But most of all, Lana is and sings as a woman, unapologetically, with all the allure and glamor and mystery that are today most conspicuous in absence.

Much music is confessional, but there’s an incense smell to Lana’s, and the outlines of a crucifix “Kill Kill” on her self-titled 2010 debut coos, “I’m in love with a dying man.” “ Diet Mountain Dew” on 2012’s “Born to Die” takes icon “Jesus off the dashboard/Got enough on His mind” as Lana establishes her persona in that second, but first confidently Del Rey, album: as Eve condemning us all to be indeed born to die as patient Monica in “ Blue Jeans” (I will love you till the end of time/I would wait a million years/Promise you’ll remember that you’re mine/Baby, can you see through the tears?) and in all the self-reflection in the midst of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, Augustine she’s all three and more, sinner and saint and theologian. The girl who became Lana Del Rey, a royal starlet, Lizzy Grant got her start, like so many musicians, in church, singing in the choir and as a cantor and, one assumes, ave maris stella. We are not a country that could or would build a Notre Dame, but in Lana’s Americana there remains a kind of Marian echo, even beyond this particular photograph she prays with us, sinners, now and in the hour of our death.Īgainst the pantheon of American pop, Lana is the anti-Madonna, subverting nothing, sincere in her parody. There is something luminous and so serene about Lana, as she holds this weeping young man, that it composes the whole thing into a secular piece of a long tradition in Western art, a Pieta.

It’s the sort of pathetic idolatry common in the entertainment industry, but it’s transformed in this camera shot. A boy - his age is ambiguous he is so abject and frail - cries in Lana’s arms, seemingly overwhelmed by meeting her. The other picture is a perfect moment of grace amidst fans and paparazzi. It hung as a poster above a broken couch in my living room senior year of college it seemed to ask me to pledge allegiance, so I did. In one, she stands before an American flag, winking over her shoulder, colors nearly washed out except the red of her lipstick and the stripes of Old Glory. There are two pictures of Lana Del Rey in my mind.

Lana del rey rockwell