I am not the right person to write this report about Lana Del Rey and her performance at Lollapalooza in Grant Park on Sunday night. I am Gen X, and male, and until somewhat recently, Lana Del Rey was a passing acquaintance in my diet. For a while, I dreaded having to attend Lollapalooza to do this assignment. I’m old and Lolla is young and I have aged out. Plus, when Lana sings in “Brooklyn Baby” about the condescension she feels from older hipsters who think, born in 1985, she couldn’t understand “the freedom land of the seventies,” I’m moved by the vulnerability and shamed by the spot-on cultural profiling.
I might have been that gatekeeper once.
But that’s in the past. Ask my family: For at least six months, even my daughter, a Lana fan, has begged me to give Lana a rest. I am all in for Lana. I would rather be listening to Lana. How I felt at Lollapalooza, deep in the crowd, almost packed against the stage, surrounded by fans only discussing her music, was a total absorption I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager. When I hear Taylor Swift, I hear someone who wishes she wrote songs as good as Lana. I am not on the payroll — not yet — but Lana, if you need someone to refill your vape pen, I will quit this job.
And yet, so much has been written about the former Lizzy Grant since “Born to Die,” her breakthrough, was released 11 years ago, that it’s surprising how unappreciated she can still seem. Infamously, her first years of stardom were spent dodging attacks on her well-off East Coast family and her physical appearance; in one of the starkest cases of critical myopia/misogyny, she was labeled a contrivance, as if Bob Dylan or Lady Gaga (or any pop singer of the past 60 years) were organically grown. She’s plowed past and proved a prolific, eccentric songwriter and the best kind of critic’s darling — her albums are too habitually adventurous for a regular stamp of approval. But it can also seem like she’s never found enough footing outside a large ride-or-die faithful. Basically, she is not nearly as ubiquitous as she should be, though Ms. Ubiquitous, Taylor Swift, has implored audiences on her Eras tour to grab Del Rey’s new album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (which is both classy of Taylor and absolutely right).
All of that might be a weird thing to read if you were there on Sunday night.
It felt at times like every breathing organism in the Chicago area younger than 19 had squeezed into the north end of Grant Park. Banners read “LanaPalooza” and a teenage boy beside me wore a T-shirt with a handmade message scrawled across his chest in marker: “I don’t believe in God. But I believe in Lana Del Rey.” (Dylan, indeed.) All of this was even more remarkable if you considered, at the south end of Grant Park, at the same time she was drawing a Biblical-sized crowd on Sunday night, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were playing. That’s kind of like a big party on Roosevelt Avenue while a mile away, an even bigger cabaret. It’s tough to stress how unusual this actually was, particularly if you know nothing about Lana Del Rey. Despite audience as far as the eye could see, she pulled out fatalistic piano smolder after plaintive piano smolder.
Del Rey, in a festival setting, is Barbie bringing the dance floor to a halt to ask if anyone ever thinks of dying. She sang about dying while driving 99 mph, and a moving hymn about the future of her family, eponymously named “The Grants,” that posed a very non-festival question:
“Do you think about heaven?”
While performer after performer at Lolla could play like variations on an old blueprint, Del Rey sang with a lonesome swoon in her voice and a grand sense of drama that, after a decade of great records, has earned gravitas and soul. Also, lyrically, she is not writing about her feelings — there’s no mood-board patchwork of motivation and self-care to be found — so much as she is wondering, with ambition, what the meaning of her life should be now. To call her thoughtful and unformed is to call Dylan wordy. I apologize for the frequent Dylan-slinging here, but there was something deeply Dylan-esque out there Sunday. She was knowingly untidy. She changed up lyrics. She looked uncomfortable and fidgety one moment and baldly self-possessed the next. On “Cherry,” an ominous funereal stomp backed a caustic take on one-sided love. She seemed indebted to the Great American Songbook; she took the stage to the sound of Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy.” She led a rapt audience that hung on the weight of her lyrics. But unlike Dylan, she was generous and sweet; she strolled out along the audience barrier and took selfies and made awkward, playful small talk with the devoted, her microphone picking up some of the chats.
Fan: “You remember me?”
Lana: “I do.”
Fan: “STOP RIGHT NOW!”
There’s so much charm and talent there, it’s also hard not to wish Del Rey would put together a less busy show, with fewer dancers and distracting pieces of theatrical drama. There were dinner tables with candelabras and “Sleeping Beauty” mirrors and a guy who glowered on the sidelines wearing a patch that read “CIA,” and I’m sure it gave the illusion of a music video at times, but the band is tight and the music cinematic. Besides, in a festival setting, theatrics tend to get lost in the mud and exhaustion and clouds of weed — it’s like staging Ibsen at a block party.
On the other hand, it’s never boring or dumb, either.
She began with a schoolyard anthem that veered into tattle-tailing: “You’re mother called, I told her, you’re (expletive) up big time.” And she closed with “Hope is a Dangerous Thing For a Woman Like Me to Have — But I Have It,” the sort missing link between the dirges of PJ Harvey and the self-empowerment of Swift. She sang: “Don’t ask if I’m happy, you know that I’m not. / But at best I can say, I’m not sad.” Then, Lana Del Rey reclined back on a long white blanket and was dragged off the stage. She sings: “You like your girls insane.” She sings: “My boyfriend tested positive for COVID, it don’t matter. / We’ve been kissing, so whatever he has I have, I can’t cry.” She is not the defining performer of a generation. She is defining herself, but like any great writer, she is mining so uncomfortably close to her innards, she knows you, too.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
