My Years of Summertime Sadness

This is Formation Jukebox, a column by Lio Min on being in transition and the music that helps them make sense of it all.

College, 201X. It was some temperate Los Angeles evening and my friend L—who has the same energy and general look as Sailor Mars—was wearing a dress and heading to a party. At some point, she passed a good American family. The mother figure looked her over and proclaimed, the way assholes do, “Is it summertime, sweetheart?” It was a throwaway line, a leer disguised as an insult disguised as concern.

When she told us about the encounter, we laughed. We were young women, aged nineteen and twenty, transplants in Los Angeles at a school with an incendiary party culture and now equally humiliating history of covering up scandals ranging from ethically bankrupt admissions to serial sexual assault. We balanced school with jobs and clubs and countless side projects, but on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, we’d shimmy into jersey and polyester slips and skirts, or layer faux leather motorcycle jackets over our tightest jeans. We’d rank our options for the night: Someone knew someone who said this house had a party. Here’s the Facebook event; did we have cash for covers? Ugh, maybe we’d just hit the frats and hope no one tried to shove their hands up our skirts again. This house is dead; this house kind of has a creepy rep.

We’d stomp around with our chunky-heeled boots and platform sandals and wobbling wedges, searching for signs of The Party, the kind of party that could be a prophecy or a portent, depending on the hour of night. Hey, let’s have fun. Hey, let’s get drunk. Hey, we’re just trying to have a good time, can you watch the way he’s treating that girl, is she okay, where are they going, where am I going?

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To be a girl in the early 2010s meant being asked about your opinion of Lana Del Rey, which you might not always publicly share but almost definitely privately had. If you were a young person of any gender who had any active interest in following the “music world,” you had probably formed a knee-jerk judgment about the woman born Elizabeth Grant. But it was the girls who were asked to speak up about LDR, to personally plant our flags about what she represented into concrete. Her name alone was a code of sorts—“Video Games,” which officially made the rounds in 2011, made Lana a staple of dorm room mixtapes (curated on 8tracks and later Spotify, instead of burned onto CDs) and ~*cool*~ party soundtracks long before her music seeped into the mainstream. Her gauzy femininity, as crystallized on her album Born to Die, wafted into the world on the same current that brought us the Weeknd’s House of Balloons. In both releases, the singer cocoons themselves in a dark cloud, but only Lana can see through it.

It was easy to mock the things Lana said in interviews, what she seemed to stand for. I was cruel and snide about the idea of someone working out “daddy issues” by being with much older men; about anyone who thought flower crowns and extreme denim cut-offs (which our friend group jokingly called “denim diapers”) were a genuine fashion statement; and especially about the songs themselves. They seemed to move in the same languid loop immortalized from her first Saturday Night Live performance, which was picked apart like a carcass. Nowhere did my ire crystallize more than in the song “Summertime Sadness.” You can imagine this girl when you close her eyes: barely sentient, wearing a red dress under pale moonlight, heels in her hands, maybe a cigarette seesawing between her lips—but she barely inhales. Oh my God, I feel it in the air / Telephone wires above / Are sizzling like a snare / Honey, I’m on fire, I feel it everywhere / Nothing scares me anymore: an invitation for danger from a doe-eyed daughter of the universal Daddy.

And yet I listened to Lana’s music with a reverence that disgusted me. There was something about her that was, for me, absolutely maddening in a way I both couldn’t stand and desperately tried to understand. I was troubled by the fact that I cared whether or not her lips were fake, whether her whole persona was fake, while I took most (male) musicians’ self-interpretations—often equally superficial and “problematic”—at face value. There were real critiques to be made of Lana, then and now, but her music turned those red flags into ribbons you could coquettishly weave into your hair.

I mocked flower crowns even as I coveted them. I bought a pair of those ridiculous denim diapers and kept wearing them even though they made my thighs chafe, even though how I wanted to look in them never matched what I saw in the mirror. I twirled when commanded, laughed a little too loudly at every joke, kept my eyes and mouth shut as strange hot breath moved like a roving storm over my body. I never admitted that my actual problem was my own idealization of Lana’s eye-rolling acceptance of other people’s desires. For years, I tried to squeeze myself into that sun-dappled, Free People-d skin. But in the end, she wasn’t the woman I was looking for because I wasn’t the woman I thought I had to be.

There were real critiques to be made of Lana, then and now, but her music turned those red flags into ribbons you could coquettishly weave into your hair.

Maybe Lana also wasn’t the woman she thought she’d be. It seems perverse now that “Summertime Sadness” was the song that brought her mainstream fame; the Cedric Gervais remix makes oblivion a celebration for the worst kind of man: Kiss me hard before you go / Summertime sadness / I just wanted you to know / That baby, you’re the best. Lana Del Rey twirls and all you see is the carcass, not the exquisite corpse she’s meticulously pieced together, the identity that forms within and against the pressure of being constantly watched by wandering eyes.

*

I interned at Interscope Records, Lana’s label, the summer of 2012. The best thing I got out of that summer was a ticket to one of her earliest shows at the El Rey Theatre. Suddenly, the woman at the center of so much “discourse” was just there. I could only take her as she was, and she was fine. She debuted a new song; there was no encore. But I knew this was the smallest stage I’d ever see her play. Born to Die was a runaway success despite the naysayers. Lana’s vision of womanhood aligned with an awakening of both #feminism and weaponized femme self-awareness. Instagram was just taking off.

Two years later, I went to Coachella as a photographer and got as close to Lana Del Rey as I probably ever will. At the beginning of her set, she eschewed the stage for the photo pit so she could sing directly to her rapt fans. The photographers afforded her a small bubble of space. She was used to “us” now, the constant buzzing of other people who minded her business. She’d yet to release her divisive sophomore album, Ultraviolence; in the LA Times review of her Coachella set, she’s referred to as a “selfie queen.” By this time, I was almost out of college. It’d been a long time since I’d strapped on heels and my shortest skirt and tried to catch the eye of some guy at a party. But, watching people sing along word for word to all of Lana’s songs, I tried to remember what it felt like to yearn for capture.

Her song “Young & Beautiful” was playing at frat parties themed around the movie version of The Great Gatsby. The scope of her songs hadn’t changed yet, but I had. Several of my friends had been assaulted by people they’d met at parties. I witnessed the despairing fallout when sexual violence cedes to institutional power and finally saw Lana’s earliest music for what it was: symptoms of an affliction. And as I moved as a woman through the world, I understood her drowsy acceptance of domination. How do you separate what you want from what you know will get you what you want? Desire as surveillance morphs into desire as self-surveillance becomes exhausting. No wonder the impulse is to sink.

But another way out is through. Bodies dripping with blood and sweat like a final girl as they stumble into new lands. Even Lana’s come up for air. She brings a rocket launcher to the beach. She ends her album Lust For Life with manifestos named “Change” and “Get Free.” She’s loved and lost and lost and lost and yet still loves, and I root for this assertion to take root. Every sweetheart deserves their summers. Sadness doesn’t have to be a legacy, passed on like a sputtering torch. It takes nothing less than all of your life to learn how to look your beholder in the eye, but once you start, it’s hard to stop.

“Is it summertime, sweetheart?” When is it not? The world is on fire and my body is on fire and yours is too. If you can’t take the heat, get into the water. Hold your breath, close your eyes, and emerge.

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