Lana Del Rey’s greatest opening line reinvented her career
In 2019, Lana Del Rey returned and instantly, something was different. It wasn’t a velvet curtain raising, it was a film title sequence, but the candid opening of Norman Fucking Rockwell! was just as impactful, only in a completely different and reinventing way.
“Goddamn man-child”: the titular and opening track of her sixth album starts with the kind of phrase you’d text your situationship in your fifth argument that you both know you’ll make up from, and fall right back into it. It’s the equivalent of a sigh, a groan of frustration, a balled fist against a chest. “You fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’,” she continues, and in the whole world of Del Rey’s explicitness, no phrase in her entire discography has perhaps ever been that naked.
That’s the thing. Del Rey, up until this point, had sung so much about sordid, seductive or downright pornographic connections. “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola,” she sang on her debut, or paraded as a sex worker on ‘Fucked My Way Up To The Top’, managing to make an STI screen sound hot in those lyrics.
She’s also painted many portraits of men, from the mysterious, alluring figure in ‘Million Dollar Man’ to the cheating disappointment on ‘Sad Girl’. Singing of relationships, in all their varying degrees of monogamy or official status, had always been her bread and butter. But ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ is different, because it feels real.
On the five albums that came before, overwhelmingly, listeners were led to believe that Lana Del Rey was a character. She appeared as a fictional figure who popped up in these different movie scenes, like the sweltering drug crowd of ‘Florida Kilos’, the toast of downtown in ‘Diet Mountain Dew’, or a starlet lounging around the Chateau Marmont pool in ‘Off To The Races’. She was everywhere and everyone, borrowing from a huge host of literary and cinematic references to craft the image of this character.
But then, when she returned in 2019, stripping things back in sound and in lyricism, the portrait on this opening track is bare.
“’Cause you’re just a man, it’s just what you do,” stands as the central line as Del Rey refuses to personify the song’s inspiration in any of the grand and cinematic ways she would have before. Instead, the figure here is nothing more than your average “self-loathing poet”, the kind of male musician you can meet at any local venue in any number of local indie bands.
There is a sparseness and honesty to it that carries across the record. On this album, Del Rey has a location, and it’s the artist’s own. We meet her in Los Angeles, but specifically there and kind of scared, singing about her home being broken into or the smothering way that her own fame was squashing any attempt at a personal life. The fictional stories dropped away on this record as she adopted a still poetic yet more diary-like voice that has remained across all her albums since.
And it all began with that opening line, “Goddamn man child”, a line that says all it needs to say with no sheen, no glossy, no tricks of the light, just as her music has remained.
