The latter track, allusions to the Charles Manson murders notwithstanding, ranks with previous Del Rey triumphs like Ultraviolence‘s “Old Money” in its somber, melodic poignancy. In actuality, though, she tackles the subject matter with grace and empathy. With song titles like “Beautiful People Beautiful Problems” and “Heroin”, there are several warning signs of Del Rey’s unfortunate vice of romanticizing pain and tragedy.
The album becomes more pensive and emotive toward its second half, particularly in its final third or so. She seamlessly weaves features from A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti into her aesthetic on “Summer Bummer”, the slow, bass-heavy beats mitigating the glacial plodding that characterized so much of her previous album, Honeymoon. And yet, the first half of the record is also as hip-hop-infused as Del Rey’s music has been since Born to Die. The familiar tropes are all here: she overtly pays homage to pop music from the 1960s and ’70s, naming the album itself after Iggy Pop’s 1977 record of the same name and offering to be “your tiny dancer” on “Tomorrow Never Came”, to name just a few. Lust for Life arrives at the most established and stable point in her career thus far, then. It has become somewhat old hat to litigate Del Rey’s (in)authenticity, and instead more pertinent to theorize the statements she makes in weaving her musical maze of images, icons, and collective pop cultural memories. Indeed, though little has fundamentally changed in Del Rey’s aesthetic philosophy over her four studio albums, she has carved out a space for herself in the universe of music criticism through sheer resilience. On her latest release and fourth LP, Lust for Life, she once again seeks to escape from the warped prism of public perception, beseeching, “Take me as I am, don’t see me for what I’m not” on “God Bless America – and All the Beautiful Women in It”. “They judge me like a picture book / By the colors, like they forgot to read,” she lamented on “Brooklyn Baby”, from her sophomore album Ultraviolence. Though Del Rey has courted such controversy and speculation about her persona, she has also on occasion broken the fourth wall to demand proper recognition for her artistry. At first, critics did not quite know what to make of this facile conundrum, and early readings of Del Rey’s 2012 debut Born to Die tore into the album for its apparent artifice.
Throughout her already storied career, it has been ambiguous which aspects of her persona are “genuine”, and which, if any, are presented with a sly, knowing wink. Lana Del Rey will likely go down as one of the most iconic pop stars of the 2010s, not least because of the questions she raises (and the anxieties she provokes) about authenticity, irony, and nostalgia.