Lana Del Rey’s Brilliant Lyricism

by Lily E

Lana Del Rey, formally named Lizzie Grant, is an established singer and songwriter who is known for her artistic performances and beautiful songs. Her main demographic consists of teenage girls, their cultish behaviour is well known and I suppose they worship her because she connects with them through her lyrics, exploring themes that relate to their struggles in life. I'm a self-proclaimed fan myself, and she holds a particularly special place in my heart because she's grown up with me. I can link her with memories of driving with my dad to singing lessons, blasting out her first album so loud that the car rumbled with the bass. She represents to me, those peaceful moments where I could be taken away by the music but also feel as connected to my dad as ever; I suppose it felt like my dad could understand me through the songs. As I've grown older she’s stayed right by me, and now that I fully understand her lyrics and the depth that can be found behind them, they hold more gravity and importance in my life. 

We can see her genius grow through each album and the overarching themes that they contain. I see similarities to John Donne’s conceits of exploration and colonisation in her song ‘Arcadia’. She compares her body to a ‘map of LA… my chest, the Sierra Madre/ my hips, every high and byway/ that you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota/ run your hands over me like a Land Rover’. We see that she is allowing herself to be objectified as a map; is this a recognition that this lover is diminishing her to that role or is she doing it herself to allow him complete control over her as an act of trust? This ambiguity shows that this relationship seems complicated and perhaps destructive. Her chest being compared to the Sierra Madre connotes imagery of wilderness, one that perhaps needs to be explored. This natural imagery is supposed to be enticing to the lover she is speaking to, the domination of her body being offered openly to them. Their fingers are compared to a ‘Toyota’ and their hands a ‘Land Rover’, the metaphor showing what he is being asked to do; explore her like a car would explore these places in America. She raises this question; does the land, vast and beautiful and permanent, hold more control than the people exploring it? Using America for this conceit shows the ties this song has with the idea of colonisation and how to make a land your own, as America obviously has a history of this. Lana, through this song, explores how difficult and confusing power dynamics can be in a relationship.

In an earlier album, she sings of women’s struggles and how they seem to permeate through time. In her song ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman to have, but I have it’, she alludes to the poet Sylvia Plath as relatable to the battles she faces in her own life. She says ‘I've been tearing around in my ******* nightgown, 24/7 Sylvia Plath’ , the reference likening her lifestyle to Plath’s own depressive one. Lana’s brilliance lies in her subversion of Plath’s famous quote from her book the Bell Jar; ‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am’. Instead, Lana repeats the phrase ‘baby I'm not, no I'm not, that I’m not’, this triadic structure mimicking Plath’s. Sylvia, in her quote, resents her heart beating, but Lana chooses not to. This perhaps, is her own way to separate herself from Plath, Lana wanting to be hopeful (like the title of the song states) that she won’t follow Plath’s decline in mental health that led to her suicide. Upon looking even closer at Sylvia Plath’s poetry, I found that Lana uses them in her other songs too. There is a line in Wildfire Wildflower when she subverts a quote of Sylvia’s poetry to reflect a happier outcome, the line from Sylvia’s poem Lady Lazarus being ‘I turn and burn’; Lana instead writes ‘I turn but I learn’. How deep her lyricism goes shocks me everytime, her drawing on these references to make her songs speak volumes.

Her song ‘Watercolour Eyes’ was used in the HBO show Euphoria and is another beautiful exploration into relationships and the destruction they can cause. She states ‘I think that you taste like rock candy’, this song apostrophising her lover as something harsh but rewarding. Throughout the poem, she seems to fight with herself over whether the love this person gives is good enough to ignore the pain it comes with. The comparison she makes of him to ‘rock candy’ shows these conflicting feelings. She goes on to say ‘sweet like beaches, leave me all sandy’, perhaps commenting on the happiness she feels when with him and how that is transient, leaving her with only negative repercussions. Her argument with herself is complicated in this way; should you give up something good because it doesn't feel that way forever? She makes an allusion to the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Wild Horses’ (another one of my favourite songs) but again twists it, this time to represent her toxic relationship; she changes ‘wild horses couldn't drag me away’ to ‘wild horses can't keep us together’. The strength of the relationship in the Rolling Stone’s song is not found in Lana’s. She writes ‘hot summer and cold watermelon your love stings like blood and a lemon’, the two contrasting fruits representing the ups and downs of her experience with this person. The ‘blood’ connotes violence and perhaps the physical pain caused by this relationship. Putting lemon on a wound would cause it to heal though, so Lana could possibly be suggesting that the pain the relationship is causing is necessary. This pain is contrasted with ‘hot summer’ which connotes freedom and happiness, this being used as a symbol of that throughout her discography. Lana overall seems to offer us an insight into the mind of someone who is in a toxic and destructive relationship, and perhaps the things they would tell themselves to reason staying. 

Any artist who has such intellectual lyrics should be regarded as not just a songwriter, but a poet. Lana seems to have proven that her songs can delve deep into complex themes and issues whilst also using beautiful word-play and metaphors that give depth to her lyrics.