She paints with sincerity and satire, and challenges you to spot the difference.
Norman F*****g Rockwell!
Lana Del Rey
79
Tucked inside Lana Del Rey’s dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Winking and vivid, Norman F*****g Rockwell! is a definitive riff on the rules of authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. She paints with sincerity and satire, and challenges you to spot the difference.
The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath with anecdotes from her own life to make us question, again, what’s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt: She’d spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: The only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.
“She’s so mysterious. I feel like I know what she’s talking about…but then you almost feel like you can’t with her.”
Miranda Lambert