Where Nothing Quite Resolves

I listen to Lana Del Rey when I want to feel sad. Not a heartbreak type of sad. Not the devastating type of sad. It’s the specific sadness of a Sunday afternoon with no plans, no texts or emails to respond to, and no reason to get out of bed. That kind of sad. 

For years, she ranked among my top five artists on Spotify. This surprised me at first, because I was never really into the whole old Hollywood, vintage aesthetic before listening to Lana. But when her 2019 album “Norman Fucking Rockwell!” came out, I ended up listening to “Venice Bitch” alone at 2 a.m. during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. As she serenaded me, I realized how much music I was missing out on. For the next 10 minutes, I laid on my bed after eight hours of online classes, blankly staring at the ceiling, letting Lana’s words wash over me. 

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Lana has a quiet following at Harvard—the same kind of people who listen to her discography solo late at night, usually exhausted. When you’re in the middle of midterm or finals, hearing someone sing about wanting to get high by the beach just feels real. She puts words to the feeling that no one really talks about. Not the weed part, but rather the fact that we all relate to needing a break.

In case you missed my hint above, here’s the thing: Lana’s music isn’t really about weed and getting high. It’s about what weed represented for her: looseness, the willingness to leave a song imperfect or unfinished. She makes music for people who are tired of being constantly on the go; her music is about letting things be. 

There’s a verse in “Brooklyn Baby” where Lana runs through a list of things: “boyfriend in a band,” “feathers in [her] hair,” a rare “jazz collection,” and getting “high on hydroponic weed.” She puts on a persona as a cool Brooklyn girl in the song. The weed reference gets the same weight as everything else. It’s just another item on the list to check off; she is not trying to make a statement. Weed is not the point of the verse; it’s just there. And that sense of casualness is worth pointing out: she’s playing this character who would mention hydroponic weed like it’s nothing. This says something about how Lana sees the role of drugs in her music, not as rebellion or confession, but just part of the whole picture. 

And then we have the nine-minute, 37-second-long “Venice Bitch.” That’s rare in today’s pop music. When Lana played it for her managers, they urged her to make a three-minute normal pop song. She refused. “Well, end of summer, some people just wanna drive around for ten minutes, get lost in some electric guitar,” she told them. The song includes a long middle section that can barely be considered a melody. It’s a few notes on the guitar that keep playing over and over, combined with lazy drum beats, and Lana’s voice somewhere in the background. Around five minutes into the song, most of the instrumental accompaniment drops away, leaving just Lana’s bare voice and a melody that sounds almost distorted.

This song may not be everybody’s favorite, but that’s the point. Lana doesn’t try to fit into pop culture trends. Most pop songs avoid silence; they fill every second with something new to avoid emptiness. Lana doesn’t. She lets her music drag, repeating a line over and over until it stops meaning anything and starts being a feeling.

Take “West Coast” as another example—one of my favorites; it just never gets old. The chorus slows down as the song progresses, and the vocals are hazy and breathy throughout. When she first presented this song to her label, Interscope Records, they were not happy about it. “None of these songs are good for radio, and now you’re slowing them down when they should be speeded [sic] up,” they said, according to an interview Lana had with “The Guardian.” Yet, Lana refused to do so. She explained that she felt “murky” with her life when writing “West Coast,” and that sense of being disconnected was exactly what she wanted people to feel when listening to the song. I see that as a subtle influence of weed. Not through the lyrics, but the willingness to let the song feel however it wants to feel, even when the company paying you disagrees.

I don’t smoke, and I don’t plan to. That’s not really a moral thing; I was just never really interested in trying. But I understand why Lana does. I know nothing about the feeling myself, but I can hear what it does for her music. The looseness and dreaminess in her music didn’t come from nowhere. Weed didn’t write her songs; it just helped her stop picking them apart. 

Imperfection is what makes art art. Art in any form is and should be imperfect, but there will always be that voice in your head telling you, “That doesn’t follow the rules or the norms of society right now; do it again until you perfect it, until it fits the expectations of others.” Lana’s music makes me feel like she’s telling that voice to back down, you know, just for a little bit. Her song “Mariners Apartment Complex” reminds me of that when she sings, “You’re lost at sea, then I’ll command your boat to me.” Combined with her signature low, undecorated voice, I hear this as her message to her fans: acknowledging how overwhelming and chaotic the world can be at times, but that we don’t have to be in control every second of our lives. 

That sort of stillness is rare in songs today. Most songs want to take you to a specific point by the end of the track, whether by provoking emotion through a chorus, a key change, a climax, etc. Most of Lana’s popular songs don’t really go anywhere, and that’s exactly what makes her so special. Her songs are quite calming; they create a space and invite us to sit in it. Lana makes music for those who are exhausted by hustling back and forth every day, who want to close their eyes and just feel something without needing to explain why. Her songs are like a break from everything that’s happening.

Perhaps the most direct Lana gets about weed is through “High by the Beach.” But the song isn’t really about getting high. It’s about escaping a toxic relationship and the paparazzi to protect her personal peace. The chorus says “get high by the beach,” but the outro says “anyone can start again, not through love but through revenge.” The weed is just in the background. The real message is that Lana is looking for independence and doesn’t want to be bothered by the noises that are coming from all directions. The music video for this song ended with her blowing up a paparazzi helicopter. This scene is not only about her trying to break free, but it’s also about her saying that she has had enough.

When you listen to Lana late at night and feel something that you cannot really explain, that’s her music doing exactly what it’s meant to. She’s not trying to make everything okay or take you to some place; she just lets her music flow. No climax, no neat outros. Just being present amidst a feeling. That’s not a form of laziness from the composer; it’s just letting things be. 

Katherine Lam ’29 (katherine_lam@college.harvard.edu)has Lana Del Rey on her top five Spotify artists every year.