I decided to go to Lana Del Rey’s concert in San Francisco on the day I turned 30. This piece of information solicited two kinds of reactions: the “Aw you must like her so much” and the “But I guess you’d want to throw a big birthday party too.” Neither was necessarily true about me — first, I like Lana’s music but wouldn’t call myself a big fan anymore; second, I’m relatively new to the city and found the idea of gathering a handful of friends I have on a Tuesday night after Labor Day weekend exhausting. I just wanted to get in touch with myself with the help of the music that I’ve enjoyed over the past few years.
It’s interesting that, of all people, it’s Lana Del Rey whom I’d spend the last few hours of my 20’s with. Lana Del Rey occupies this rare space in the music world, an artist whose image — the old Hollywood beauty dubbed “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” who falls for bad, moneyed, older guys — is so out of the left field, yet who somehow enjoys mainstream success. So much has been said earlier about her authenticity, from her well-connected wealthy father to her musicianship to her lips, that so many times it threatened to derail her career. Lana has been known as a walking performance art piece, and walk she does — you’d be hard-pressed to find anything on the airwaves resembling her music, let alone anything this wildly successful.
In 2011, I stumbled on a blog post about her live performance on a UK variety show, thinking to myself while squinting at a blurry thumbnail of her face, “I didn’t know Natalie Portman was a recording artist.” 24-year-old me was so transfixed by her sounds and visuals, sending myself down a rabbit hole of vintage video montages and unreleased demos. On a crowded train with my earphones on, gazing out to Tokyo’s skyline at dusk, I’d mouth the lyrics of Summertime Sadness way before it was released as a single and became a top 10 hit. I remember being disappointed later by the follow-ups like Ultraviolence and Honeymoon because of the lack of hooks and dramatic productions that I came to love. My relationship with Lana has never been deeper than whatever I can hear or see. Even at the height of the controversy around her credibility as an artist — her notoriously disastrous Saturday Night Live performance, I couldn’t have cared less about it all, about how the sausage got made; I just knew I liked the damn sausage. I fell in and out of love with her several times based purely on my sensory judgement on her work. So was the fact that I’d see her live for the first time on my 30th birthday, the beginning of the new chapter of my life — or so people say, going to force me to scrutinize her more profoundly and reflect whatever I might find upon myself? Was this by mistake or design?
As I walk toward the line outside Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, I let the thought that this concert might mean something to me spiritually hang in the back of my mind and tried to not expect anything at all, skipping my usual pre-show ritual of checking out the setlist and bombarding my ears with the artist’s music. I allowed myself to be surprised by anything; it worked. My eyes widened in amusement as these flower crown-wearing young men and women hurriedly shuffled past the gate, again from my seat on the balcony as their arms flailed toward her direction in unison like a giant snake slithering through the crowd, and again through a monitor at their gleeful faces as she got off the stage to greet them after the show. This is one of the most passionate concert-goers I’ve ever seen.
But what surprised me the most, of course, was Lana Del Rey, so much so that I’d occasionally find my mouth slightly gaping open in surprise as I watched her perform. “Perform” sounded like the perfect word to describe what Lana constantly does as an artist who has this big, bold persona to maintain, and whether I knew it or not, I might have subconsciously anticipated her to “perform” her set. What I witnessed, instead, was the ease in everything she did, from gliding around the stage on her stilettos to doing some light choreography with two dancers. There’s this unmistakably nihilistic essence to her singing — switching between nonchalantly twisting the notes and selectively attempting to hit ones with which she’s pleased. Listening to it, I felt like I was temporarily freed from the weight of the expectations I put on myself, the echo chamber of life in San Francisco — the city where its residents’ collective ambitions are all-consuming like the fog that perpetually engulfs it. In those moments in a packed auditorium, just like when I silently sang along to her songs in a Tokyo train, it’s as if these words were in the language that was foreign to everyone else, meaning so much to just me all the while managing to say next to absolutely nothing. Regardless of how absurd (Body Electric’s “Elvis is my daddy / Marilyn’s my mother / Jesus is my bestest friend”) or socially aware (lyrics of Change) the lyrics were, they rolled out of her mouth like smoke, carrying no venom or irony, just shifting their shapes to the melodies. I was reminded of how I used to and apparently still think that Ride’s first verse has the most gorgeous melody ever. They were the comforting I didn’t know I needed.
On my way out of the concert hall, feeling content that I’d been able to see Lana Del Rey in the flesh, I still didn’t know who she was or had any intention to find out. Although she remained as enigmatic to me as ever, this ethereal being looked supremely comfortable being exactly that. One minute she sang about being a groupie in love with a rock star and the next about how she wanted to become a better citizen of the world — her silhouette casting over a backdrop of a mushroom-shaped explosion; she did not try to justify her choices and just showed up to do what she had to do. The next morning, the first day of my 30s, a thought popped up to say hi like an old friend, “Am I enough?” I shrugged it off and got ready.
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