, calling back a post from 2023:

Ned Braden wrote:I’m still so fucking madly in love with that dead person...

The like second to last post she made on instagram was her and some close friends at Lana's Merriweather Post Pavilion show in October '23. She died like two weeks later. I wish I could've been at the show with her just for one last hurrah and to let her know she was important to me. And to see Lana, of course, who I've still never seen live.

Dead girl was super into Lana, and was really the impetus for me getting into her. In my dankest depths circa 2020 I'd have sad bastard parties with myself, alone with Lust for Life playing on the open air balcony with some cheaply purchased super amazing Spanish Vino de Jerez (Sherry. Most underrated of all the boozeahol imo) and embarrassingly also occasionally cigarettes. The last time I talked to her was on one of those days.

Lana's music will always remind me of her for this reason. Still get teary eyed on occasion while listening to that record.

I only just now for the first time noticed that having a refrain of “You’re no good for me” in a song called Diet Mountain Dew is clever.

I had never seen this music video before.



It’s great.

She’s releasing a country album called Lasso. I adore this woman.

Nick wrote:She’s releasing a country album called Lasso. I adore this woman.

Fuck yeah

Norman Fucking Rockwell! is truly a no shit contender for best album of all time, isn't it? I'm listening to it now, and I can't think of a better album to be playing on my car stereo when it careens off a cliff, gets launched into space, or hits the wormhole that will take it to a matthew mchcacuneachueughhey (sp?) dimension like in the movie interstellar.

Seeing her at the superbowl was probably my favorite part of the superbowl, which is something, considering it was a really good game.

Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! is on the shortlist for greatest album of all time, and an easy pick for definitive and perhaps greatest album of the first 30 years of the 21st century.

Since the start of her career, her songs have been thoroughly drenched in an off-kilter, almost Lynchian brand of Americana, so perfectly stylized that a plurality of music critics initially wrote her off as a media creation… almost too chic to be real. But her verses were always packed with real, heartfelt emotion.

It is interesting to consider that in her early years, her performances were done in front of a giant American flag. Sometime around 2016/17 the flag was replaced by images of static… like on the tv sets that our generation grew up with. When asked about the change, she stated that it no longer felt appropriate. In an era where the flag had been hijacked and thrust at the forefront of a xenophobic, authoritarian, and thoroughly racist political movement, large images of static on screen seemed to mirror the disintegration of the singer’s own belief in the American dream that had always been central to her songs.

This emotion is borne out on the second half of NFR! Hauntingly beautiful songs that speak to the growing gap between the dream and the reality. A choice excerpt from The Greatest:

I'm facing the greatest
The greatest loss of them all
The culture is lit and I had a ball
I guess I'm signing off after all
…
LA is in flames, it’s getting hot
Kanye West is blonde and gone

The exasperation of these lyrics speaks to me even more clearly now than it did when the album was released. So does the album’s closer… after building up and tearing apart her version of the American dream, she ends the record with “Hope is a Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have-But I Have It.“  The world may be broken… but it is still worth pushing on in hopes that we can find a light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m listening to Norman fucking Rockwell and crying, just like the last time.

Paradise is underrated. Great, short record. Between that and and MP3s I have from an unreleased collection that got pulled from streaming platforms, been jamming a lot of forgotten LDR. “Riding in Cars With Boys,” “Ride,” and “Queen of Disaster” all constantly playing in my head.