did you know there's a buttered noodle on the veranda

Lana Del Rey, Solar Power, and thinking you know everything at 25: a review

Until yesterday, I hadn’t attentively listened to anything Lana Del Rey has produced since Norman Fucking Rockwell. After the triumph of her highest-rated album (according to Pitchfork – I know, I know – but seriously, a 5.5 on Born to Die?), a first listen to the first few tracks on Chemtrails over the Country Club left my world positively unrocked, not to mention the unserious name which inspired widespread parody. Not even a year later, the online mockery resumed with the initial album cover of Blue Banisters, which looked like it had been designed by Lana herself using a free trial of Canva. In this instance, cyberbullying worked, and the final cover ended up looking far more polished once she had roped in a pair of German Shepherds and a paid graphic designer. I still couldn’t be bothered to listen to it though.

However, our girl really stuck the landing on Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. After listening to every track up to ‘Candy Necklace’, I was cheering her on from the side lines and hoping she’d make it to the finish without flagging. By the time I’d listened to the most gorgeous consecutive run of four songs on any album I’ve listened to in a long time (‘Kintsugi’, ‘Fingertips’, ‘Paris, Texas’ and ‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’), I was sold. ‘Margaret’ sealed the deal, and the hark back to ‘Venice Bitch’ on ‘Taco Truck’ produced the perfect coda, wrapping up the record in a neat little bow. Chef’s kiss. No notes. I’m just so happy she’s back. Did you know the party’s December 18th?

It's a welcome diversion after a rough few years for me and my relationship to music. I kicked off 2021 being unable to listen to anything other than a select few songs by Elton John, Billy Joel and the Bee Gees. Any songs that were to make the cut for my Mental Illness Mix were vetted for any remotely negative lyrics, mentions of break-ups, or chords which might make me feel something – the rest would be consigned to oblivion lest they set off my OCD ruminations, which would have me bedbound under a weighted blanket for hours at a time. I had to stop watching Tiktok after I was triggered by Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Déjà Vu’, which was everywhere at the time. It sounds so stupid, and it was, but it was also devastating. It’s the only time in my life where I had locked myself in a metaphorical sensory deprivation tank in fear of what I would do to myself otherwise, and the loss of music was the one I felt most acutely. I’m not claiming to be qualified to talk about or critique music on any level, but if my Spotify minute stats are low every year, it is because it has always been there in the back of my head, playing me through a life of teaching myself to sing and worshipping classic rock groups and playing instruments that I would give up once I got bored and then regret it. Depriving myself of it was an alien exercise.

The cursed playlist itself

The minute I was able to listen to music again properly, Lorde’s Solar Power came out. The lead single made me excited to feel something again, but safely this time, in a way that wouldn’t make me want to top myself. Melodrama is one of my soul albums: it came out at a time where I needed it most, when I was 18, jetting off on adventures to Amsterdam with my friends after we’d left school and thinking I was hopelessly in love with a man who was too old for me. The title track of this new release was cute, something for the summer, something for the girlies to get ready and dance to. I guess I needed that after the worst winter of my life, too.

But the rest of the album left me cold, and at the time I couldn’t quite verbalise why. The first track, ‘The Path’, which I still listen to on occasion, is Lorde’s prison break from a fanbase who glued themselves to Pure Heroin and Melodrama like climate activists to a Botticelli painting, refusing to move until she indulges their sadness even more. Letting them know in explicit terms that she is not their saviour is an understandable move, but still one which comes off as overly patronising, especially when paired with the didacticism of ‘Secrets of a Girl’ (which I do quite like regardless of its cringe spoken outro by Robyn) and ‘Oceanic Feeling’: okay, the cherry-black lipstick is collecting dust in the drawer, and you insist you’re taking it one year at a time because you still haven’t found enlightenment, but it sure sounds like you think you have. We get it! She’s happy now! Good for her! But the disavowal of the brooding, introspective Lorde from five years ago means that a significant part of the vulnerability and incisive lyricism we have all come to know and love from her get lost in the process, and it leaves songs with genuine heartfelt intention like ‘The Man With the Axe’ and ‘Stoned at the Nail Salon’ (hate this song, for the record) feeling insincere, empty, and nearly impossible to identify with. Relatability is not by any means a metric of good art, but the sterility of it all does not make for a favourable review, either.

To me, Solar Power reads almost like a child star’s break from their Disney Channel beginnings, like Miley Cyrus in her ‘We Can’t Stop’ era, albeit more wholesome. You’re watching, bemused, as they make bold statement after desperate bold statement to disown the person they were before, to change their branding, and we as consumers sit and ask ourselves when they will simply drop the act and go back to the person we knew they were all along. I’m not convinced by accusations of overfamiliarity or ‘parasocial relationships’ from fans towards artists, as I do think that as a celebrity whose entire multi-million-dollar income stream relies on adulation and mythologisation from ordinary people, you sort of forfeit the right to be talked about like a normal person. Besides, we’re only human; we’re naturally unsettled by change, especially in what we perceive to be the inherent personality of someone we admire. But we do, perhaps presumptively, foresee an inevitability of collapse of this radically and unsustainably different persona at some point down the line, especially if we feel that our favourite artist has changed for the worse. I suppose this is exactly the opposite of Lorde’s intended outcome, but I can’t help but think of the Streisand effect: by consistently drawing attention to the fact that she is no longer that teenager with the dark lipstick and the moody lyrics, we only think about it more.

The album also reads like Joni Mitchell writing ‘Both Sides Now’ at the age of 25, which ultimately led her to re-record it in the year 2000, at which point she really could see love from both sides now with all the age and wisdom she had accrued. I think writing an album about everything you have learned over the years when you are only 25 is always going to smack of precocity and will ultimately fall flat, even when you rose to fame at an even more naive 16. This is why an album as introspective as Ocean Boulevard has pleasantly surprised me in the way it has. Lana is 37 now and has released nine albums. She released her debut when she was 26, older than Lorde was when she released Solar Power. In many ways, this is the perfect point in her career to produce something this personal. Perhaps I am comparing apples with oranges – there’s an argument to be made that if we’re assessing two albums of the No More Sad Girl Bullshit genre, then Solar Power’s equivalent would be Lust for Life. However, despite its mid-tier position in Lana’s discography, it still deftly negotiates a whole spectrum of human emotion that I don’t think Solar Power quite achieves. Take the aching isolation and yearning of ‘13 Beaches’ versus the almost saccharine optimism of the final track, ‘Get Free.’ Despite some of the weaker songs in the middle of the track list, it works as a sincere and cohesive unit because there is a simple overarching message of hope and aspiration towards happiness which binds the whole record together, rather than an implicit claim to being the finished product.

But I digress. Perhaps the most startlingly raw moments in Ocean Boulevard come through in ‘Fingertips’, a meandering interrogation of her feelings about her own family, where she wonders whether she will ever be mentally well enough to have a child, or how she would ‘find [the] astral body’ of her late uncle who died by suicide and take him home, or why her estranged mother sent her away to rehab. Lana’s long-time fans will be aware of how she was sent away to get sober at 14: hearing the adult Lana asking ‘what kind of mother was she to say I'd end up in institutions? […] What the fuck's wrong in your head to send me away, never to come back?’, dripping with betrayal, is emotionally the rock-bottom point of the album. However, what makes the record such a success is that there is a beautiful balance of self-assurance and self-deprecation which Lana navigates so fluidly throughout. Possibly the deftest example of this is recognising the abject reality of her American-whoredom and relegation to side-piece status at 33 (‘A&W’), before immediately transitioning to a largely bullshit sermon by megachurch pastor Judah Smith (‘Judah Smith Interlude’), a semi-ironic nod to the tradcath Instagram girlies who have claimed her which ends with ‘I used to think my preaching was mostly about You… I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.’ This is Lana’s album; it is all about her. We feel it with acuity and precision as she lays out her personal lore with grace and vulnerability, while simultaneously cordoning it off as her own. This is her self-determination; her autonomy to claim; her image to fashion as she pleases. She’s well aware of her own commodification by her cult following, but that isn’t going to stop her from drip-feeding us the rawest streams of consciousness on this new album.

Ocean Boulevard is a masterpiece of a woman who is and has been conscious, even preoccupied, with the way her music is perceived and consumed. She doesn’t run from this preoccupation, however: instead, she runs through it, taking the remnants with her into the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard along with whatever the fuck she wants to do now. There’s no denial, but there are no apologies either.