Now it’s A$AP Rocky’s turn to pair off: The Harlem rapper turned fashion icon last seen cavorting with Del Rey in the music video for Born to Die’s “National Anthem” returns as the featured artist on both of the tracks from Lust released today in anticipation of the album’s launch on July 21. It started with the Weeknd: After having gone without features on her first three albums, Del Rey combined forces with the Toronto singer, guesting on a gorgeous interlude on his Starboy and then sharing a duet with him on Lust for Life’s title track. After the grand stoned cathedral of Honeymoon, one could be forgiven for believing that her romance with hip-hop was nothing more than a summer fling.īut Lana moves in her own time, and the slow rollout for her fourth album, Lust for Life, is proving that her passion for black music is more committed than ever. Subsequent albums would move away from hip-hop lyricism in the process of shaping an especially languid version of cool: The verses were shorter and less verbose and repetitions took precedence over clever rhymes. That being said, Born to Die’s actual musical arrangements are not very hip-hop and are pretty much as retro as they’ve been made out to be: outsize orchestrations, sweeping melodies, an endless sense of something hanging in the air. “You were sort of punk rock, I grew up on hip-hop,” she sings to a lover on “Blue Jeans” from Born to Die, a debut album whose verbal density and content is clearly informed by a close study of rap lyrics - other phrases on “Blue Jeans” include “fresh to death,” “chasing paper,” caught up in the game,” and “ride or die.” Born to Die’s excellence is based, in no small part, on Lana’s willingness to meet hip-hop on its own terms while maintaining her own sense of image and proportion. Come for the Lana, stay for the end of the world.For all the talk of her repurposing a ’40s and ’50s aesthetic, Lana Del Rey has always kept abreast of the music of the moment, and what the music of the moment happens to be, more and more and more, is rap. The song cuts out midway for a dance to Mexican music (overlaid near the end with an unidentified Lana track). (Given Lana’s statements of concern regarding the ongoing Korean crisis, it’s not impossible that that rocket is actually a missile of some sort.) The video isn’t bad, but it is incredibly alienating. The entire tableau seems suffused with a sense of luxurious, disoriented doom. She’s wearing a botanically themed dress slit on the left up to the middle of her thigh. The whole thing is, as per Lana Del Rey’s usual music-video standard, rendered in luscious colors and vivid contrast as per Lana Del Rey’s usual standard of beauty, Lana Del Rey’s so beautiful that time seems to slow around her. A rocket fires toward the sky above her at one point, and there’s an impossibly tall building in the background in the scene where she meets the guitarist. The easiest way to describe him: He looks like the child of Ed Sheeran and Lana Del Rey.Īnyway, Lana is also filmed driving a car by herself through a cityscape with vague sci-fi tendencies.
The post-breakup song with automotive themes and no small degree of indefinite longing (to the past or future, it’s impossible to say) has received a suitably lush treatment: The singer is filmed caressing and disengaging from a tattooed, bearded, and mustached musician with pale skin and long red hair flowing over his shoulders.
The song itself, already hazy in classic Lana fashion, has been attached to a series of images that convey a mood more than a story.
It’s hard to know what to make of the new music video for “White Mustang,” the fifth track from Lana Del Rey’s recent Lust for Life.