“Looking for America” by Lana Del Rey, Tuesday, November 8, 2022

With the U.S. midterm elections at hand, I thought about this '60s-style protest song from Lana Del Rey, released just weeks prior to her sixth studio album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!  Like most tracks on NFR, "Looking For America" was produced by Jack Antonoff. However, "Looking for America" was not an album track on NFR. Del Rey and Antonoff recorded "Looking for America" was recorded on August 5, 2019 in response to two shootings that happened two days before, one in Dayton, Ohio, and the other in El Paso, Texas. 

IT’S JUST A DREAM I HAD IN MIND.  In many ways "Looking for America" thematically belongs on Norman Fucking Rockwell! In both the larger work and the last-minute single, Del Rey mourns the loss of the "good old days." Del Rey, who built her career as a nostalgia act, creating art centered on the past, shifts her sound to '60s protest songs in the wake of Donald Trump's presidency, a candidate who campaigned on the "good old days promises" but whose presidency puts Del Rey into an existential crisis. The focus of Del Rey's writing is no longer craggy-faced, problematic men, those men are still present, but Del Rey is singing beyond them, to the concept of America itself. But "Looking for America" takes the theme that Del Rey dances around in NFR and makes it explicit that Del Rey is longing for a version of America when it was safe to grow up, when gun violence wasn't on the nightly news. Yet, this nostalgia for America's past is tricky.  The "Make America Great Again" slogan is older than Trump. Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater all used this call to a time when America was at its strongest. But the simplicity of the time that politicians and citizens alike harken back to failed to address human rights for everyone and minimized complex social issues. Unlike MAGA, the message of "Looking for America" is forward-looking for a Del Rey song: guns need to be regulated. 

NO BOMBS IN THE SKY. And so we come to America's 2022 midterm election. It's best not to take voting advice from Lana Del Rey, Elon Musk, or Kathy Griffin. But this election seems important. For years I didn't vote. I didn't live in the jurisdiction I was registered for over ten years, first going to college in Tennessee then living abroad. I trusted that system would take care of itself; who was I in the system? In 2020, 80 million Americans thought just like me and also didn't vote. We thought that we didn't like the candidates or that they didn't represent our true views. The problem is when you trust other people to uphold the system and fail to realize that you are part of the system keeping it going. And if government by the people for the people isn't what you're interested in, bad actors certainly will step in. So, if you want to live in a theocracy owned by an evil chocolate corporation, don't vote. Also, remember what's at stake, economic relief now vs. voting rights in the future. We don't get the luxury when we're looking at a ballot to say, "Let's vote in a dictator now, and if we don't like that system, let's vote for someone else next time." It's too late. So, that's my two cents. Go out and vote!

Read the lyrics on Genius.