But while Lust for Life certainly marks a great step forward in terms of maturity as an author and as a musician, it lacks the overwhelming self-awareness and personal nature that was so crucial to earlier songs the Lana image of the 2017 record was unusually “selfless,” focused much more on the collective than the individual – which, of course, is not a problem or a shortcoming, but simply a quality that reflects Del Rey’s talent as an ever-changing, incredibly diverse artist. Her previous record, Lust for Life, was praised not only for its fresh, more complex sound and its optimistic outlook, but also for finally going beyond and breaking out of the relatively “small range of emotions” ( abandonment, heartbreak, loneliness, melancholia) that defined her songs for years. Throughout the years, one thing and one thing only remained constant: Lana Del Rey’s ability to transition from one persona to the other in a remarkably seamless fashion, all the while maintaining an exceptional level of effortlessness and never letting her various (new) identities feel in any way contrived or conflicting.įor her sixth album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, set to be released early this year, Lana Del Rey seems to have taken yet another turn in developing her image.
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From her 2011 debut onwards, the 33-year-old Elizabeth Woodbridge Grant has appeared in more forms and has taken up more roles than we could possibly count, from young, fragile, Bambi-eyed ingenue (“This Is What Makes Us Girls”) to a strong, reflective, purposeful hippie queen (“When The World Was At War Before We Kept Dancing”). First, the literary world – intertextual allusions and references – play a very important role in the Del Rey universe second, I couldn’t think of a modern day artist who handles her self-image with better care or more intelligence. There are two reasons why I thought it interesting – or perhaps even necessary – to begin this review on such a literary-philosophical note. Even in the most openly, blatantly autobiographical works, the “I” of the text will always be somewhat different from the author the image that the artwork presents is always a creation, a manipulation, and thus, part of the artwork itself – or indeed an artwork on its own. “ I is another” – the lyric persona, the “ I” of poems, novels, and even song lyrics, is not to be confused with the author him- or herself.
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For my professor, Rimbaud’s pithy words were of especial significance to the interpretation of auto-biographical works. It is impossible to know yourself entirely, he said no matter how much time you spend thinking about and trying to define who you are, that exploration will never be perfectly complete or accurate, since you can’t simultaneously be the object and the subject of the reflective process. “Remember: ‘ I is another‘,” he used to say, citing nineteenth-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was only seventeen when he captured something truly fundamental about the human psyche in that short, to-the-point phrase. My old French literature professor had an all-time favourite quote that he’d always introduce new authors and pieces with.
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Soft, sorrowful and radiating with heartfelt sincerity, Lana Del Rey’s “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It” is a wonderful example of the singer-songwriter-poet’s talent not just in producing music, but also in rebuilding her image with remarkable self-awareness and intelligence.