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Cerritos College • Norwalk, Calif.

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Cerritos College • Norwalk, Calif.

Talon Marks

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Lust For Life: Lana Del Rey cures the depression she gave us in 2012

With the next generation of flower children anticipating the release of what will surely be Lana Del Rey’s Grammy Award winning album — the entire fan-base is amazed at the work of the self-proclaimed “Queen of New York City,” which is eclectically modern, timely, original, retrospective and classic.

Lust For Life starts off on exactly the right footing with arguably the most radio-friendly of the singles off Lust For Life. Track one is Love, of which ten out of ten elders approved of:

Love by Lana Del Rey is the full package, it has everything the first song on a record should: Ingenious lyrics, a very certain aesthetic (in this case, 60s Folk Rock-inspired), a feel-good tone and a beautiful and innovative music video.

The song is an anthem for the next generation of flower children; in it, Del Rey discusses the importance of making love a priority when someone is young. During the bridge, she whispers “Don’t worry, Baby,” and in this simple but effective climax — the listener is granted an age-old revelation: All you need is love.

It only made sense that such a vibrant track was followed with a pallet cleanser.

While some might say that having the title track, Lust For Life, take second banana to another song is bad framing — Lust For Life isn’t just a filler track between an anthem and a long-winded ballad; no, it is Del Rey herself offering us a mantra, a mood and a state of mind.

In the track Lust For Life, the White Witch of the 21st century tells us to take our fate in our own hands and respect the sacredness of pleasure and beauty.

The sultry songstress immediately breaks our heart in the third song, 13 Beaches. The track starts off with a lifting of Candace Hilligross from the 1962 film Carnival of Souls saying: “I don’t belong in the world, that’s what it is. Something separates me from other people. Everywhere I turn there’s something blocking my escape.”

This sets the tone for a five minute song about the speaker living in a contrived world where privacy is a luxury, and how they yearn for something “real.”

The pre-chorus is the best part of the song both lyrically and sonically:

It hurts to love you,
But I still love you;
It’s just the way I feel
And I’d be lying
If I kept hiding
The fact that I can’t deal
And that I’ve been dying
For something real.

The song is also sprinkled with wonderfully melancholy imagery such as an impossibly lovely woman reclining on an empty beach eating dripping peaches and feeling lonely, including scenes of pines and daisies.

The track also features perfect lines such as: “But you still can find me/ If you ask nicely,” and “In the ballroom of my mind/ Across the county line.”

The songs that lukewarm listeners of Lana Del Rey will be obsessed with and not listen to the rest of the album are:

  • Cherry, which is the sexiest song on the record featuring muddy trap beats, beautifully suggestive lyrics and an actual recipe for a love potion
  • Summer Bummer, which is a lush collaborative track with A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti that showcases Del Rey’s talent for painting portraits of lust interlaced with an innocent and romantic mirage of the island of the nymphs Nabokov describes in the novel Lolita.

In My Feelings, Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind, Tomorrow Never Came and Heroin are the deepest cuts on this record — although lyrically, these songs posses vital imagery that hammers in the 60’s and 70’s aesthetic.

God Bless America – And All The Beautiful Women In It is the track that sets the aesthetic in stone with simple rhymes and a drifting melody (reminiscent of the aforementioned women of 60’s Folk Rock), a simple and subtle application of the sound pad (mixing the trap beats with a more Born To Die rhythm) and a temperamental acoustic guitar.

This guitar reappears in what we are going to call a postmodern protest song, When The World Was At War We Kept Dancing. This song is a lyrical masterpiece that can be summed up in the lines: “Is it the end of America?/ No, it’s only the beginning./ If we hold on to hope,/ We’ll have a happy ending.”

Beautiful People, Beautiful Problems is the wet dream of anyone who wears rose quartz to attract love into their life, picks flowers for the protective and supplementary properties they have when you place them in a vase and reads their tarot each day to appease the anxiety surrounding their love life.

This whole album is Del Rey getting back to her Born To Die and Lana Del Rey: AKA Lizzy Grant roots, and the lyrics “Blue is the color on the shirt of the man that I love./ He’s hard at work, hard to the touch./ Warm is the body of the girl from the land he loves./ My heart is soft, my past is rough,” are exactly what we should expect from this exploration of identity once the speaker is no longer sad — being that “sad” is so often the end all, be all description assigned to Lana Del Rey by people who aren’t well-informed.

Change is a stripped down, less hopeful version of When The World Was At War — but isn’t it the honesty and rawness about The Sparkle Jump-Rope Queen that we love the best? This protest song highlights the need for people to stress the importance of peace and environmentalism in times such as these when world politics are so tense.

Get Free highlights all the important points of the album. These are selflessness, because we all inhabit the same Earth; hope, keeping the world a magical place full of wonder, mystery and love.

With an attitude illustrated in Lust For Life, we will make it through the Trump presidency.

The whole vibe of the song is the perfect ending to the perfect album of the summer of 2017, the summer of love.

TM Katie Stratton
INDIO, CA – APRIL 13: Singer Lana Del Rey performs onstage during day 3 of the 2014 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club on April 13, 2014 in Indio, California. (Photo by Katie Stratton/Getty Images for Coachella)

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About the Contributor
Benjamin Garcia, Fall 2017 Online Editor
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Lust For Life: Lana Del Rey cures the depression she gave us in 2012