Photo by Justin Higuchi via flickr
From the first sweep of strings evoking a scarf-in-the-breeze to the last line, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have/ but I have it,” the back-half sung in a treacly, unconvincing voice, Lana Del Rey’s masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell seems to encapsulate the American spirit— or at least what’s left of it— better than almost any other piece of contemporary art. The political and personal are so intertwined, there is no separation: the relationships mean everything and then are cast aside as though they meant nothing. Many songs hold up a mirror: in “Mariner’s Apartment Complex,” she sings, “You mistook my kindness for weakness,” and that declaration, in only the second track of the record, reverberates: in this world, the one of the record and the one we are suffering in, all kindness is weaponized against the person who gives it, especially if they do it with no strings attached.
But something Del Rey could not have seen coming from her vantage point in 2019 was that she might actually call the apocalyptic elements in the landscape of 2020– with startling accuracy— to the point where I’m half-convinced, though the song is called “The greatest,” she likely thought, whimsically, of adding a parenthetical title “(life in a disconnected zoom call),” not yet knowing what it would mean.
The song ends on Jack Antonoff, producer and pianist, playing softer and softer as her mouth seems to cushion the last few lines: what had been wailed and pleaded in earlier verses seems tame and almost like begging, now:
The culture is lit
And if this is it
I had a ball
I guess I’m burned out after all
If this is it, I’m signing off
Miss doing nothin’ the most of all
Hawaii just missed that fireball
LA’s in flames, it’s getting hot
Kanye West is blonde and gone
“Life on Mars?” ain’t just a song
I hope the live stream’s almost on
It’s hard to listen to someone do the Whitman-esque “Do I contradict myself? Fine, then I contradict myself” as quickly as Del Rey; there is a whiplash effect between her hatred and desperation for technology. If we weren’t suffering a similar effect as a society, it would be disorienting: as it is, it’s rare to have a conversation that isn’t interrupted by a cell phone and at least one party saying something to the extent of, “I’d do anything to get rid of this thing,” while madly typing away on it. But the indication of technological obsession in society is not what’s so impressive about “The greatest:” this song, and Norman Fucking Rockwell, came out in 2019.
I’ve been joking for a while that I was impressed that Del Rey correctly named three of the four harbingers of doom, the contemporary horsemen of the apocalypse. It’s certainly not Biblical, but there has been no shortage of plague, famine, conquest, and war, and while I wouldn’t make an argument that this lines up perfectly, it’s hard not to see corollaries in her doom-list: Hawaii avoided extinction, but just barely; there are fires all through California now, the flames stretching from LA up the coast; and the public breakdown of a brilliant— now unrecognizable and scary— Black man, Kanye West, all feel like the kinds of colossal losses that hint at bigger problems, and they’ve all gotten much, much worse this year. A few nights ago, though, I realized that she’d outsmarted even me and called the biggest social problem in a tongue-in-cheek way, even if she didn’t mean to do so.
As a huge David Bowie fan, I sometimes assume people bring him up just so they can talk about him, and certainly, due to the Mars rover, “Life on Mars?” was relevant in 2019. But by 2020, it was essential. I was driving home, singing along with a song I’ve known as long as I can remember, and I heard the the chorus come out of my mouth:
Take a look at the law man
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, I wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best-selling show
I burst into tears. It’s hard to explain what I felt, knowing that men are dying because police have knelt on their necks while they cried for their mothers; knowing that Breonna Taylor was killed while she was asleep in her home and no one has done anything about it. There are so many people who can’t breathe anymore, including, more and more, the living people who are watching this all happen as it streams through their TVs and computers.
Which is when it hit me: while I think Del Rey’s songwriting is some of the most clever out there right now, what was most painful was how obvious, in the reflection of “Life on Mars?”, 2020 was going to be. Let’s go ahead and rename the horsemen: there are still four, but I think the names need to be recontextualized due to the modern era. Sure, we still have the plague, and while she didn’t correctly predict a worldwide pandemic, the lack of understanding and care surrounding mental health is why people are happier to laugh at Kanye West and make fun of him than to remember, wait, this is a human being— no matter what he said, no matter how dumb it sounded. He’s deserving of compassion because he exists. So is that the plague of 2020? Not the primary one, but it’s certainly one of them.
And famine? It’s hard to imagine California without its lush landscape, the fruit trees and the hibiscus. It’s hard to imagine the salty coastal air clogged with smoke. I say that because I’m not in California: obviously, those citizens don’t have to imagine, because they’re living it. They may not be experiencing a lack of food, but they are experiencing a new and burgeoning lack of ability to support the population. It feels like a famine, to me, if we describe that as a desiccation and loss of things that make an environment livable.
The fireball missed Hawaii, but that’s not the horseman, there. It’s the “almost” of the whole thing, which is the very definition of “conquest.” The first fireball doesn’t have to hit for the threat to be there: often, in battle, the first gunshot misses its intended victim, or the first cannonball misfires. That doesn’t end the conquest. The threat of something lurking, something ready to destroy precious, beautiful parts of Earth and of people’s homes— that’s conquest.
How can the lawman be anything but war?
I listen to “The greatest” now with a little hesitation. People often think I’m joking when I say I think there’s a darkness and an understanding to the song that Del Rey couldn’t possibly have predicted— but who knows. There are so many prescient lyrics on Norman Fucking Rockwell that it’s hard to tell what’s our own world imagined as a grotesquerie and what’s our world through a carnival mirror. On dark days, I worry that she wrote the whole thing straight-faced, that she knows something we don’t.
On those days, I think to myself, My God, we’re watching the world burn on our livestreams and she called it.
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020. She has a column forthcoming with Hobart.