Lana Del Rey's Ride

The other, his eyes merry at the thought of talking to an internationally famous writer, made a sound, 'R-r-r-r-rum, rrroom,' which Bech recognized as an allusion to the famous rubber-faced motorcyclists of Travel Light, with it's backseat rapes and desolate roadside cafes - Bech's homage, as a young West Side nobody, to the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson.

~ John Updike, Bech in Czech.

Roadside cafes, gas stations, camp-fires, fifths of scotch, tattooed men on leather seats on bikes on open road; the wilderness is America. Not only on the page, but on newsstands, the screen, in music and art, and without getting too wet, in the minds of every American.

With entrepreneurial guile in excess Lana Del Rey crawls over the American wilderness in her latest video, Ride, bluffing through poetry and song, cold-reading a cultural narrative full of lyrical and visual cliché.

Her narrative begins, “I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met along the road were my only summer,” a touching if paradoxical metaphor for prostitution, confirmed by the accompanying images, a past-time that few would pursue willingly let alone promote.

What's more, unfolding over nine long minutes, Del Rey makes clear her commitments in the war against cliché, and she’s fighting for the wrong side. “It takes getting everything you ever wanted,” she says, “and then losing it to know what true freedom is.” From Kerouac to Krakauer, Faulkner to McCarthy, the symbolism of the American outback is a land well-trod, and retracing the footprints of freedom is like pressing rewind and record at the same time.

Del Rey’s narrative voice artfully sidesteps nothing. She is a mystery, a paradox, walking with purpose atop fashion and feeling, regurgitating little poems that college freshman write on dorm-room walls: “Live fast, die young, be wild, and have fun.” Somehow capable of such profound inanity, she wraps herself in the Stars and Stripes, bites her lip, her nail, and sings like Stevie Nicks mixed with Marilyn Monroe.

Too talented to fail, too beautiful for the men she uses, too smart to convince, the fictional Del Rey dances with Alexander Supertramp, Mac McMurphy, and Holden Caulfield. She is anomalous, “born to be the other women, who belonged to no one” and, by implication, everyone.

That territory beyond the Hudson is the canvas upon which she paints a new image of feminism, squeezing the bikers with tattoos and heft tighter than they can squeeze back, rebuilding a proud and deliberate homage to female self-image from use and degradation, sand and saguaros.

Lana Del Rey is a phenomenon, and I forgive her contradictions. Her prose-poetic journey in Ride makes her intentions clear: to muddy the divide between art and artist. Securing one final paradox, she succeeds. "We had nothing to lose," she coos, "nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art."