Even the earliest explorers of California were driven there, in part, by myth. In 1510, the Spanish writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo published “Las Sergas de Esplandián,” a pie-eyed fictional account of an “Island of California,” populated exclusively by Amazonian women, “robust of body with strong, passionate hearts and great virtue,” and situated “very close” to the Garden of Eden. It appears that the work was widely read, its inventions internalized. When a Spanish expedition first reached the western edge of North America and ran into a mountainous peninsula stretching into the Pacific, the sailors named it Baja California. Soon, cartographers began using “California” to indicate the entire western coastline. The appellation itself is a synecdoche. It originated as a fantasy.
In 2015, there is no better embodiment of California’s dizzying, orphic appeal than the singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey, herself a myth, the present-day iteration of Lizzy Grant, a girl who was born in New York City in 1985 and came of age in Lake Placid, a former Olympic boomtown deep in the Adirondack Mountains. Del Rey’s transformation is not singular, but mirrors the precise kind of aesthetic reinvention (a name change; perhaps some cosmetic surgery; the acquisition of many, many gossamer frocks) that aspiring starlets have been enacting since the advent of the studio system.
Del Rey relocated to California in her mid-twenties, and it’s now challenging to find a promotional photograph of her that does not, in one way or another, suggest a deep allegiance to the state. There she is, on a poolside chaise. There she is, brooding, adjacent to a succulent, in a “Hollywood” T-shirt knotted off at the navel. There she is, on the cover of “Honeymoon,” her third album, slouched atop a Starline Tours convertible, wearing dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. The video for the single “High by the Beach” features Del Rey pacing anxiously about a Malibu mansion in her nightclothes (she eventually fetches a rocket launcher from the sand and explodes a paparazzi helicopter that’s been hovering nearby). Even her taken name conjures a golden terrain. “Lana” was inspired by Lana Turner, a titan of red-lip, Old Hollywood glamour; “Del Rey,” which translates from Spanish as “of the King,” is a neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles.
Del Rey’s California—which is the California of our collective unconsciousness, a dream song—is preoccupied with glamour and love and fame and anguish and loneliness and hunger. Those forces animate her work. “She grew up on the East Coast but she is an artist of the West Coast,” James Franco wrote of Del Rey in the new issue of V Magazine. “When I watch her stuff, when I listen to her stuff, I am reminded of everything I love about Los Angeles. I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and bikers.”
Franco’s characterization of his adopted hometown (he was born in Palo Alto) is its own kind of invention—one wonders exactly what sorts of “figurines” he’s referring to—but he’s right that Del Rey is inextricably of her time and place. On “Honeymoon,” Del Rey sings often of California. The most explicit homage here is the track “Freak,” in which Del Rey, in her languorous, trembling voice, encourages a lover to relocate, to find his truth out West: “Baby, if you wanna leave, come to California, be a freak like me, too.”
California is, of course, where a person goes to change. The state is a haven in which to unfurl whatever latent identity has been lurking in your bones. Those impulses are reflected in—perhaps dictated by—the geography: the San Andreas Fault, the eight-hundred-and-ten-mile boundary between two tectonic plates, requires the landscape to periodically rethink itself, reconfigure. Then there’s the ocean, slapping against the cliffs of Big Sur, rolling gently toward Santa Monica—as if to say, loudly, convincingly, “Last stop! Now or never!” In his essay “Fifteen Takes on California,” the critic David L. Ulin writes of “our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.”
The best songs on “Honeymoon” are about helplessness in the face of a forced conversion: the kind of change incited by a breakup, or by any sort of sudden, unfixable loss. Del Rey can be a deft lyricist, gasping bruising little lines, like “I lost myself when I lost you,” or “Ain’t it strange that you’re not here with me?”
Then, inevitably, she’ll do something odd, like quote David Bowie, only instead of deploying one of Bowie’s terrifically dreamy observations (“It was God’s light, it was ragged and naïve, it was heaven,” say) she sings, “Ground control to Major Tom.” The line implies distance—in this case, the vast and ravaging expanse that develops between estranged lovers, as each goes on to create a life unknowable to the other, and, transitively, becomes unknowable to the other—but the shorthand feels too easy; the effect is nearly goofy. In “Music to Watch Boys To,” she evokes the title of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” a felix culpa about the mercurial dawn of spring, but then caps the line by saying “Like love, or lemonade.” Love, sure: betrayal, duplicity, abandonment, ache—that’s where Del Rey lives, writes. But lemonade, at least, seems indelible.
Much of “Honeymoon” is deliberately cinematic. Imagine long, sustained shots of a beautiful woman drinking dry champagne and sobbing in a beachfront mansion. Del Rey is often accused of sounding bored—and she does—but her disaffection belies a certain kind of distance from her pain. That’s hard-won: the apathy of the perpetually aggrieved. This apathy is encapsulated, handily, in the devastatingly plaintive lyric “God knows I tried,” from a song of the same name. This is the sort of exhausted thing a person might say to herself after she gives up, decides to try something else for a while: “God knows I loved; God knows I lied; God knows I lost; God gave me life; and God knows I tried.” Her primary accompaniment is a spindly, reverb-doused electric guitar. Del Rey has reached a funny kind of détente with her misery, with her sense of remorse, of indignation. She has reached the end of a line.
It is perhaps a queasy comparison, but if Del Rey has a spiritual predecessor, it’s Joan Didion, who wrote frequently of California’s gauzy pull, but more often of its inherent strangeness, its finality: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent,” she wrote in 1965, in “Notes from a Native Daughter.” We don’t think about the East this way; American inertia moves in a single direction. There is only one way to ride off into a sunset.
Or, as Bob Dylan sang: “We drove that car as far as we could.”
