posted by Hatty

This is not a music review. I haven’t bought Lana Del Rey’s album Born to Die. Not yet anyway. One thing her video streaming has made me think of though is how Del Rey plays on one element throughout all her videos: nostalgia. It’s the Hollywood glam in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. She sings about the American Dream as if it exists the same for you and me.

You see, I don’t even know what decade it is. Yes I’m an American. But it’s never going to change the fact that I wasn’t born here or that I don’t share the same cultural memories she’s inherited. Lizzy Grant, she and I are from the same era, both born in the mid ’80s. But the culture I inherited in the developing and newly constructed democratic Korea in the ’80s is a completely different creature from that of a small town, Catholic boarding school life in the East Coast.

Strange, isn’t it? What is it then that makes me feel for what I never had in her videos? How can you miss a place you’ve never been to? A time in history you’ve never lived? Looney Tunes characters, pearls and lipsticks and beehives, marquees of So Cal liquor stores and Vegas hotels all lit up, palm trees and the horizon, white kids in pools with their summer flings. None of these live in my memory. Del Rey tricks you into thinking that these are your stories; that you did grow up in a small town New Jersey with the dream of making it big some day and “living for the fame;” that you had the boyfriends with tattoos and pools big enough to jump in cannonball style in the lazy summer; that you made out in those mustangs and could drive forever into the California sunsets. And I buy this. So do hundreds of thousands of iTunes listeners.

As I follow her sugar sweet lyrics exploding into fireworks, a question arises whether this landscape of nostalgia she conjures up is real pieces of histories occupying real people’s minds or an empty but constant need — fueled by an American brand of consumerism — for “back in the days” when the sun was golden and girls were beautiful and life was free. Then another thought comes that maybe it’s not an American Dream at all, but an universal one. Like Carl Jung’s archetypes, a collective unconsciousness materialized and made concrete in the metaphors of Lana Del Rey’s clever pop packaging. For what exactly though?

All I know is that many people, twenty somethings, who can’t possibly remember the America Del Rey sings of, love her for what she paints for us. Our common desire for something less ugly than the current crumbling state of things. And I wonder at the end — the Star Spangled Banner waving gloriously — in which America I live now.