Deconstructing American Masculinity in Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell
Nobody can write about being a girl in modern society like Lana Del Rey. Sometime in 2011 Lana released her debut major label album “Born To Die” in that span of time she established herself as the next best American songstress. Lana once said that she believed words are one of the last forms of magic, and its no surprise that her music oozes mysticism and mystique. Not in a sense of the occult but of modern mythmaking, she constructs the fantastic tales that live inside our daily lives, in newspaper columns, comic strips, video games, and creates fantasies out of them. A soothsayer of our time, she tells the stories of the American dream, the quintessential pilgrimage in the land of pop. She writes about America like its a fantasy land, but with a scathing twist that never once loses it’s sense of dreamland. In Norman Fucking Rockwell she paints the monsters that live inside white picket fences in Rockwell’s painting. Heartbreaks, disappointments, angst and conflicts that are present inside every idyllic house and family that have been told and retold a thousand times in the history of pop.
But different from her predecessors, Lana sings about the fragility of creatures that the pop world has deemed as Gods. She sings about men and the pitiful beings that they truly are, something that the American pop world has deemed impossible. Some of the stories are scornful, some are wistful and romantic, but all of them are laced with empathy. She doesn’t sing of man hating or man worshipping but she sings about who they truly are, vulnerable, weak, and human. But most importantly she sings about navigating life as a woman in the world of men, something that is often done, but not properly enough.
In 2019 she constructs a work of American history through Norman Fucking Rockwell, borrowing the name of someone who once constructed a piece of the American dream. There, Lana abandons her typical trip-hop motif for something more refined, a swelling orchestra that is minimalist and at the same time maximalist, something that is truly befitting for a story of American dreams. She references the greats and remakes tropes with her own twists, the Californian holy land myth, Laurel Canyon mystique and musicians of the past that created the very myth she is retelling in the album. From The Beach Boys to Hemingway to Dylan to Fitzgerald, Norman Fucking Rockwell is a work of excess, doomsday storytelling, and everyday life all at the same time, and at the center of it is her fragile Heracles.
To understand NFR we must first understand the namesake and the construction of the American dream. Norman Rockwell was a painter that helped establish the visual identity behind the American dream. What Rockwell painted was a picture of freedom and perfection, of a respectable and peaceful life you can lead in America, a society filled with liberty and family values led by men. The American dream has always put their eggs in male figures and the patriotism they hold while carrying freedom in their backs. The American dream has always been a concept riddled with masculinity and even more masculine figures. From Humphrey Bogart to The Kennedys to John Wayne, even in more contemporary times the leading male figure in pop culture media has always been a way of creating and preserving the dream. Even in music, figures such as Jim Morrison, Elvis, and countless other rock figures have dominated the landscape of pop culture in America.
Rockwell is also a male figure of picture perfect America, an essence of masculine values and how they are expected to act and treat others. The heroes of the story of America has always been men and at some point men developed an ego the size of those heroes, while also thinking that they should act like the actors on the screen. The concept of American masculinity is something unique, something that is closely tied to self perception, patriotism, and male ego. Lana sings not just of masculine toxicity and how they are perpetrators but how men are also victims of these values, how pitiful they are to cling to their egos and self image while the world falls apart around them. Lana is an incredibly sensitive songwriter, able to create empathic stories and sprawling landscapes in just the span of mere minutes and in NFR she deconstructs men and all their perceived glory.
In the title track she sings “you’re just a man, that’s what you do” and that’s exactly who they are, just men. Prone to heartbreaks, and bursts of raw emotion they don’t have to be stronger than they really are Lana says. And by nature men are disappointing creatures, the numerous songs in her tracklist tells this, but there is a certain romance to it, there is beauty in watching a slow moving train wreck. This is NFR in its peak, a fantastic story of normalcy and a woman’s point of view of a man’s world. Failure after failure and heartache after heartache accompanied by towering strings and orchestra, Lana paints the beautiful side story in a Norman Rockwell painting, the often unseen inner world of a dream.
Not just commenting on the inner struggles of men but also how they interact and view the opposite sex. Lana with her signature timeless beauty, vintage aesthetic, and wistful vocals create an image of a modern day Marilyn Monroe. Someone that men always wants and yet someone that cannot get past her image that is constructed by men. In the song “Venice Bitch” she sings of wanting a hallmark life with her man, someone that lives the American dream and someone that is a perfect partner for her man. The view and values of conservative middle class men that perceive women as a kind of predestined partner to have marry, have kids with, live in a house with, grow old with, while occasionally having a little fling here and there. This is the view of America that is constructed by Lana Del Rey a critique of the essential American life that is also romanticized by her at the same time. To quote Pitchfork magazine NFR is a story about a heart shattering and reforming, only to shatter again.
Ultimately, Norman Fucking Rockwell is a revival of the Americana myth performed by Lana, a tale of broken men, women, and country attempting to navigate the mess of a dream that they created themselves. A time capsule of past present and future America constructed in 2019 in a landscape of turbulent social and political conditions, NFR stands as one of the contemporary landmarks of pop music befitting to be called as one of the next best American record.
