No, it’s about Brooklyn now, a confused, living museum that honors its own geographical memory through a bizarre cultural cannibalism. The song’s not about Brooklyn 30 years ago, that long-gone, ideal Brooklyn where artists lived fast and cheap. At first it sounds like she’s talking about an older man, but it turns out she’s talking about a whole bunch of them: Lou Reed, the Beats, the first generation of jazz musicians, and so on. “They say I’m too young to love you,” she simpers on “Brooklyn Baby”. Shedding the tight choruses and hip-hop samples that propelled her debut, Del Rey now plunges fully into the 21st-century impulse to fetishize 20th-century culture. Here, she dons a genre that once framed an idealized vision of female longing and fills it with all those other women: the women implied by the songs that men were singing about, the women that served as fodder for generations of male heartbreak. It doesn’t loop back through the roles played by last century’s women singers, though Del Rey wields classic femininity as an aesthetic weapon. Ultraviolence, meanwhile, sounds nostalgic. They’ve adopted a mode of playing and writing that’s well-trod and easy to recall fondly. The Black Keys find comfort in the 1970s. Here’s a gallery of the bad ones.īoth Del Rey and Auerbach draw upon signifiers of 20th-century culture, but their motivations for looking back seem miles apart.
Her lyrics supply a wonderful foil to The Black Keys’ most recent outing, Turn Blue, which ended on the conclusion that “all the good women are gone.” Damn right, Del Rey seems to sneer. Inside the album’s big, vintage swing, she sings herself into places that Born to Die, with its pop veneer, couldn’t touch. Died of love, or died of him? Is there a difference?Īided by the production talent of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Ultraviolence presents an endlessly fascinating cornucopia of dysfunction. “I could have died right then ’cause he was right beside me,” she sings, her voice multi-tracked over itself. She hears violins and violence in the same word.
She hears sirens, either the kind that signify emergency or the kind that lure you to be dashed against the shore. Del Rey sings about a man who nicknames her “poison” and “deadly nightshade,” then hits her in a way that makes her suspect it’s a sign of true love. She repeats the title of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”, a song written in 1962 by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, recorded by The Crystals and Phil Spector, and later disowned by King. On the title song, she sings from the throes of a physically abusive relationship. Lana Del Rey appears at her most complicated on her second album, Ultraviolence.
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