Lana Del Rey plunges into the deep of ‘Tunnel under Ocean Blvd’, and we’re ready to dive in
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges. From the choir rehearsal through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Lana Del Rey plunges into the deep of ‘Tunnel under Ocean Blvd’, and we’re ready to dive in, to experience an Emotional Tour De Force.
Beauty—long Lana’s virtue and her burden—fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom—and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.
Bold and Enthralling
This album begins with a mistake. As a trio of backing singers is conducted through a burst of ‘The Grants’’ central chorus line, they slip up. “I’m gonna take mind of you with me,” they sing, “mind” instead of the intended “mine”.
Other artists might have scrubbed that faux pas and replaced it with something perfect and polished, but not Lana Del Rey. That error is reflective of how she portrays life itself in her music – imperfect, sometimes messy. In many ways, she is a documentarian capturing angles that aren’t just bright and beautiful.
For all of Lana Del Rey’s heavily stylized albums, they have been cries of pain that cut near the bone. “Fuck me to death, love me till I love myself,” she sings on the title track of this sprawling ninth album. At 16 tracks, Ocean Blvd leans heavily on a combination of muted piano, hovering strings, and Del Rey’s voice.
Vulnerable Womanhood
Blue Banisters, Lana’s album from 2021, introduced many of the ideas that stand out here: revisiting old material with relish, releasing pop’s conventional structures and polish, and writing about loved ones with tender specificity. Lana, née Elizabeth Grant, started with a track that bears her family name, and she holds them close throughout. The matter of bearing children comes up in “The Grants” and “Sweet,” a traditional wife fantasy tucked in a mid-century film musical score. “Fingertips” broaches the topic of motherhood with a devastating admission of self-doubt. “Will the baby be all right/Will I have one of mine?/Can I handle it even if I do?”
Such a sentiment could easily be attributed to millennial unease, but this feels more personal. In Lana’s words “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution”—at her most genuinely unguarded. With its solemn hush and meticulously rendered but opaque details, “Fingertips” seems disinterested in holding our attention. There’s no structure, only the strings and the Wurlitzer picking up Lana’s breadcrumbs as she wanders the misty forest of her memory.
Elsewhere, Lana throws stones into these still waters, most memorably on “A&W.” She writes from the perspective of a sympathetic lonely heart; here, a symbol of the ire that unorthodox women unleash. “Did you know that a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?”. This is a personal question for Lana—unmarried and child-free at 37, a subject of constant physical scrutiny.
On the other hand, the title is a fit-to-print stand-in for “American Whore,” an embattled attention-seeker, an illicit lover, an imperfect victim (“Do you think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”). Then, after a radical balladry into boom-bap playground rap, she became a brat tattling to someone’s mom. We are whores who deserve what we get, or else children that need saving from our own decisions.
Growing instinct to self-mythologize
Where do we go from here? To church, apparently. Lana follows “A&W” with a sermon on lust from Judah Smith, the Beverly Hills pastor. The four-and-a-half-minute homily, accompanied by melancholy piano and occasional laugh seems designed more to inflame than to enlighten. In the end, though, comes an interesting kernel: Smith concedes, “…I’ve discovered that my preaching is mostly about me.”
Now more than ever, Lana’s preaching is mostly about her, reflecting a growing instinct to self-mythologize. On Ocean Blvd, she sings explicitly about being Lana Del Rey. That backward-looking gaze also settles on hip-hop, a longstanding presence in her work from 2017’s Lust for Life. The trap beats are back in the record’s final stretch, where they accompany some of Lana’s most willful provocations.
There’s a sense of doubling down, of insistence that her path is hers alone to forge. On “Taco Truck x VB,” is a trap remix of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s “Venice Bitch”. Lana elbows her way in front of the criticism: “Before you talk let me stop what you say/I know, I know, I know that you hate me.” She is fresher yet out of fucks.
Lana is a chronic cataloguer of her references: Take “Peppers,” which samples Tommy Genesis’ ribald 2015 track “Angelina.” At her best, Lana reinterprets others’ work with intention, percolating their meaning through a personal filter. She now applies this same approach to her past materials. She is an artist tracing her evolution and submitting her work, ripe for reimagining, for entry in the greater American songbook from which she so readily draws.
