If anyone knows the value of nostalgia, of how it can still cut to the quick of what’s left of human emotions, it is Lana Del Rey. Building a career on knowing the potency of this drug (unlike Cardi B, who instead built her career on sympathy and payola, per Nicki Minaj), it is almost as though she specifically watched the 2007 episode of Mad Men entitled “The Wheel” on repeat, in which Don Draper spins the advertising yarn, “Nostalgia: it’s delicate, but potent… in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
And wielding this tactic to poignant effect–almost like a mental five point palm exploding heart technique, Del Rey brings us her second “end of summer jam,” called, in keeping with the L.A. obsession we have known for so long, “Venice Bitch.” Obviously, the less international types’ minds will not go to Italy. Semi picking up where the “Mariners Apartment Complex” video left off, we see Del Rey once more on her iPhone, though this time expressing far more emotion than we’re usually accustomed to seeing as she screams into the receiver, shoots her fingers like a gun at the camera and then runs back to her group of friends near the side of the road. It’s almost as though she’s just like the very girl with the unshakeable wild side in “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” except instead of “skippin’ school and drinkin’ on the job (with the boss)” or “table dancin’ at the local dive/Cheerin’ our names in the pink spotlight/Drinkin’ cherry schnapps in the velvet night,” she has the millennial maturity to know, “We’re getting high now, because we’re older” (you know how it is, when those former alcoholics switch to weed). Though, of course, being young finds one similarly obsessed with getting high for different reasons, one of them not being as a means to substitute the sweet taste of the drink.
Bringing back her old style of the “found” video–the very thing that launched her to aesthetic singularness in “Video Games”–much of the video uses “vintage” imagery of cars barreling down the freeways (Bret Easton Ellis likely appreciated it). Del Rey appears in between, laughing carefreely throughout most of her “cameos” in between images of Venice and the cars roaming about the roads that once were such a great symbol of the American sense of freedom and possibility. And, speaking to that, tinges of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” appear as Del Rey joyfully rides around in the back of a truck with her friends (a.k.a. her backup dancers from the LA to the Moon Tour), seemingly just living in the moment because that’s all there is, and ever will be. In this manner, it is something of a flipside to the “Summertime Sadness” incarnation of nostalgia, in that it is, as much as nostalgia can be, a happy kind. Both appreciating fleeting instances of knowing one is content, while also making peace with the fact that they are just that: fleeting. Which is rather tantamount to the “Golden Age” (in which one didn’t need to take into consideration the economic needs of anyone except white people) of the United States from the mid-40s to early 60s that people still overly romanticize thanks to the saying, “Nostalgia is the belief that things were better than they actually were.”
As Del Rey has unwittingly documented the decay of Americana over the course of her discography and the videos that have come with it, it is only fitting that she should reveal the title of her forthcoming 2019 album to be Norman Fucking Rockwell, a jibe not only at self-obsessed geniuses (though often “genius” is more appropriate), but also that continued yearning for a time in America that at least vaguely made sense and wasn’t quite so, well, shitty. Because, in this case, nostalgia for the past is not a liar.
At nine minutes, forty-one seconds, “Venice Bitch” is Del Rey’s most sonically ambitious and complex song to date, and further proves the lyrics, “Fresh out of fucks forever,” reaching a new peak in her career in which she’s more comfortable than ever taking risks and experimenting (maybe that’s why a poetry book called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is due out next year as well). In this case, she’s definitely taken a page from the meandering musical tendencies of one of her idols, Jim Morrison. And so as the summer comes to a concrete close, and you find yourself with that twinge of yearning for the months when it was all just beginning, let “Venice Bitch” wash over you with its laconic chorus and varied rhythms, giving you a touch of summertime sadness infused with just a bit more hope for what the future, in winter, might hold.
