Lana Del Rey – A&W
Stans are speculating that “La Croix” will be the next to come in the LDR carbonated beverage saga…
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Frank Falisi: “Did you hear the new Lana?” Ben asks me, adjusting his perch on top of the lousy excuse for stools we had behind the info desk at the bookstore. “We’ve sort of been digging it all morning.” With the obvious caveat that there’s no better occasion to receive new music than recommendation, even one as tentative and gentle as this one, I’m struck thinking you could do worse than “book store” as model and mark for Lana’s operating aesthetic project. On a purely practical level to start: you can play Lana Del Rey in bookstores. Unremembered seventies folk, foggy vinyl trap, a tendency to fade towards the background without sounding sinisterly canned…it’s not a bad sound to bubble around your ears while your eyes go about the task of shopping around words. But beyond her sound’s practical application, there’s something literary to the fractured America in her voices hups and gulps, as much Cheever as it is Cookie Mueller, as much “FICTION” as it is the bougie floral stationery by the door. A bookstore is a container for aesthetics for sale, not unlike pop music. And what does it mean to call a sound “novelistic”? It’s an interiority for understanding any number of larger-than-yourself concepts: American womanhood, sex in the twenty-twenties, the racial politics of interpolating Doo-wop traditions into your Antonoff-produced single. A novel can contradict in ways a pop narrative doesn’t always, not merely through the liberation of an unreliable narrator, but, by allaying itself with a consciousness, opening itself up to the myriad contradictions we undergo in every moment. “A&W” contradicts itself, both a handy essence-ial symbology of the Lana Del Rey myth as well as a disbursement with obfuscation: this is what it feels like. Confessions, thirsts, poetry chapbooks, a wink to “Video Games”, the re-apparition of ‘Jim’, realizations that catch, that slip. A split at the middle worthy of Lorde’s “Hard Feelings/ Loveless” ensures that the proceedings are as grounded in the body, an advantage the pop song has to the novel. You have to sing it, you have to make the body do the things that let it sing it. There’s a lot of glee in this second half, pitch-flips and falsettos that flange, all a reminder that the best literary theory of Lana Del Rey start and end with voice, that most peculiar aspect of the literary that we simultaneous prize beyond any other quality and which may, in fact, not exist at all.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: One of those songs where I’d rather write a book about it than a blurb. But considering that no publishers are calling me this will have to do. Every second of “A&W” is, as they say, a rich text — the drones, the dirge-leaning turns of the melody, the vape hits — all coming together into a work of staggering information density. Where “Venice Bitch”, her prior moment of proggy grandeur, was shaggy and hallucinogenic, “A&W” is bracing and unadorned — she’s some how gotten Jack Antonoff to do his best impression of outsider art on the second half. Lana’s own performance is a fulfillment of all the hopes and aspersions cast upon her at the dawn of her career, a totally self-obsessed collection of mantras and streams of consciousness that also feel like fragments from some great work of experimental fiction. It’s a true one-of-one, a song that I can’t imagine any other artist even treading water with.
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Leah Isobel: At this point, Lana’s mythology is so baked-in that every new song becomes an exercise in revision, and her tactics have become less disguised over time. The juxtaposition between the first and second halves of “A&W” makes those strategies more naked than ever. Her critic-bait piano/siren-wail mode comes from the Norman Fucking Rockwell! playbook, the fried-out “Jimmy Jimmy” breakdown from (the run-up to) Born To Die. If nothing else, it ably demonstrates how the distance between the two arcs of Lana’s career is actually not that long, and how the acclaim that greeted her sonic shift probably felt to her like respectability politics writ large; so that even as she’s become accepted by the pop literati that once shunned her, she still has something to prove. But her response here is just as disingenuous. “If I said I was raped” is an extremely huge and consequential “if,” even for a songwriter whose conditional tenses and comparisons are central to her work’s effects. I suppose this is the experience of being an American woman: feeling the need to foreground your trauma, or its immanent possibility, in order to really be heard. But “A&W” leaves no path forward, just infinite recursion into her preoccupations. Which is probably why it got nominated for a Grammy.
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Michael Hong: The piecemeal “A&W,” a condensation of eras of Lana Del Rey to become the most Lana track available, is impossible to judge separately from what it is and what you believe of her. Is her self-characterization of being an “American whore” laced with excessive melancholy or is it a proper nihilistic wink? Is the music’s languor masturbatory or rewarding? Are the sing-speak taunts lame or fun? I find “A&W” a tad overindulgent, yet favour the latter answers, but that’s only because last I heard of Lana, she was waitressing down at a Waffle House in Alabama.
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Michelle Myers: This level of self-pity is only bearable because Lana is willing to implicate herself in her own misery. She slurs through her lyrics at 2:55. “Look at the length of it and the shape of my body.” Her pitched-down vocals on “Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high,” croak against the flimsy sadgirl hip-hop beat. There’s little glamor in her day-three-bender, vomit-in-the-hair act this time around, and I find that refreshing.
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Brad Shoup: There are a lot of great details in the first half, both musical (Antonoff’s urgent psych-folk flutter that suggests Will Oldham at his most windswept) and textual (trying to find Forensic Files on the hotel TV, the cop that turns the shower on before calling). And every time she says “American whore,” it degausses everything around it. It turns the room into a diorama. It’s a relief when she makes like a desperado under the eaves for some trap-pop taunting. Antonoff launches triumphant countermelodies on the Mellotron; Del Rey uncorks some truly sardonic coos while doing donuts in the Ramada parking lot. By itself, I’m sure it would be slight; after all the underlining that precedes it, it’s cathartic.
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Jonathan Bradley: “The last time I did a cartwheel is when I was nine.” I love when Lana Del Rey begins her songs as if she’s writing the first page of a 20th-century realist novel. I also love when Lana Del Rey works on epic scale; it suits her predilection towards myth and symbolism and narrative slippage. And yet I do not love “A&W,” which starts with woolly guitar picked like a mid-period Laura Marling single and then transforms into a rumbling 808 lope — it might be her first trunk-rattler. That’s a broad stylistic range, but none of it coheres, and while she addresses the bleak subject matter more plainly than usual, the telling isn’t striking enough to make cohesion not matter.
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Ian Mathers: Look, I absolutely recognize that there are important things being addressed here, but in the spirit of “this meeting could have been an email” it’s also fucking interminable. Ethel Cain has decisively lapped her at this point, the transition between parts is dull as dishwater, and the second part just feels superfluous. Plus now I want a root beer, and I don’t have a root beer.
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Alfred Soto: Those who write about lockjaw as a spiritual malaise should not sing as if with lockjaw.
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Nortey Dowuona: Very good but the back end fucked it up big time.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Imagine the structure of “Partition,” except where instead of having the first half being about feeling badass and the second half being about having kinky sex with Jay-Z, the first half is about the experience of being sexualized and objectified and the second half is about confronting the mother of your lover. This is Lana aiming for and achieving vulnerability, epicness, and humor. “A&W” contains such striking reflections (“I mean look at my hair/Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/If I told you that I was raped/Do you really think that anybody would think/I didn’t ask for it?”) that when it turns into “Jimmy” you can’t help but being taken aback at the slyness and humor with which Lana quips, “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fuckin’ up big time.”
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Will Adams: Every second of “A&W” feels important. If that sounds over-dramatic, consider this is Lana Del Rey we’re dealing with. She’s spent the last fifteen years chiseling away at her mission to distill the experience of American womanhood; there’s going to be lore. There’s the usual self-reference at play — the hotel/motel settings of her shelved Lana Del Ray aka Lizzy Grant; the hip-hop beats and schoolyard chants of Born to Die; an actual flash of strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” — while Lana flits through the many voices she’s established: the somber croon, the raspy head voice, the sedated mumble. Over seven minutes, she builds a narrative of sexuality turned hedonistic. It’s unsettling from the start, with a major/minor chord progression and detuned piano. A bit of sweetness enters in the pre-chorus, until the arrangement collapses at the refrain of, “this is the experience of being an American whore,” each time mounting with a throbbing sub bass. And then there’s the second half, where the ornate arpeggios are replaced with woozy trap, the detailed lyrics with repetition: “Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high,” she deadpans. It echoes the quiet resentment of the breakout song that launched a thousand takes, “Video Games,” but now there’s less neediness and more nihilism. NFR remains Lana’s magnum opus on an album level, but “A&W” might represent the same as a single song.
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Reader average: [9.55] (9 votes)