“Dark Paradise” by Lana Del Rey, Thursday, July 7, 2022

 

This July, as many American have celebrated Independence Day, I think it's important to look at different versions of the American Dream. Lana Del Rey's 2012 record Born to Die examines "the dark side of the American dream" at times. While America is starting look more like it's Puritanical heritage with a little too much Flannery O'Connor and Homer Simpson pseudo-religiosity, the Northeastern secular world that Del Rey paints on her debut album seems like a world apart from a neo-conservatism. Del Rey's America is the America of Hollywood. It's New Yorkers who vacation Upstate in the summer and attend cocktail parties on the weekend. If they go to church, it's infrequent and not an evangelical version of Christianity. It's the America of the Jazz Age and the fifties.

ALL MY FRIENDS TELL ME I SHOULD MOVE ON. But it's also the America of Mad Men. Del Rey has been criticized for sometime avowing an opposition to feminism. In 2014, the singer said in an interview with Fader magazine, "For me the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I'm more interested in . . . SpaceX and Tesla." The relationships portrayed in Born to Die are certainly problematic. But raising an issue with them is difficult because the details are often so over the top and outwardly problematic that they are hard to take literally. Lana Del Rey is clearly not a role model, but becomes one ironically. And all of this is filtered through another layer of irony: Lana Del Rey is a persona of the artist Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grant. And, while in persona of Lana is Grant, but it's difficult to say whether or not Grant is Lana Del Rey under the makeup or if there is some cognitive distance between the two. Like with many artists, it's difficult to crack the true meanings behind the songs. With Del Rey listeners have a layer of fiction often not imposed by other musicians. 

I WISH I WAS DEAD. I've heard a theory that Born to Die hinges on the song "Dark Paradise," the album's seventh track. This is song is the chilly November rainstorm of an otherwise May to September record. The song alludes to the death of a former lover. However, with Del Rey, it's hard to tell if this was literal or symbolic. The death of this lover, whether or not he were the same abusive lover sung about elsewhere on the record, propitiates the Del-Rey lifestyle elsewhere on the album. It's the tragic backstory answering why Del Rey is the way she is. Today's song doesn't rely much on the golden age of Hollywood, the Beatniks, '60s swingers, cocktail parties, the Jazz Age, or any other Del Rey trope on the record. Del Rey fastidiously studied the archetype of the heart of the trope--it's the James Dean or Kurt Cobain figure who died too young, leaving the heartbroken lover behind to pick up the pieces of her life. Del Rey confesses that "I wish I was dead," like him, but the ambiguity of being "scared that you won't be waiting on the other side" brings her down to the ocean, like a siren, to sing the song for the dead. If this interpretation of the record is correct, then Del Rey does move on, but continues to live a life of self destruction continued into her next record Ultraviolence. Very simply, the song brings up the topics of grief, the possibility of life after death, and salvation vs. damnation. But in the context of the album that in ways sets out to be the next great American novel, it's hard to separate this song from a larger context in that Del Rey is an American woman or that she is America itself in all of its idols and hypocrisy. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.

Demo 1: 

Demo 2: