Young and Beautiful.
Growing up with Lana del Rey; live coverage at Terminal 5, 2017 / Hyde Park, 2023.
artwork by Asher Stone.
I have always been inspired by the female musicians who came before me—from the pop girls whose lyrics I would scream in the backseat of my parents’ car during my youth to the beautiful bassists whose tablature I later learned. Yet, no artist has been as formative in my adolescence as Lana del Rey. By the time I was thirteen, I had her first four major label albums immortalised in my memory and felt connected to her aestheticized reality. I remember adding songs from Honeymoon (2015) to my iPod Nano that I took to my annual, phoneless sleepaway camp. That same year, I had just begun my first year at a coed school and was romanticizing the horrid realities of hormonal middle school boys a bit too much. Later that October, I went to my first Lana del Rey concert with my dad’s cousin, Nicole, who was perfectly in between our ages (the millennial to my dad’s Gen X and my Gen Z).
Walking into the space at Terminal 5, I was immediately starstruck, although it was very much in reality, a step above her criticized SNL performance a few years before. The colorful, ambient lighting sculpted Lana like Venus de Milo in her form-fitting black ensemble. This experience, along with my Glossier and Brandy Melville obsessions (in particular their Lower Manhattan outposts), entirely shaped my time in middle school. By the time I began high school, I was starting to age out of most of these things. I still listened to Lana and used my products and clothing, but it was with a grown up, more mature perspective. Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019) had just released, and unlike my cutesy, juvenile experiences with Born to Die (2012), Ultraviolence (2014) and Honeymoon, I felt more connected with NFR, as if I was somewhat the right audience. Songs like “Cinnamon Girl” and “Happiness is a butterfly” are especially incredible. To this day, I still stick to this album, more so than the ones that came before it and after it.
As my high school experience was impacted by the pandemic for practically every year except the last, I spent extended time in Long Island, Miami and of course New York City, attending classes, missing out on the niches that define adolescence. Despite this, I still made many friends through my school, as well as external programs offered by the Whitney Museum, New Museum and International Center of Photography, where friendships blossomed through music and film tastes. In summer programs I attended in Paris and Italy, Lana was a constant for the many other very cool teenage girls I became acquainted with, with them being from various places including Hong Kong, Madrid, California and El Salvador.
With UChicago's academic calendar extending my summer from May 19th to September 26th, I spent a month in London through a Sotheby’s program in Art Business and Entrepreneurship. Outside of my studies, I explored the UK and attended a couple of concerts, bookending with a second Lana del Rey concert. At eighteen, I was confident in comparison to the shell of my thirteen-year-old self. I had performed live, exhibited in museums, published research and more, and I was ready to leave home for a long period of time. The very day of the concert, I attended the F1 race in the English countryside and was rushing to meet my friend at a coffee shop near the Marble Arch station on the Central Line (after many train transfers) with a nearly dead phone. I somehow made it, and we peacefully walked through the concert park as the sun slowly set.
Soon after, like a goddess, Lana appeared. Everything that was minimal at age thirteen was full of theatricality at eighteen. Her diamond crown-like headband and floral dress counterposed the other concert outfit as it flowed with her performance. As two years have passed by, I do not remember every detail, but I was mesmerised. It was a celebration of girlhood, of being a teenager, regardless of where you grew up or what generation you are, as she turns forty this year. Lana transcends this boundary as she continues to inspire aspiring musicians or someone going through or reliving the motions of adolescence. And I thank her for that.
edited by Aidan Burt.
artwork by Asher Stone.