" Cholo meets surfer," he wrote in his memoir. would have made it the 15 miles west to the beach 20 years ago, or even at the height of the surfing craze in the 1960s, when as a kid the writer Jack Lopez almost got beaten up by a tough guy for walking down Western Avenue in board shorts, clutching a copy of Surfer magazine. See, there's the slippage, the step away from an authentic or even consistent narrative: Few Latinas from East L.A. Her hair is in in Dutch braids, similar to the styles cholas wore in the 1990s. In several shots, she holds onto a surfboard. Lana Del Rey is up to her elbows in water in the video for "F*** It I Love You," one of the singles that built excitement for Norman F****** Rockwell! (referred to hereafter as NFR!), her fifth album and the one that has cemented her status as a serious artist among critics who may or may not have thought her previous work problematic, or at very least, incomplete. I think she goes to the beach but she spends her time looking at that filthy, shiny sand.
Does she drive past Malibu to El Matador, where the water is the cleanest but the one Porta-Potty often overflows? Down to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, near the aquarium where schoolkids swarm? In her songs she dwells on Venice and Long Beach, two places where the red signs the city uses to warn of excess sewage in the water show up the most.
Reading this, I wonder where she goes and what she does after she unfolds her towel and sets up her umbrella. "I'm mostly at the beach!" Lana Del Rey exclaimed in a recent interview, explaining her cultivated disconnect from the Hollywood pop machine. A few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, away from the skateboarders and homeless people, WASPs sun themselves at country clubs as employees sweep the sands. Half-melted Icees in Styrofoam cups, one flip-flop, taco foil, condoms, a dead vape pen. This is what people forget about Los Angeles beaches: They're part of the city, inundated with the city's grit. The trash on the Venice boardwalk sparkles like Wet n Wild lip gloss. On her new album, Lana Del Rey (shown here in 2018) is at her most instantly compelling, fully committed to the messy alignments upon which her art is built.
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