Review: Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Rey’s best albums unfold boundlessly: gathering U.S. pop culture references over decades, shredding toxic relationships detail by detail and exploring the intimate bonds between violence and love. Since her debut over ten years ago, her wild, nihilistic glamour has exposed the oppressive cultural prisms of white America through the lenses of iconography like California, white mustangs, blue jeans, Art Deco, Guns and Roses, and Brooklyn. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd represents more of that revelatory drama, often sounding like a greatest hits of Lana’s playbook. It spans genres from psychedelic rock to folk to trap, sprinkling in classic Lana-isms from “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fucking up big time” to “If you want some basic bitch, go to the Beverly Center and find her. But much of the album also feels more insular and ghostly than the maximalist production on Norman Fucking Rockwell! or Ultraviolence. T he lush, cinematic production that ha