Born to Monologue

The video for Ride doesn’t open with music. It opens with Lana Del Rey on a swing in front of an American flag, delivering a spoken-word piece about freedom and loneliness and the specific ache of someone who has always been slightly out of phase with the world they were born into. What follows runs nearly ten minutes: motorcycle clubs, desert highways, neon motels, a woman who appears to be unraveling in the most photogenic way possible. It’s maximalist to the point of self-parody—and then, against all logic, something in it lands.

What made Lana interesting in 2012, while everyone was still arguing about whether she was "authentic" (as though pop music had ever been auditioning for that), was the specificity of the sadness. Not generic heartbreak but something more ambient, more structural—the feeling of a life that is simultaneously overfull and completely hollow. Ride is the thesis statement for that entire mode of being. The monologue at the end, the one that begins "I was always an unusual girl," is ridiculous and completely sincere in exactly equal measure. Which might be the most honest thing about her.