The Story of Lana Del Rey’s Norman F-cking Rockwell!
The 2010 decade was marked by the rebirth of hip-hop and the emergence of a new generation of musicians. From 2010 to 2019, the world witnessed pop songs shoot up in the charts and pop stars rise and fall. Simultaneously, the music market quickly shifted from physical and digital consumption to streaming. Amidst so much change, only a handful of artists started and finished the decade at a high point, and Lana Del Rey is perhaps the most intriguing of them. While her debut album got mixed critiques in 2012, Del Rey continuously found ways to impress critics and fans with her subsequent records. In 2019, she reached her artistic peak with her sixth record, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which, in some ways, felt like both a laugh at the past and a celebration of her career.
It’s almost impossible to pick out a favorite line from Norman Fucking Rockwell! The record could easily have been a poetry book, which is how the singer might have felt about it as well. She released Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, a book accompanied by a spoken album, less than a year later after dropping NFR. Both the book and Norman Fucking Rockwell! share similar themes and some verses/stanzas. They are love letters and journals with Los Angeles in the background.
By 2019, Del Rey had been incredibly consistent for almost a decade. She had released one critically acclaimed album after the other, nurtured a strong fanbase, and performed at sold-out concerts, cementing herself as both a touring force and an “album artist.” At that point, the singer had nothing left to prove. She had already overcome her gauche 2012 TV appearances and the harsh, biased criticism her debut album received. If Ultraviolence (2014) had been a game-changing moment in her career, her fourth and fifth efforts, Honeymoon (2015) and Lust for Life (2017), established Del Rey as an artist whose releases were something to look forward to. And even though her fans grew accustomed to expecting outstanding material from her, everyone was surprised when Norman Fucking Rockwell! came out. It wasn’t the typical Lana Del Rey record, which usually banged with some songs and missed the mark with others. Instead, it was an album that kept the same quality from start to finish, a record that allowed the public to experience the singer and songwriter at her best yet.
Confusing some of her fans, Del Rey named her album after Norman Rockwell (1894 - 1978), an American painter who drew illustrations for a weekly magazine for most of the twentieth century. He often portrayed scenes of the everyday life of Americans, usually depicting happy families and fueling the idea of the “American dream.” Adding the word Fucking in between his name was her way of calling out Rockwell for advertising a false reality in America, as if saying, “perfect life, huh?” She was also making a political statement. In 2019, Republican Donald Trump was president, and the country was highly polarized (as it still is). There was a surge in gun violence, and mass shootings made the headlines almost every day. If anything, the American dream was a distant utopia, and Del Rey was protesting Rockwell’s “ideal family” dinner images.
Del Rey released Mariners Apartment Complex as the first single off her upcoming album, then without a name, on September 18, 2018. The song was co-written by Jack Antonoff, at the time best known for being a member of Grammy-winner band Fun and producer of Taylor Swift’s 1989. “I had never worked with him. I wasn’t writing when I met him,” Del Rey confessed about Antonoff in a radio interview in 2019. “Then he told me, ‘If you have a day off tomorrow in New York, you should come down [to the studio]. I know I have good stuff for you.’” A collaboration that proved itself fruitful: Antonoff ended up producing 11 of the 14 songs on the album. Mariners wasn’t the first song they recorded, but Del Rey chose it to be the first because she believed it was a good fit for the end of summer.
Del Rey said she got the inspiration for the song after a date with a guy she had been seeing. That night, they were standing in front of his friend’s apartment complex when he told her they were a good match because they were “both messed up.” That was a turn-off for the singer. "I'm not sad. I didn't know that that's what you thought you were relating to me on that level," she told him. For many years, the public’s perception of Lana Del Rey was that she was this sad, depressed woman. In an interview published by The Guardian in 2014, Del Rey infamously said that “[she] wished [she] was dead already,” fueling this image and coming under scrutiny. She attempted to get rid of her sorrowful persona in the years to follow: the Lust For Life album art, released in 2017, was her first cover to depict the singer casually smiling.
“I pretty much do my own thing, and I’m pretty casual in the studio. If it works, it works. We went down to his studio and he played a little progression of six chords, and without being cheesy, I asked him: ‘Am I allowed to have those chords?’ They were so beautiful. I just knew that if he was gonna let me have those chords, I knew that I had gotten so lucky.” Del Rey talking about ‘Love Song,’ the first song she and Jack Antonoff recorded together.
A week later, the singer released Venice Bitch as the second single off the album. The 9-minute long track, a psychedelic and folk rock song, had the gloomy feeling of Americana music that only Del Rey and Antonoff could pull off back in 2019. The song blends whispered spicy lyrics and distorted guitar solos halfway through, making it sound like it lasts a quarter of its total length. Venice Bitch was met with critical acclaim, with magazines like Pitchfork calling it innovative and titling it “best new music” of that week. Later, the track was included in many “best songs of the year” lists.
As 2019 started, no one knew when Del Rey would drop her already highly-anticipated album. She went on to release two other singles: Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It, a piano ballad that referenced American author Sylvia Plath and talked about religion, family, alcoholism, and her work toward sobriety; and Doin’ Time, a cover of the Sublime’s 1997 song. The latter gained a music video inspired by the 1958 film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. As it happened with the first two singles, the third and fourth were praised by critics, and the more accessible sound of Doin’ Time drew the attention of even the most skeptical.
On August 22, Del Rey released the tracks Fuck it, I Love You and The Greatest, both as promotional singles. She dropped a joint-music video for both tracks. While Fuck it, I Love You carried on the Californian vibes of Doin’ Time, The Greatest impressed critics and fans alike for its wistful lyrics. In the song, the artist recalled the time she lived in New York while also reflecting upon the world’s current state. The album, she announced, would finally come out a week later, on August 30. She also shared the album cover art, shot by Del Rey’s sister Chuck Grant. The artwork displays the singer on a boat with Duke Nicholson, Jack Nicholson’s grandson. The American flag can be spotted in the background.
Upon its release, Norman Fucking Rockwell! was met with critical acclaim in most reviews, being praised for its sharp lyrics and detail-oriented production. Apart from the wit in the album title, Del Rey’s songwriting on NFR! helps showcase how much bravery is necessary to be an artist of her caliber. It takes some [a lot of] guts to open the album with a line like “Godman, man child, you fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you.” It takes double the number of guts to call out a former friend the way she did on The Greatest, implying that Kanye West had gone astray from his path after declaring his support for Republican President Donald Trump on SNL. They had once been such good friends that Del Rey sang at West’s and Kim Kardashian’s pre-wedding celebration five years before. But that was over, and Kanye West was “blond and gone.” The song ends with “Life On Mars ain’t just a song,” an intelligent shoutout to David Bowie’s 1971 hit song.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! Debuted at #3 on the Billboard Hot 200 album charts, scoring over 102,000 equivalent units (album sales, paid downloads, and streams). It became Del Rey’s sixth top-10 album in the United States. It received an 87 score on Metacritic, a website that aggregates reviews and gives albums (and games, tv shows, and movies) a final score. At the end of 2019, the album figured in many “best of the year” lists. It was named the best album of the year by Pitchfork, The Guardian, and Slant Magazine and remained one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s decade. The record was also nominated for Album of the Year at the 62nd Grammy Awards, while Norman Fucking Rockwell (song) scored a nomination for Song of the Year. Del Rey has confessed that even having released two other albums afterward, Norman Fucking Rockwell! continues to be the favorite album she’s ever made.
Listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell!:
