The most pointless accusation a pop star can receive, that of a lack of authenticity, was thrown at Lana Del Rey with a harshness that can only be described as sexist. The violence of the reaction perhaps shows how successfully Del Rey triggered the mainstream with her persona of the hyper-submissive Stepford wife. She was the pouting, glamorous submissive who, in her flawless American artificiality, ultimately exposed the artificiality of the American dream itself. She built her myth from the vocabulary of US mass culture: “My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola/ My eyes are wide like cherry pies.”
10 “Kill Kill”
Already on her first single, released under the name Lizzy Grant, Del Rey showed essential elements of her later aesthetic: the breathy vocals, the doomed love, the self-stylization into an American icon. In the self-directed video, she wraps herself in an American flag while wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig. In between, she cuts grainy home videos of other people, showing amusement parks and crowded beaches.
9 “Video Games”
The birth of Lana Del Rey. The video, shot by herself, shows her, apparently filmed with a laptop camera in front of a white wall, in the middle of a quickly edited collage of old Sunset Boulevard pictures, vintage beach scenes and paparazzi shots of stumbling starlets. In contrast, her solemn singing: an elegy.
8th “National Anthem”
Del Rey breathes “happy birthday, Mr. President” to A$AP Rocky, who plays JFK. Then sun-drenched Super 8 recordings, home videos of the presidential couple, Del Rey playing Jackie Kennedy. It ends the way it has to end, with a shot at the convertible, panicked police officers and shock on Del Rey’s face.
7 “Ride”
She swings on an old car tire in front of a monumental desert panorama. Vast land, no longer in the hands of the natives: bikers roar through the area, loaded with weapons, sleeping in shabby motels and drinking at the gas station. Del Rey is the biker bride who gets groped at the pinball machine. She wears a feather headdress while her boys build a fire.
6 “Ultraviolence”
She walks along a garden path in her wedding dress. A man is with her, but we only see his hands. The invisible groom feeds her cake and puts his fingers in her mouth. The shaky camera shows his perspective, he walks behind her, follows her into an empty church, getting closer and closer to her, like a character in a horror film. The lonely wedding is the beginning of a nightmare.
5 “High By The Beach”
The Pacific glows blue, Del Rey stands on a terrace in Malibu in a bright robe. A helicopter appears and hovers threateningly in the air in front of her. She retreats into the apartment, fleeing the noise and the downdraft, but the flying paparazzi won’t leave her alone. So she climbs down the rocks, pulls out a guitar case, unpacks an Uzi and takes aim. Happy end.
4 “freak”
She puts an LSD paper on Father John Misty’s tongue, he transforms into a cult leader who is swarmed by women dressed in white in ultra slow motion. They drink the Kool-Aid and disappear into a paradisiacal underwater world. “Baby, if you want to leave, come to California, be a freak like me, too.”
3 “Lust For Life”
Glamorous lives end in tragedy. Actress Peg Entwistle jumped to her death from the H of the Hollywood Sign in 1932. Dancing here
The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey on this H, the city’s night lights below them, an impossible starry sky above them. At the end it zooms out: Earth is a lonely planet.
2 “Doin’ Time”
Del Rey is about two hundred meters tall, rips palm trees from the ground like blades of grass, climbs over the city highway like a Carrera track. This, it turns out over the course of the video, is the plot of a B-movie that is playing in the drive-in cinema. The gigantic Del Rey descends from the screen like “Purple Rose Of Cairo” and disciplines the audience.
1 “Chemtrails Over The Country Club”
An American idyll in Technicolor colors: the sky almost as blue as the swimming pool, the old convertible blood red, ice cubes in the glass, fruit from the market. But then: wolves and a hurricane, everyone’s eyes glow demonic, and Del Rey and her friends transform into bloodthirsty creatures of the night.