Make America Great Again With Lana Del Rey
Today, about eight hundred thousand photos on Instagram are saddened to the end of the summer with a hashtag of the title of her song. Don’t worry if you don’t have a summer-themed photo that you share with a sepia filter and lyrics of Summertime Sadness yet. With her sixth studio album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, released at the end of August, Lana Del Rey introduces us to a new side of her own audiovisual world.
In October 2011, when Video Games became a big hit where she films herself singing with resentful eyes in her photographer sister’s Manhattan apartment, Lana Del Rey became the new packaging of an old concept: Melancholy. Her melancholic attitude, meaning “depression of spirits”, combined with the misty sound and the vintage archive images she found on the internet and put in a collage for the music video, the stuck music industry and the bored listeners found fresh blood that fed them musically and visually. The answers to the questions of where this girl came from and how it had not been noticed before were only known to Elizabeth Lizzy Grant, who was born in 1985 in New York. After studying philosophy at university, she moved to Brooklyn and started playing in small bars.
hoping to be discovered with desperate hope could have been regarded as the first steps in the career of a değerlendir star ında in America of the twentieth century. But we know this is a formula that is too romantic in the twenty-first century, no matter which corner of the world it is, and this no longer works. She must have realized that in January 2010, because Lizzy has rebuilt herself by making many changes from her name to her appearance. The name Lizzy Grant is replaced by Lana Del Rey, her style has a vintage look with the help of a renewed wardrobe and thick eyeliner and curling false eyelashes. The sad expression in her eyes, combined with the dramatic interventions of plastic surgery, strengthens her image, and all that is left for Lizzy is to perform her art.
Born To Die, Ultraviolence, Honeymoon are the hit albums that have developed the image of “old Hollywood magic” step by step. The cinematographic videos she made for her sadcore songs which are riddled with melancholy are documenting her image both visually and aurally. Hippie Lana, with a big smile on her face and flowers in her hair on the cover of her album Lust for Life, is showcasing this step by step progression. With the help of her image and amazing talent, she made Young and Beautiful for The Great Gatsby movie soundtrack, directed by Baz Luhrmann. In the song, she is asking “Will you still love me when I’ve got nothing but my aching soul?” with a heavy melancholy, this paved the way for non-melancholic collaborations with popular figures like The Weeknd. The Great Gatsby which dubs “the American dream” as an illusion with a sad but striking story that happens in the ’20s, gives way to the blockbuster movie Charlie’s Angel, which has a lot of action and promotes an alternative sexy woman image and a successful music collaboration with teenage pop idols. It doesn’t mean that Lana is now banal as the result of her popularity because she shapes the popular culture while preserving her original image.
Now, she is trending with her sixth studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell that she’s just released. The hippie girl on the cover of Lust For Life now surfs on the California coast in a neoprene bathing suit. This vintage visual style, presented by the graphic artist Norman Rockwell, who left his mark on American pop culture, and which Lana is familiar with, has spread to the album. Lana, with one hand firmly grasping her man while the California beaches are burning in the back, has reached the other hand to us as a saviour.
It is hard not to think that she is remembering and reliving the most popular era of America as a response to the “Make America Great Again” notion used by mediocre Trump America to promote a basic illusion.
For a graduate of philosophy, it must be a heavy mental responsibility to consider and present one’s self as a project. Moreover, Lana Del Rey does all of this by ignoring to acknowledge the fact that she used her father’s help, who is very wealthy, in her interviews and creating her own reality, such as “songs dedicated to the dead gangster lover”. She transforms everything that she presents into a visual and auditory feast and is now considered a diva. It’s not that hard when you think about her 2018 MET Gala costume which is dedicated to Catholic imagination in 2018! Lana Del Rey is like a self-born mythological character of an alternative world.