I was twelve years old when ‘Summertime Sadness’ was released, just as myself and everyone I knew was finding puberty and social media. A mess of badly processed Instagram posts, captioned with the lyrics to this 2010s standout, ensued. A lot of us wished Lana Del Ray the way of Carly Rae Jepsen and Rebecca Black: Obscurity. She didn’t go, and that wasn’t a bad thing….or so we thought. Then, last year, she put up this rant about how her tone of ‘tenderness’ had fallen out of hype, only to be replaced with the (obviously) less moral music of certain artists about ‘being sexy, wearing no clothes’ etc etc. Self-pity isn’t really a sin, so this would’ve been just another meltdown. Yawn, next! What set this one apart was that she named the artists whose music she blamed for hers not hitting the charts: Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Camila Cabello, Kehlani……notice a theme here? Yeah, so did everyone else. Of course, she said everyone was ‘making it a race issue’. Yeah, sure, Lana. Just incidental that you say this during the release of your album ‘Chemtrails over the Country Club’, featuring a very 50s-themed picture of an array of women, eleven. All white. Y’know, the kind of women featured in ‘The Help’ and the like. The ones who view black women as vivacious and immoral. Yeah, I’m not a fan. Her new album, ‘Blue Bannisters’ is……fine, I guess. It’s grasping at a sound and a time that exists only somewhere in between the TV shows of Westworld, Lovecraft County and Watchmen. There’s a lot of reaching here, and, as a diehard Taylor Swift fan, I can’t help but notice the resemblance between this record and Taylor Swift’s twin albums ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’. There’s a country-like hue about a lot of it, again, quite disingenuous and quite Swiftian, beginning with the opener ‘Text Book’, which inexplicably references her Electra complex in the second line. She references “screamin’ Black Lives Matter in the crowd”, in the same song’s chorus, wishing her dad could see her. It’s at about this time that I buried my face in my hands, wondering exactly why I’m writing about this album. The second time she goes ‘You’ve got a Thunderbird, my daddy had one too’ sent me into a blind fury. Needing validation, I took to the internet, hoping the real time, professional reviewers shared my horror at this release. Well, escape, more than release, to borrow a quip from comedian Rob Brydon. I found praise heaped on this album. I practically inhaled another cup of coffee and decided that I had to listen to the remainder of this album, if for nothing else, then for the sake of telling you how terrible it is. She grasps for a proper-noun dense modern country ballad in the title track. I’ve never been to Oklahama or read much Russian poetry or known a Jenny, and, by how deplorable her descriptions are, I’m pretty she hasn’t either. Great, she payed some attention in middle school literature, she called her bannisters blue, symbolising melancholy. Big whoop. A New-Yorker talking about folksy Americana. This swimming pool that Jenny jumped into, smoked near etc etc, Lana. Is it blue too? Can I submerge myself in it to escape your songwriting?Lead single Arcadia is Tumblr poetry from a really repressed teenager, and I mean none of that kindly. What does “Lay your hands on me like you’re a land rover” even mean? Lady, you have had a decade of being accused of glamourising abuse and you’re literally asking to be treated as terrain under the tires of an all-terrain vehicle? In public? Also, we get it! You’ve had sex and affairs at nice hotels. Stop mentioning the Hilton Hotel!!! Interlude-The Trio is a reach for era-defying juxtaposition, marrying Ennrio Morricone’s Te Trio with trap-esque music. How woke. How pathbreaking. Every half-literate soundcloud DJ is thus validated. She serves devastating sidelong glances at the media perception of her and the presumptions that brings into her personal life in ‘Black Bathing Suit’. Or, she tries to. Consider the lyrics. “And what I never said, why there’s a price on my head It’s nothing to do with them, it’s my karmic lineage So I’m not friends with my mother, but I still love my dad Untraditional lover, can you handle that?I guess I’m complicated, my life’s sorta too I wish you could see to my soul through this black bathing suit You don’t know me any better than they do, baby ‘Cause I sing like an angel, my heart’s like one too” ….and with a straight face! The most egocentric ‘I’m not like other girls’ plea that has entered the public consciousness, is this song. In the name of emotional climaxing, it enters a second half that is needlessly peppered with production artefacts that are incoherent in significance. ‘If you Lie Down’ has the airs of a wild west romance, an illicit affair, asking a man who passes through town to lay with her, if he does choose to rest. Now, maybe my taste for overly white heterosexual nostalgia is a little bitter, being a very queer third world Gen Z-er. But there really is nothing nice about this song. The outro has a horn track that emulates a gramophone player that is the background to this fling she’s singing about. It comes off as the sad, soggy, mascara streaked parade of one that Lana Del Rey has become. Less a parade, more a wake, really. The B-side is so homogenous, I’m not going to bother with individually talking about any of it. It’s reminiscent of her 2019 album ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’, except it’s more dreary and strung out than anything. Pithy, unimaginative, bleak and folksy metaphors and imagery characterise her complete abandonment of individuality. She winks knowingly at the pandemic, talking about lockdown and masks. I mean, sure, I guess? I’m not entirely sure how to tell you about the closer, ‘Sweet Carolina’. She wrote it with her father and her sister. If this is some realisation of the roots of her desire, it sure does sound like it. The tone is parental and reassuring, quite antagonistic toward the child’s S.O. (“F*ck you, Kevin”). This is great, when sung by a parent. Just weird and icky, when sung by the daughter it’s being sung to. This album has merit, I’m sure. I’m oblivious to it because of my political inobjectivity(She was a little too okay with the January 6th Capitol riots in America. BLM my foot, Lana). This album provides supply to the demand of her following, more of the same. At times, it shows promise, with self-awareness and literary and modern reference. Those turn out to be cheques she leaves uncashed. A pity, really. The one part of this album I think was acceptable was her vocal performance. Well, she topped the charts, so maybe I’m the problem.
