Lana Del Rey has been hinting for quite a while at some sort of shift away from the town that has inspired and kept her all these years: Los Angeles. The hints were subtle at first, but then grew to a crescendo on Chemtrails Over the Country Club, with lyrics like, “I left Calabasas/Escaped all the ashes” and “I come from a small town, how ’bout you?/I only mention it ’cause I’m ready to leave LA/And I want you to come/Eighty miles north or south will do.” What Del Rey seems to have settled on instead is thirteen miles northeast of Downtown LA, the location of Arcadia at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains that also happens to be the name of her latest single from the yet-to-be-released Blue Banisters (formerly Rock Candy Sweet).
Having always been a girl highly sensitive to place (which is likely why she couldn’t stay in New York), it seems appropriate that Del Rey should gravitate toward Arcadia, named after the paradisiacal Greek region. Itself called as such in honor of the Greek god, Arcas. It’s also fairly apparent that Del Rey’s bleeding-heart ways for the Native American population should send her in this direction as well. Perhaps not realizing that the more white people stay away from their land, the better. Instead, Del Rey communes with the history of the town not through its nature, but by staying in one of its middling hotels. Like that girl in “Ride” who made hotels and strange men her home, the girl in the video for “Arcadia” seems fond of the “vagabond” lifestyle as well (“vagabond,” in this sense, meaning a middle-class white girl who can afford to stay in hotels posing as “cheap motels” for the sake of their cinematic cachet).
In any case, it’s refreshing to see someone remain genuinely committed to LA. Even if talking about its periphery. And while Billie Eilish might have called her latest concert “A Love Letter to Los Angeles,” Del Rey has been writing those for years (see also: “LA Who Am I To Love You“)… “Arcadia” being just the latest. Whereas most others, like Del Rey collaborator The Weeknd, are ready to swear the city off altogether. Or, worse still, talk about returning to odious yet beloved New York. The “fallback plan” that always feels like a last resort more than anything else.
To additionally convey her love for the milieu, Del Rey references the mascot LA didn’t ask for, Paris Hilton, likely pleased over the numerous mentions of her family’s hotel empire, starting with Del Rey describing, “Hangin’ out the Hilton Hotel window/Screamin’, ‘Heyo, baby, let’s go.’” Something in that line reminding one of the lyric in “This Is What Makes Us Girls” that goes, “Walkin’ down the streets as they whistle, ‘Hi, hi!’”
But it seems no one will do that to Del Rey in Arcadia, even despite her sensual claims about her body. Unlike Shakira, who once said it was lucky her breasts were “small and humble, so you don’t confuse them with mountains,” Del Rey instead likens her chest to the Sierra Madre, one of many in a series of personifications regarding her body and its relationship to the City of Angels, and environs thereof.
Playing with the conflicting ideas of gentility and violence (an American staple), Del Rey casually sings, “My hips every high and byway/That you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota/Run your hands over me like a Land Rover.” Tantamount to saying, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” this analogy expresses Del Rey’s sentiments not only toward fame and the public, but America as a whole—embodied by one of the country’s most recognizable emblems: the car. So, in this sense, she takes it one step beyond what Billie Eilish and Lorde have done on their own fame-shunning records (Happier Than Ever and Solar Power, respectively) in that Del Rey is blaming the sickness of fame/the invective it draws on the sickness of what America has held up as a beacon. Its false ideals and promises negated by Del Rey alone in this hotel room, sipping coffee from a to-go cup and heating up an Egg McMuffin in the microwave. All of America’s “grand” symbols reduced to one sad, pathetic scene of loneliness and aimlessness. Fittingly, the McDonald brothers—you know, of McDonald’s fame—started their first restaurant, The Airdome, near Arcadia in 1937. The infiltration of Americana and the complete symbolic ousting of anything Native American being manifested by this moment.
Arcadia High School’s continued use of the Apache as their “mascot” is fitting in the Del Rey universe, too. For on the one hand, she wants to donate her poetry book proceeds to Native Americans (the high school also holds fundraisers for the White Mountain Apaches), but on the other, she’s doomed, like the rest of us, to exploit them by sheer use of continuing to enjoy their pillaged land.
Ah, but back to Del Rey in that hotel room. One wonders if she’s aware that Hunter S. Thompson wrote the majority of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at a motel across from the Santa Anita Racetrack. That seems like the sort of intel that would get her wet. Not that she isn’t already as she caresses herself to the images of LA while singing, “All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries/That pump the blood that flows straight to the heart of me.”
All this talk of America and the evocation of its symbols—LA being a key one—reminds the listener of her 2019 single, “Looking For America.” A track that, believe it or not, actually sounded more hopeful than this one despite being a reaction to a rash of mass shootings that year. Name-checking the Hilton again, Del Rey also brings up other symbols of the nation as she bemoans, “America, America I can’t sleep at home tonight, send me a Hilton Hotel/Or a cross on the hill, I’m a lost little girl.” As are we all in this climate. And perhaps her retreat into this hotel room is the only way she can deal. At the end of the song, the video provides a remixed version of Ennio Morricone’s “The Trio” from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. In this final minute, we see Del Rey vaping, rolling around on her bed “High by the Beach”-style, dancing in front of the air conditioner and generally mucking about. We’re then shown that other usual image we associate with her: driving. As she heads toward the Arcadia sign, after which she gives us, for the second time, a peace signal followed by flipping us off—an indication of how she feels toward anyone that would dare view her as something less than a genius.
Addressing the fragility she so loves to discuss no matter how much ire it draws from those who can’t help but roll their eyes at the luxury she has of being fragile at all, Lana croons, “And my heart is like paper,” adding for her critics’ benefit, “I hate ya.”
Her insistence on belonging is at odds with a statement like, “I’m not from the Land of the Palm/So I know I can’t stay here/I’m not native.” This, too, appears to allude to the Native American element that’s pervasive within the framework of a location and abstraction like Arcadia.
Ascending into the star-filled galaxy at the one minute, forty-nine second mark as the city’s distinctive geography continues to show up superimposed on her skin, it appears as though Del Rey is telling us that even if she leaves, the town’s imprint will forever be left upon her. And also that, apparently, one needs to leave this Earth in order to feel any sense of calm—to tune the voices and the fury out in order to keep creating purely and without self-consciousness. Even so, “All roads” still lead back to Arcadia “as integral to me as arteries/That get the blood flowing straight to the heart of me/America, I need a miracle.” The miracle, presumably, being a public that doesn’t lash her—even if and when she says some lash-worthy shit.
To that point, she laments, “They built me up three hundred feet tall just to tear me down/So I’m leavin’ with nothing but laughter, and this town.” She further declares, “I’m leavin’ them as I was, five-foot-eight/Western-bound, plus the hate that they gave/By the way, thanks for that.” Her sarcasm is brought to its completion with the taunting “best of luck” sentiment, “On the way, I’ll pray for ya/But you’ll need a miracle America.” In spite of the venom, maybe there’s a prayer for us yet as Del Rey, remaining a “good Catholic girl” at heart, can’t help but believe in miracles. Even if what she’s looking for isn’t a miracle, so much as a return to the past, when her specific brand didn’t appear so out of place.
Now, however, it seems to have a place in Arcadia (regardless of Native Americans wanting it there or not). Whether one wishes to see it as the Californian or Greek version. Arcas, incidentally, was turned into a constellation (Ursa minor) like the very ones Del Rey floats among. High in the sky, where no one can mock or dare criticize her ever again. Or rather, when they do, she’ll simply refuse to hear any such “negativity.” Like Liz Lemon “high-fiving a million angels.”
