My first recollection
of encountering the music
of Lana Del Rey was a notorious
Saturday Night Live appearance
that was summarily panned by
everyone who saw it as perhaps
the worst SNL musical guest
performance in history.
I didn’t see it live, but if I remember
correctly, I was curious enough
to watch it later, and while
I didn’t really like what I heard,
I thought to myself,
what is so terrible about that?
I mean, she was kind of awkward
and she was doing a funny
thing with her voice, a thing
she no longer does as far as
I can tell. But it wasn’t that bad,
certainly, not nearly as bad
as everyone appeared
to think–career-ending bad.
Well, news flash, her career was
far from over and it took me
a long time, but in the first part
of this current decade, when
everyone was singing her praises,
I started streaming her stuff, and
in 2023, a full decade after that
fateful SNL appearance, I bought
this album with the strange-ass title:
Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
I’m kind of hypnotized by this album.
It’s dark and subdued. Her singing
is so unassuming–there’s none of the
weirdness from that earlier decade.
It sounds like she’s hardly pushing any
air through her lungs. At her most
bombastic, her voice has this relaxed,
almost lazy quality, even when she sings
a line like “fuck me to death.”
The production is lush, but minimal,
mostly piano and strings, big backing
vocals, and if there are drums, they
sound a mile away and inside of a cave,
or absolutely dry and quiet.
A sadness pulses through most of this,
and it feels somehow not of our time.
But every once in a while the production
throws the listener a curveball, like that
transition in the middle of “A&W,”
from this spooky piano and voice,
singing “This is the experience
of bein’ an American whore,” to a kind
of psychedelic slow hip-hop jam
replete with drum machine beat,
where she sings about “Jimmy Jimmy
cocoa puff,” who only loves her when
he wants to get high. It’s such an odd
turn, but fascinating and groovy.
The album is sprinkled with these
field recordings, noted as “interludes”
in the track list: background vocalists
rehearsing to get the words right, what
feels like a complete sermon given by
a pastor in his church, and several minutes
of Jon Batiste just screwing around on his
piano and laughing, apparently riffing
with Lana on some new idea. These
interludes add a kind of cinema verité
effect, a window into the making of
the record, or a way to paint the vibe
of the album, the preacher serving
to kind of offset or comment upon the
darkness in which the speaker in most
of these lyrics finds herself.
It’s a sober, haunting record,
one to which, especially when streaming,
at one hour and eighteen minutes of play,
I would often find myself napping,
and then afterwards,
regretting that I had dozed off, feeling
that I had missed something along
the way. Spinning the vinyl version will
remedy that, to a certain degree; the need
to get up every twenty minutes to
turn the record over can stop one
from dozing off and create the space
for a more active listen. You can’t miss, for
example, the collaboration with Father
John Misty on side three, “Let The Light
In,” maybe my favorite tune on
the record.
This is the only Lana Del
Rey album in my collection.
At first, it was a bit of a guilty
pleasure purchase, but the more
I sat with it, the more I understood
how her weirdness and seriousness
distinguish her from her female
pop star peers. There’s a depth
here, a more pronounced vision,
that, even though her skill as
a vocalist is not astounding,
her music has a weight that other
singers with stronger pipes
may lack. It’s art with a capital A.
I’m certain I’ll be adding to
the collection more from Lana Del Rey.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Polydor/Interscope Records, 2023, double album on opaque lime green vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response for each artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric. This one, for example, ends in a rhyme!
michael jarmer 