The best albums of 2019, No 1: Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!
Our album of the year saw a maturing Del Rey dismantle the American dream while loving it to death, her imagery and artistry aligned to perfection
When Lana Del Rey arrived in 2011, anyone who bet on her becoming one of the decade’s defining artists would now be quids in. As sublime as her debut single Video Games was, her debut album, Born to Die, was flimsy, laced with hiccupy hip-hop affectations and surface obsessions (Hollywood, bad boys, putting a red dress on and then taking it off again) that didn’t suggest much potential for maturation. How nice it has been to be proved wrong.
In 2017, the New York Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli tweeted: “Serious Q, why does everyone seem to unequivocally love Lana Del Rey now? What changed?” What changed is that an artist perceived as a dilettante, thanks to sexist assumptions about her aesthetic and background, turned out to be one of pop’s grafters. She leaned into the image that had aroused suspicions, creating an identity so indelible that when she swapped her pout for a grin on the cover of 2017’s Lust for Life, it was as startling as finding a green can of Coke.