Tracks 5 and 6 from Ultraviolence (2014)

Tracks 7 and 8 from Honeymoon (2015)

I was a little baffled the first time I listened to "Video Games" after seeing it on many critics' lists of the best songs of 2011. And even though I'm very familiar with Lana Del Rey now and listened to most of these albums when they came out, I was pretty much just as baffled when I saw "A&W" on many critics' lists of the best songs of 2023. That's not to say I've never liked any of her music -- "West Coast" has always been my favorite song of hers, and I think Ultraviolence and Norman Fucking Rockwell are the albums that appeal to me most, I like her stuff more when it's piano or guitar-driven, some of the 'trap' beats on Lust For Life sound really embarrassing to me. 

I don't wanna be dismissive of Lana Del Rey, she might be the most influential female singer of the past decade, and a lot of artists I enjoy more like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo are heavily indebted to her. That said, I don't know if I'll ever be totally comfortable with Del Rey's vocal style and aesthetic, so much of it reminds me of Kristen Wiig's "SNL" character Shana. As far as the edgy alt-pop girls of the 2010s go, I tend to be more into Tove Lo, Charli XCX, and Halsey. 

On an intellectual level, I like when artists create such a stylized aesthetic and lyrical perspective that they almost become their own genre, and Lana Del Rey has arguably done that as well as Tom Waits or even Jimmy Buffett. And maybe her work is the insightful examination of American femininity that many critics say it is, I'm a man, I try to take music made by women seriously but I'm not gonna 'get' everything. I have trouble with some of her lyrics, even understanding that there's some camp or deliberate humor in there. "My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola"? Like, literally? That raises a lot of questions, some of them about your pH balance. Sometimes I'd put a song into this playlist and then hear her sing something like "baby you're so ghetto" and I just noped out and replaced it with another track. 

In a way I kind of feel bad for Lana Del Rey that, even though she's very successful and has several platinum and gold albums, her only big radio hits familiar to the general listening public are pretty unrepresentative flukes: a dance remix of "Summertime Sadness" and a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time." So I kind of went into this wondering what an ideal Lana Del Rey radio hit that actually sounds like her other work would be, and I think it would be cool if something like "Radio" or "White Mustang" had been a big mainstream hit.