Subterranean Millennial Blues
Lana Del Rey's "Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd"
The title of Lana Del Rey’s noir-ish third album—the 2014 record that compelled critics to reckon with her not as a vacuous pop star but as an artist—is Ultraviolence. It’s a play on the word “ultraviolet,” which is a range of light humans cannot see. Ultraviolence, set in the Hamptons, Malibu, and their hipster enclaves, is populated by femme fatales and predatory men who crave money, power, and glory. Their privilege and affluence is a product of their ruthlessness and also works to conceal it. It’s a cruel world; we just can’t see it.
Is that a groundbreaking thesis? Not particularly. As I alluded to earlier, it’s a theme common to film noir, which often exposes the rich, powerful, and respectable as no different than the criminal class they employ to cover-up their deviant behavior. But like the best noir, Del Rey brings a psychological depth to her work that suggests an iceberg’s worth of raw desire lurking beneath the surface of American society and within the recesses of the human soul.
The title of Del Ray’s recently released ninth album—Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd—also refers to something unseen. It turns out that titular tunnel is real, albeit inaccessible. The Jergins Tunnel opened in Long Beach in 1928 and provided pedestrians access to the ocean until it was closed and sealed shut in 1967. It wasn’t simply a spare utilitarian thoroughfare; its architect incorporated stately ornamentation into its design. Del Rey describes these features in the opening lyrics of the album’s title track before turning her gaze inward:
Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard?
Mosaic ceilings, painted tiles on the wall
I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul
Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls
In the lines that follow this verse, Del Rey wonders, “When’s it gonna be my turn?” The Jergins Tunnel was closed after 39 years of use. At the age of 37, Del Rey feels her body is betraying her, that she is no longer young and beautiful. Perhaps no longer useful. She fears she’s losing her appeal and, like the tunnel, on the verge of being “sealed up” and forgotten. The vaporous pop song itself sounds like it is about to float away into the atmosphere.
But there’s more to this young woman’s anxieties than the inexorable approach of middle age. Part of it is that she remains in thrall to her libido. More importantly, though, she has started to realize how her determination to make herself desirable to a male sexual partner is warping her sense of self. Does she long for a partner who will finally love her for who she is? Or does she feel she has no choice but to seek affirmation within the fantasy world of men?
Open me up, tell me you like it
Fuck me to death, love me until I love myself
There’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard
There it is again, that hidden tunnel. It works as a sexual metaphor, as a stand-in for systems of gendered power and how those systems shape her self-image and self-worth, as a representation of the id. But that tunnel is also a passageway. Del Rey seems to be saying it’s not enough to simply acknowledge the subconscious. It must be traversed as well.
Many consider Lana Del Rey the millennial generation’s poet laureate. Billie Eilish has said Del Rey “created us all.” During the opening show of her new tour, Taylor Swift plugged Del Rey’s new album and called her “the best that we have.” Bruce Springsteen once described her as “one of America’s greatest songwriters.” As an artist, Del Rey is comparable to Leonard Cohen: Moody, brooding, evocative, intimate, yet enigmatic. Like Cohen, just when you think you have her figured out, she pulls the rug out from under you and slips away. Her elegiac albums seem to bare so much while holding even more in reserve.
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is Del Rey’s latest milestone recording, an album that sits alongside Born to Die (2012, featuring “Video Games”), Ultraviolence (2014), and Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019, featuring “The Greatest”) as masterworks. It finds Del Rey firmly in the midst of her imperial phase, a princess ruling over an artistic queen-dom of her own creation while surveying a greater empire trembling around her, its subjects wracked by destabilizing emotional and mental dissonance. Her melodramatic music—so dreamlike, so old-fashioned—speaks to the age the way Douglas Sirk’s films commented on the 1950s. For a nation convulsed by waves of cultural, economic, and technological change; poisoned by patriarchy, a harsh religious culture, and garish notions of respectability; and seeking refuge in idyllic, sentimental notions of the past, Del Rey is here to play the role of Freud.
Some of what Del Rey sings about on this album is barely buried sociology. The title of the outstanding “A&W” may tap into a vein of American nostalgia, but the A & W are short for “American Whore.” The song’s opening lines move quickly from her childhood, when she’s abandoned by her mother and judged by others on her appearance, to a string of hook-ups with a series of men at a Ramada. Her voice alternating between her familiar deadpan and the possessed wispiness of Kate Bush, Del Rey sings of being disparaged as a woman for fulfilling men’s fantasies, of being used by others and denigrated for pursuing her own desires. “A&W” breaks down into a spare, fuzzy hip-hop outro with Del Rey chasing highs and bad men at the club. A judgmental roommate sneers at her when she gets home, “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fucking up big time,” reopening the original wound.
Familial relationships roil many of this album’s songs. There’s that absent mother, along with Del Rey’s own absent motherhood. (We know from earlier songs and interviews Del Rey also had a poor relationship with a stepmother, whom she wishes her father would have defended her from.) She adores her niece and a recently deceased grandmother. On “Fingertips”, she describes how she learned her uncle had suddenly passed away just before she had to perform for the Prince of Monaco; she gives herself two seconds to cry before pulling herself together.
Death haunts that song: There’s a suicide attempt, the “cocktail of things that twist neurons” to counter her depression and keep her alive, a family mausoleum, a teenaged crush who drowned in a lake. Yet if death is a moment, Del Rey is more interested in what builds up to it and its fallout, our fear of its inevitable arrival and what awaits us in the afterlife, of what might drive someone to take their own life and how others respond to the bereaved.
It’s these deeply personal, upsetting experiences that we bury inside ourselves, where they strike core anxieties or battle more positive thoughts. On the opening track “The Grants” (named for her family) two gospel singers (actually Whitney Houston’s back-up singers) and Del Rey sing “I’m gonna take mine of you with me”. It’s about memory—what you carry with you, what you cherish and regret, what you might try to make amends for or fix going forward—and it’s sung in a bright, beautiful voice. There are memories that can strengthen us. But there are other memories we carry with us, too, ones we’d rather not dwell on but that still bubble to the surface, the source of our dread.
Our memories and pain, the ghosts of our loved ones and the demons that gnaw at us, our insecurities and forbidden desires, all of it packed away inside our chest cavities, bundled up within an overcoat, sealed off inside a tunnel. Many are inclined to suppress such thoughts or keep them to themselves. Del Rey says we would be better off exposing them to the light. On the song “Kintsugi”, set in the period after her uncle’s death, she allows grief to break her heart. Yet likening the way she copes to the Japanese art of kintsugi—in which a broken piece of pottery is repaired with a lacquer that highlights the places where the piece of pottery fragmented so that the break and repair are forever a part of the object’s lore—she chooses not to lock this pain away where it can fester. It’s better to mend it even if the scars show because, as she sings, “that’s how the light gets in.” A little while later on a duet with Father John Misty titled “Let the Light In”, Del Rey urges a lover to take their affair public. (Del Rey often casts herself in her songs as the mistress, the woman a man regrettably cannot admit he truly needs.) In this case, dealing with one’s darkest (or perhaps most taboo) thoughts and feelings isn’t just a way to heal but to live a healthier, more authentic life, one free of shame. (The song after that, “Margaret”, featuring the album’s producer Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, is an unabashed profession of true love that finds Del Rey singing “When you know, you know.”)
One of the album’s odder tracks is a spoken word interlude drawn from a sermon by Judah Smith, a charismatic preacher at a West Coast megachurch that has been frequented by celebrities like Justin Bieber. Smith has spoken out against abortion and homosexuality in the past, so his inclusion on this record has riled some of Del Rey’s fanbase. During the five-minute track, Smith rails against lusting after your neighbor’s wife before shifting to discuss God’s superior creative genius. (You can hear Del Rey laugh at him on the recording when he calls God a “rhino designer.”) It’s initially not clear why Del Rey would turn her album over to this raving firebreather. While Del Rey has been accused of living the lifestyle she is supposedly critiquing in her music, she is not someone who would damn adultery. Nor is she someone who would place God on a pedestal and describe God with such overwrought language.
But the twist comes at the very end of the track, when Smith states, “I used to think my preaching was mostly about [God]/ And you’re not gonna like this, but I’m gonna tell you the truth/ I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.” Suddenly Smith’s sermon is about taming his own desires, his own ego, and his disdain for his audience. He’s not sharing these thoughts to impart wisdom onto others but to work through these issues on his own. It seems Del Rey respects Smith in this moment for shedding his over-the-top public persona and realizing how his preaching is compensating for something he’s submerged deep inside himself. Perhaps that’s how listeners ought to approach Del Rey—or even America—as well.
Much has been made of Del Rey’s penchant for artifice: The orchestral fairy tale arrangements, the faded Polaroid Americana, the way she acts as though the Gilded Age never came to an end. (Let’s also remember, like “Bob Dylan,” “Lana Del Rey” is a stage name.) Critics initially recoiled at that. She was too fake, too spoiled to know how to be relatable. Others rejected her for being too real, a privileged yet aimless millennial seeking (and failing) to find something profound in the lives of adrift nepo babies. The nods to hip-hop and the way she would pass herself off at times as just another ordinary girl were nothing more than lame attempts at being cool.1 Her take on feminism wasn’t empowering but reactionary and needlessly contrarian. The references to meaningless, affectless sex only revealed how shallow she was. Listen to her music and you may begin to wonder if she’s simply good at sounding profound.
Yet while artists like Patti Smith try to strip all the artifice out of their music to provide the listener with something real and unrefined, Del Rey instead layers it into her work. Why? In part, it’s because she sees artifice everywhere. But it’s also because she’s interested in its purpose: What does artifice conceal? What can artifice potentially reveal? I suspect Del Rey thinks the answers to those questions are elusive but pretty standard no matter who you are (although it probably varies by gender.) What sets us apart as individuals isn’t found in our subconscious but in the poses we strike as we try, little by little, to make sense of or deal with all that suppressed psychological weight we carry. We’re all our own projects at various stages of excavation and repair. She wants us to dig, into ourselves and into each other.
The album’s final two tracks, “Peppers” and “Taco Truck x VB”, find Del Rey drifting back to the pouty, sexualized millennial pop of Born to Die. On the hip-hop infused, Billie Eilish homage “Peppers”, she raps suggestively to a boyfriend, “Hands on your knees, I’m Angelia Jolie/… Let me put my hands on your knees, you can braid my hair.” Declaring, “Fuck it, gonna give a show,” she opens the blinds and dances naked for the neighbors. The faint traces of a Red Hot Chili Peppers acoustic guitar line opens “Taco Truck x VB”, which places Del Rey vaping with a boyfriend down at the taco truck. They’re too cool and too high to care, but there’s a hint of “violence” in their pose as well. The song fades into a grimy version of “Venice Bitch”, a track from Norman Fucking Rockwell! that casts the laid-back (yet vaguely dysfunctional) life of a couple of L.A. beach bums as the epitome of the American Dream. But in the bridge, a muffled voice responds to this scene of aloof bliss:
If you weren't mine, I'd be (Get high)
Jealous of your love (Drop acid)
If you weren't mine, I'd be (Never die)
Jealous of your love (Not tonight, Lake Placid!)
Lake Placid, where Del Rey’s childhood friend drowned.
Are these songs a portrait of the authentic Del Rey? Or are they a pose? Are they the result of Del Rey wrestling with her demons? Or are they compensating for something Del Rey has yet to reckon with?
There are tunnels upon tunnels upon tunnels under Ocean Boulevard…
Signals and Noise
Following up on last week’s article about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:
Last Sunday, the Washington Post reported Thomas has been reporting income of between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from a Nebraska real estate firm that hasn’t existed since 2006.
Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow—who has lavished the judge with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts and financial benefits over the years—told the Dallas Morning News there’s nothing wrong with his friendship with Thomas. No one, however, has said the friendship was improper. What is improper is Thomas accepting the gifts and benefits from Crow, the facts of which Crow has not disputed.
CNN reported Thomas’s mother is living rent-free in her home, which Crow purchased from the Thomas family in 2014. Thomas’s mother is still responsible for paying the property tax and insurance on the home.
By Isaac Arnsdorf and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “Trump Touts Authoritarian Vision for Second Term: ‘I am Your Justice’” (“Trump’s emerging platform marks a sharp departure from traditional conservative orthodoxy emphasizing small government, which was famously summed up in Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ Trump, by contrast, is proposing to apply government power, centralized under his authority, toward a vast range of issues that have long remained outside the scope of federal control.”)
“President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”—Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser, ripping into Don Trump for arguing abortion regulations should be left up to the states.
Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has slammed Joe Biden for a “deficiency of leadership” and playing “political games” with the debt ceiling while praising Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for putting forward a proposal that would prevent default.
By the way, if McCarthy put forward a proposal that would give every American a free daily doughnut from Dunkin’ Donuts and raise the debt ceiling, it would technically be a proposal that would prevent default. It would be a dumb proposal, but it would still be a proposal. And for the record, Joe Biden has put forward a proposal for raising the debt ceiling. It’s pretty simple, too: All Congress would need to do is pass a standalone bill that raises the debt ceiling.
Is Ron DeSantis’s campaign for president buckling? His claim he’s a better candidate than Don Trump seems refuted by his many early missteps, Republican Florida legislators are beginning to voice their frustration with his feud with Disney (which keeps one-upping him), and Trump spent the week rolling out endorsements from Florida legislators. (Trump’s campaign even got a Texas Representative to walk out of a DC meeting with DeSantis and endorse Trump.)
By Brian Klaas of The Atlantic: “Laboratories of Authoritarianism” (“In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis applauded the role of experimentation within the states, calling them ‘laboratories of democracy’ that could inspire reforms at the national level. Today, that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of authoritarianism, experimenting with the autocratic playbook in ways that could filter up to the federal government. American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy.”)
Iowa is poised to place some of the toughest restrictions on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits in the nation. In fact, the state plans on spending $18 million dollars in administrative costs over the first three years of the new program, which will exceed the state’s savings on the revamped program. Food banks in Iowa are already facing increased demands for their services.
The Florida Board of Education has extended its restrictions on classroom instruction of gender identity and sexual orientation to 12th grade. (The rule states, “This amendment prohibits classroom instruction to students in pre-kindergarten through Grade 3 on sexual orientation or gender identity. For Grades 4 through 12, instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards ... or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend.”) My question: Is it still legal to refer to men using “he/him” pronouns and women using “she/her” pronouns in classrooms in Florida if the individuals referenced by those pronouns are not part of the state’s academic standards?
WTVF Nashville learned the vice chair of the Tennessee House Republican Caucus was recently found guilty of sexually harassing at least one statehouse intern by a House ethics panel acting in secret.
The Tennessee General Assembly has not held a vote to expel him.He has resigned from the General Assembly.The Tennessee legislature has responded to the recent deadly school shooting in Nashville by passing a law that further protects gun and ammunition dealers, manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits.
The state of Washington has passed a ban on semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15. (Missouri and Nebraska, meanwhile, loosened gun laws this week.)
FOX News settled its lawsuit with Dominion for a cool $787 million. While the lawsuit did air much of FOX’s dirty laundry, FOX will not have to issue a public apology. In response to the news, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark goes there: “I would not blame Fox watchers for feeling used and disrespected by Fox. It’s clear that no one views Fox’s audience with greater contempt than the people who work at Fox. They believe that the people who watch their channel are foolish, irrational, and infantile. They believe that these people cannot grasp reality and that if they were confronted with reality, they would react with anger and petulance. The people who run Fox believe that the people who watch Fox are dim, emotional, and unpatriotic bigots who must be coddled like particularly malevolent children. And here’s the thing: Fox is right. We know that they’re right because Fox’s audience hasn’t abandoned it even as the texts and emails from discovery piled up. Even as the network was forced to cough up one of the largest settlements in media history.”
FOX News must still contend with a similar lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, which is seeking a larger settlement and a public apology.
For The Atlantic by Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Neutrality is a Fiction—But an Indispensable One”
Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona used his official House newsletter to direct people to an anti-Semitic website that has denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler as a great man. Gosar did so after the site ran an article written by a Kremlin-funded news agency that praised him for standing up to “Jewish warmongers” in the Biden administration.
The McCurtain Gazette-News of McCurtain County, Oklahoma, published a transcript of an audio recording in which county Republican officials and law enforcement officers lament being unable to lynch Black people or hire hitmen. (One such exchange: County Commissioner: “It’s like somebody wanting this job, they don’t realize, like your job. I heard it the other day, said I heard 2 or 12 people were going for sheriff. I said fuck, lets get 20. They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into. Not this day and age. I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for fucking sheriff.” Sheriff: “Yeah. Well, It’s not like that nomore.” County Commissioner: “I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.”) Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has called for all officials involved to resign. (One county commissioner did so.) The Sheriff claims their conversation was recorded illegally.
An 84-year-old white man in Kansas City has been charged with a felony after shooting Black teenager Ralph Yarl, who mistakenly ringing the man’s doorbell. Yarl was on his way to pick up his siblings when he accidentally went to the wrong address. The Washington Post’s Kelsey Ables looks at how this case fits into Missouri’s “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws. (For the record: You cannot shoot someone simply for ringing your doorbell.) By Imani Perry (the mother of a Black teenager) of The Atlantic: “This Country Will Break Our Hearts Again”
Yarl wasn’t the only young person in America shot this past week for doing something innocuous. There was also the high school cheerleader shot for accidentally trying to get into the wrong car, the twenty-year-old killed for pulling into the wrong driveway, and the six-year-old shot after she went to get a ball that had rolled into someone’s yard.
The United States is on a record pace when it comes to the number of mass killings this year. (A total of 17 mass shootings, resulting in 88 fatalities in 111 days.)
According to The Trace, Americans purchased 60 million guns during the pandemic years. In that time, 1/5 of American households brought a newly purchased gun into their home, bringing the total number of Americans living in a household with a gun to 46% (up 14% since 2010). The guns fueling this surge in gun ownership are not hunting rifles but handguns. The people who were most likely to buy a gun in this stretch of time were young people, women, people of color, and renters.
Note to right-wingers freaking out about groomers and pedophiles: “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander, who was invited to speak at the 1/6 Eclipse rally by Trump himself but was kept off the stage by Trump’s advisors, has apologized for asking teenage boys for explicit pictures.
Rep. “George Santos” promised to donate the entirety of his $176,000 congressional salary to organizations like soup kitchens and animal shelters, but has refused to disclose details. Said Santos this week: “Is there a requirement for an annual report that I should submit to you? The answer is no... I owe you no explanation to [sic] what I do with my salary.”
A local Ohio politician was found guilty of using public funds to buy himself kayaks, hot tubs, a popcorn cart, a drum set, a snow cone machine, a CPR manikin, two snow owls and a wildebeest. In case you’re wondering, the going rate for a wildebeest is $4,116.30.
China is rapidly building-up its nuclear arsenal.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has cautioned against an economic “decoupling” from China, calling instead for a more constructive relationship with the country.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced at a summit they are now working together to “expand trade and balance world geopolitics” as a counter to the United States.
In the latest instance of democratic rollback in the country that started the Arab Spring twelve years ago, the leader of Tunisia’s opposition party was arrested and charged with terrorism last week.
Exit Music: “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee (2018, the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack)
Del Rey’s utilization of Black culture could be seen as problematic. She positions hip-hop in her music as down-to-earth, and she brings Jon Batiste onto Did You Know… to lend it some soul and to counterprogram Smith’s sermon. But white musicians have a history of treating Black music as primal and authentic, particularly when it’s contrasted with their [the white musician’s] own more “refined” work. Del Rey has caught heat for racially-loaded comments in the past, which may have spurred these lines from Did You Know…: “[I’m] A fallible deity wrapped up in white/ I’m folk, I’m jazz, I’m blue, I’m green/ Regrettably, also a white woman/ But I have good intentions even if I’m one of the last ones”. Lyrics like that put me on edge.