The lyric Lana Del Rey said defined her: “The theme of my career”
The truth is a very delicate subject in songwriting.
It should be rightfully mined by musicians, to provide an unfiltered view of the world in which they live and in turn, provide us with some sort of enlightenment. But there comes a point in songwriting, where that pain crosses with responsibility and the ripple effects of their narrative starts to make themselves known.
It’s a complex that can be seen clearly in Lana Del Rey’s track, ‘Ultraviolence’. Make no mistake, Del Rey is one of the most gifted wordsmiths in the modern era of music and her songwriting style has captured the attention of a generation of listeners. She balances intimate feelings of melancholy, love or hope with a grand cinematic sound approach that ultimately gives all of her songs an air of tragedy.
Crucially though, she puts the feminine experience at the very foreground of her music and the impact that has on her audience can’t be understated. But in ‘Ultraviolence’ she puts the very truth of her experience at the centre of it, to pose that very question of moral responsibility.
“I used to be a member of an underground sect which was reigned by a guru,” she said, explaining of the songs origin. “He surrounded himself with young girls and he had this insane charisma I couldn’t resist as well. So I was in this, I’ll call it sect, because I was longing for love and security.”
“But then I found out that this guru wasn’t a good but a bad person,” she added. “He thought that he had to break people first before he could build them up again. At the end I left the sect.”
So the song consequently becomes a self-constructed conversation between the conflict of pain and love, and how the two become somewhat blurred in the midst of hypnotic charisma. And the line “He hit me and it felt like a kiss” called that dilemma into question, with critics raising the potentially troubling nature of glamourising abuse.
It was something Del Rey acknowledged, but once again funnelled attention back to the personal nature of her lyrics, saying, “That’s been the theme of my career. The thing about me is, coming from an alternative music background and singing for nine years, being basically invisible, I’m so used to writing for myself — and at the end of the day, I do it because I feel like I have to. So when I’m recording or writing, I don’t have other people in mind. It’s not always comfortable for me, but I don’t not say what I want to.”
It’s a fine line for Del Rey to tread, because her music clearly shows that she didn’t initially get into the business to write for the masses. She is, despite her global reaching status, an intimate musician whose music works best in the confines of her own creative environment and so to ask her to compromise that would only do a disservice to her music.
