Forgive me: I will always be lamenting how much I love Lana. I will always be saying how her honeyed voice makes me want to cry and scream at the same time, how her honeyed songs make me feel sad but slutty. I will always be talking about how her artwork shimmies the line of sexist and sexy, falling, always, constantly, perpetually into one or the other. I will always be gazing out the train window listening to Lana like I’m in a teenage B movie where the protagonist daydreams about being in a teenage B movie gazing out the train window listening to Lana.
The tunnel under Ocean Boulevard would, of course, sound like purgatory. Underground grandiose, abandoned beauty, lost promise, dashed plans. I could be describing a Lana album in that sentence - or the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard. The rhythm of the phrase itself sounds like the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, doesn’t it? Is there a word for an onomatopoeia that’s a phrase not a word? Purgatory is, as you may know, “an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification. The process of purgatory is the final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.” In layman’s terms - it’s the place where some religions believe you go after you die, where you get punished for your sins but with the aim to make you pure enough to enter heaven. It’s temporary, but painful, but honourable, but hopeful. Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have (but I have it). There’s something dangerous about purgatory, and what danger can do when we believe it’s not directed at us is give something an edge. The edge is sexy. It’s a lit cigarette falling out of a red lipsticked mouth. It’s the tilt of the insides of a bottle of whisky. It’s the stolen glance, where the meaning hides under the eyelids. It’s intangible and at the same time too tempting to touch. It’s Eve and the forbidden fruit. Curiosity becomes a heavy load - too heavy to hold. Comfort becomes constraint. It’s the 9 of Pentacles. There is a crack in everything - that’s how the light gets in.
Sometimes me and Tobs talk about which celebrities become so iconic that you know exactly who they mean when people refer to them by their first name only. There’s only a few of my generation: Amy, Taylor, Billie maybe? Adele, obviously. Mariah and Britney, but that’s pushing it generation wise I reckon. Lana. You know this year they changed the whole format of the Glastonbury poster - the whole point of the Glastonbury poster - because Lana said to? They always have the headliners of the Pyramid Stage in a bigger font, then everyone else in the same size font, and Lana threatened (in an Insta caption, no less) to pull out of headlining the Other Stage if they didn’t make it clear that she was doing so. And they changed it. We wouldn’t even have needed the Del Rey on the poster, never mind the larger font size. She’s an actual icon. There isn’t many of them these days. Certainly none that have as much mystery and intrigue and brazen audaciousness as that tunnel under Ocean Boulevard.
When you cut orchids, they get sticky. They’re so beautiful, and they make you feel so gross. Roses, petals soft as chiffon, grow with spiny thorns. Peonies close their heads as night, balling back up into their chestnut-hard cover. Defending themselves from the world that must be out to get them. And then opening up for the party that is showing themselves off - expressing themselves. Meeting the world. It’s worth the pain, in the end.
Join the party - by the way, the party’s December 18.