Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me”, it feels like a taunt she’s spent the last decade mixing personas-outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pin-up girl and poet, sinner and saint-ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Back in 2010, when Lana released this album, she was still finding her feet as an artist. Lana Del Rey’s albums ranked from worst to best 7. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it”, is packaged like a confessional-first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords-but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey's own life to make us question, again, what's real. In celebration of her career, this feature looks back at her creations and ranks the albums in order of greatness which is no easy task with a canon as illustrious as Del Rey’s. (On “The Next Best American Record”, she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation-really, everything is. This paradox becomes a theme on Rockwell, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference.
At first, her stylized noir-pop garnered skeptical sneers - the rise of her 2012 debut, Born to Die, was impeded by a tentative live debut on Saturday Night. They just go on and on about themselves and I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah.' But there’s merit to it also-they are so good.” Lana Del Rey envisioned a Southern California dream world constructed out of sad girls and bad boys, manufactured melancholy, and genuine glamour, and then she came to embody this fantasy. "So often I end up with these creative types. "It's about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. Their partnership-as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos-allowed her to take her subjects less seriously.
In a 2018 interview with Apple Music's Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so funny,” she said. Winking and vivid, Norman F*****g Rockwell! is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them.
Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders-and celebrations-of just how empty these places can be. Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humour that brings them back down to earth.
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