Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album came out over a little over a year ago, on March 24th 2023, and I’m a year late in writing about it. “Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” hasn’t been the easiest record to describe. Excepting a brief interlude into electronica in “A&W,” we’re now a long way from the layered hip-hop and electronic production of Lana’s early records, continuing the evolution of the last few records towards more stripped-back and acoustic arrangements, less concerned with commercial appeal and more with an emotional expression of a period in her life. This record is steeped in piano, strings, light organ and acoustic guitar, immersing you in a certain velvety cocooning feeling. Often slow and languid, it’s more like an experience than a typical commercial album of hooks, hits, lead singles. There’s a kind of mood of hearing this through 1970s wooden speakers connected to a vinyl record player, reminding you of the emotional landscape of The Bee Gees, ABBA, and the kind of soft country rock you might have heard over a transistor radio circa 1975.
The songs are highly textured, containing little hidden understated piano melodies like a latter day Nick Cave song. In fact, recent Cave is an interesting reference point, with the enveloping lushness of “Ocean Blvd” similar to the shimmering liquid feel of Cave’s “Ghosteen.”
The sense of Lana’s disinterest in constructing a hit record is exemplified by the inclusion of long verbal soliloquies set to music, one from ‘mega-church preacher’ Judah Smith, and one from Jon Batiste.
The Judah Smith sermon, set to a meandering undersea piano dream sequence, covers subjects of disillusion with life, distraction from what we have by desires for what we want (“I’ll infuse you with dеsires for what you have and what’s in front of you”), and a realization that the sermonizer is really more interested in himself than in any self-righteous sense of helping others (“my preaching is mostly about me”). Lana’s reactions – seeming to land somewhere ambiguously in laughter (derisive? approving?) and wordless sounds (agreement? skepticism?) – suggests she is perhaps finding some resonance in the themes, and perhaps this is what she is telling us with this inclusion: that this album, and the current phase of her musical development, is not focused beyond her attempts to live her own life. I can hear the chorus of Lana-haters accusing her of selfishness for that statement, along with the narrative that Judah Smith is homophobic, based on his prior typical Christian-fodder statements – unsurprising, given he is a Christian preacher.
It’s difficult to find much fault with any specific utterance in this particular sermon, though for me the god-talk is a little nauseating. Smith’s prior statements make ample cancel-fodder for those who would find some useful outcome in erasing Lana’s career, but in some ways the cancelers are their own church, and despite much positive work and early victories, their fight seems to have drifted into territory as ambiguous as Lana’s intentions, full of cross-fire and poorly chosen battles with no discernibly beneficial outcomes, so I’ll let them have their controversy. I’m not on board.
In any case, Lana would not be the first artist to examine Christianity as part of a search for meaning – Bob Dylan was attending celebrity church long before Justin Bieber ever turned up to hear any of Judah Smith’s TikTokkery; U2 are explicitly a Christian rock band. She’s not even the first artist, more broadly, to examine some kind of faith or conversion as a possible source of direction – think Cat Stevens’ and Sinéad O’Connor’s conversion to Islam. I’m not a fan of organized religion generally, and less a fan of someone deciding – in adulthood, long after they’ve had the opportunity to develop sufficient critical thinking abilities to want themselves personally and civilization generally to evolve beyond the need for deeply flawed organized religions sullied with elements of non-humane veins of thought – to convert to one. But I no more want to stop listening to Sinéad O’Connor because of her conversion and her generalized statement that white christians are disgusting than I want to stop listening to Lana for sampling Judah Smith.
The Jon Batiste interlude is, put one way, less verbally provocative – both in the sense that few will be up in arms over what’s said (and briefly sung), and in the sense that not much of what Batiste says is likely to provoke much thought (“Oh / Oh, I feel it in my soul / I feel it in my soul / Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know I was gonna feel it in my soul” etc.).
At nearly nine minutes, these two interludes take up a lot of real estate on the album, and it’s a testament to her individuality and lack of assent to popular thought that she has allocated over 10% of the record to them.
Sandwiched between these interludes is one of the two tracks (“Candy Necklace”) that contain the most intriguing melodies on the record, where the sense of mystery and transportation is deepest, the other being “Paris Texas.”
ronanconroy 