The human psyche possesses a primal instinct for the potency of the ‘witching hour.’ Canonically, the witching hour takes place between 3am and 4am, in the deep dead of night, where all is still and the Veil is at its most transient and the air is suffused with ghosts. Perhaps none of this is true, and yet there is still a strange, almost reverent attention one pays to the night when they are awake at 3am. You should be asleep and you are not; you are staring into the horizon of the ceiling, suffocated by the quietness of this lifeless hour, conscious of a most acute loneliness. Everything is imbued with a surreal, existential quality. You are never more aware of yourself than when you lie awake in your bedroom.
It is in this witching hour that one often discovers the music which embeds itself in their core, and so it follows that this is where I first listen to Ultraviolence. 3am on a schoolnight, wracked with all the melancholy and torture that a melodramatic 14-year old gay boy can bear, I am the perfect victim to that heavy opening guitar and that piercing ‘Share my body and my mind with you…’
All of my follies and failures, my desires and depravities, the all-consuming weight with which they occupied my teenaged mind, seemed to coil around the gravity of this woman’s beautifully tragic voice. Life is ending every day when you’re young, after all. She seemed to understand this intimately; seven minutes of reverb-drenched lament, pulled between the poles of her crazy, young freedom and the loss it imparts, sung with a melancholy that almost measured to my own after failing a Maths test. It was glamour, it was tragedy, it was melodrama, it was a beautiful woman in a flowing dress collapsing into tears in black-and-white. I was struck; it was me.
I recount my first experience with Ultraviolence in part to see if I can capture the profundity of that moment, to articulate the significance of a chance encounter with the kind of art that becomes integral to one’s constitution. I’m not sure words are ever sufficient. But I am also curious: when I interrogate these early experiences of appreciation and compare them to the current, I wonder why they persist. How many pieces of media must I have consumed at that age, with my voracious appetite for art and my malleable naivete, that have now sifted through the sieve of matured taste? How many other albums strike me with the same enormity ten years later, my bed now an office desk and my melancholy gaze now cast over an industrial construction site?
For my generation of music listeners, an album like Ultraviolence came out at an opportune time. That particular stage of your early teens is a critical time in one’s conscious development: burgeoning sexuality, burgeoning queerness, burgeoning identity formation. This formation of identity becomes especially contingent on one’s relationships with their interests and what they come to symbolise. Just as the sport-player becomes the jock, the Lana listener must surely become the sad poet, the deep thinker with a rich and tragic interior life. Art that strikes a chord with us in this exploratory period often leaves some psychological mark, because these pieces have transcended their externality from us and instead become touchstones to our self-actualisation. I listen to Ultraviolence, therefore I am.
But perhaps even more crucial is the incidence of its release against the development of critical appreciation, this wondrous capacity for contemplating on the meaning and the power of a work of art. I was no stranger to Lana, just as intrigued as anybody who was fortunate to be alive for that Born To Die era, but I can’t say I completely understood the magnitude of what I was experiencing. I listened to songs and I liked them, as I suppose most normal audiences do (how foreign, this concept of receiving sensory stimulus and not writing a fucking essay about what it all really means).
It was only after Ultraviolence that the idea of an ‘album’ became more than a nebulous space from which I could pull a few songs I enjoyed. Now it was a body of work, a feat of storytelling bound together by beautiful voices and poetry and a narrative throughline which transcended the sum of its parts. I was partaking in a sonic and aesthetic world now, my listening less clumsy and rudimentary. I was understanding what it meant to enter an artist’s creation and marvel at its finer details, and to have it linger over me long after I had stopped listening. I felt the dreamy haze of guitars at the chorus of Black Beauty moving in me even at breakfast.
It’s unlike me to write two separate essays on the same topic, but as Carrie Bradshaw once said, you only get two great loves in your life, and mine have always definitively been Auckland and Lana del Rey. She watched over my entire adolescence like some twisted maternal figure, and then I spent my young adulthood trying to rid myself of her. Even then, I was defining myself in the absence of her influence; I was better than Lana now, surely. I was older, more pretentious, more serious, more judgmental, not so pathetically wallowing in self-pity as my old Tumblr peers. I didn’t need to reblog edits of some pretty woman with a cigarette captioned ‘He hit me and it felt like a kiss’ in Arial text to cement myself as somebody who understood beauty and tragedy. I had a part-time job.
But even a life in inverse must indirectly reference the subject, and my formative Lanahood was painfully apparent in everything from my choice of shoe to my taste in her poor imitations. Like a persistent rash, I could not escape her—and in the summer of 2022, fresh out of the pandemic lockdown and particularly vulnerable to the comforts of childhood, Florida Kilos worms its way onto somebody’s beach playlist. The armour of intellectual superiority was no match for the glee of asking the Colombians to yayo, yayo. Nor was it a match for asking the song to be repeated on queue another seven times, nor even the compulsion that overcame me in the evening to just dabble in a little of the rest of the album.
Of course, I haven’t stopped talking about Lana since.
The question remains, then: how do you reconcile two versions of yourself, ten years apart? What binds the critical enjoyment of both child and adult? When it dawned on me that this June marked Ultraviolence’s decade anniversary, I couldn’t stop mentioning it to all of my friends, and what fascinated me was that they somehow all cared about it too. ‘I was there,’ they’d lament, acutely aware of the passage of time. The implicit understanding we share is that one woman’s sophomore album was as inseparable from our upbringing as reading Shakespeare in high school, and perhaps infinitely more conducive to shaping our understanding of the world. Even now in our adulthood, its legacy is undeniable. At some point, an album like Ultraviolence is no longer just an album, but becomes a part of the spiritual and psychological canon informing our tastes, our emotional landscapes, our very lives.
‘We don’t know all that much about Lana del Rey, and we’re not sure what we’re told is real,’ writes Mark Richardson in his Pitchfork review. I remember poring over the critical response to this record and vehemently defending it to whoever would read on the Internet, and the debate always seemed to singularly fall on this point: authenticity. The character of Lana del Rey became a double-edged sword; crucial to her success and allowing her the licence to construct her fantasy worlds, but also impeding her ability to be taken seriously. A glamorous woman with botched lip filler reimagining herself as Jackie Kennedy stands a hard chance of being venerated in the pantheon of great singer-songwriters, like the Jonis and the Bob Dylans she so admires. I wanted so badly for her to be taken seriously because I took myself seriously. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would question the realness of a woman who spoke to me so deeply. They didn’t understand tortured souls like us, I concluded, couldn’t fathom the introspection of people like me who dreamed about blue hydrangeas and white sunshine and cooed ‘I’ll run to you’ about whatever ridiculous straight boy crush they had that week.
But upon returning to Lana after my sabbatical and familiarising myself with her later works, particularly the more honest and less affected songwriting on Norman Fucking Rockwell and its successors, I began to see Ultraviolence in the new light of hindsight. Where I had once only heard her pain and melancholy, what I could hear now was her nudge-nudge-wink-wink. It dawned on me then: while I was at war with critical magazines on the question if ‘Is she real?’, Lana revelled in the ambiguity of it all.
In reality, the authenticity never mattered. It was never about whether she’d actually really fucked her way to the top or romanticised abusive relationships, but rather about the desire to do these things, and it is this same desire she plucks within her listeners. I’d never been heartbroken at 14, but I wanted to be. I wanted the glamour and the romance and the drama of that cinematic life, to be the kind of person who met with such monumental emotions and experiences. That longing to be the tragic protagonist of your own cinema is the most authentic and primal part of oneself, and what makes a great work of art other than the ability to appeal to our most base desires? Sure, Lana was sad, she was tragic—but she was also tongue-in-cheek, teasing, ironic, holding up a mirror to our gauchest self-indulgences.
This is the thread of genius running through Lana’s oeuvre, and I suppose it is what keeps an album like Ultraviolence so fascinating after all of these years. It’s complex, layers of reverb mirroring the layers of its artistry, it’s beautiful and funny and introspective and a little stupid. It touches at the narcissism of every self-serious woman and faggot alike and laughs about it behind your back, but it also drowns you in its dreamlike mist where everything seems so alluringly Hollywood. It has stood the test of time for ten years and will do so for decades to come, and my growing wisdom will only ever refine my admiration. What does she say in Brooklyn Baby? She’s talking about her generation, the newer nation—and it is indubitably a product of a post-Lana world.
Yes! I think you really got at the heart of what’s appealing about Lana. I haven’t thought of her as a tragic artist for a long time and I think people who still see her as the artist for “sad girls” are just scraping the surface of what she’s doing in her work.
of course, your comeback touches on the generational canon.