Lana Del Rey - Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd (Audio)
Three weeks on from its release, I fear I have not stopped listening to Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. I am well aware that my kinship with Del Rey turns my general mood into a self-fulfilling prophecy of glamorized pain and suffering. Still, watching her grow as an artist—from a girl who cries of old money she desires and old men she fucks into someone who warbles about childhood, family, reckoning with her body, and a sense of home—has been oddly gratifying. “Paris, Texas” and its wistful piano tinkering is easily my favorite track on the album, but I keep circling back to the Jack Antonoff (ugh) production “A&W” (short for “American whore”), which unearths new sounds and layers with each listen.
In many ways, this song is an embodiment of the old Lana’s aestheticized self-destruction (Call him up, he comes over again/Yeah, I know I’m over my head, but, oh/It’s not about having someone to love me anymore/This is the experience of being an American whore). But it’s also a resignation of sorts: As a relentlessly objectified woman in the public eye, Del Rey has no choice but to accept that she will always be sexualized by beady-eyed vultures without her permission…and brutalized because of it (trigger warning! Mention of sexual assault ahead): I mean, look at my hair/Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/If I told you that I was raped/Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?/I didn’t ask for it.
She’s done fantasizing, she seems to tell us. She knows exactly what her reputation in the cultural sphere is, and she is resigned to letting people think what they want about her. —Emily Leibert