Lana Del Rey’s motivations for emulating Taylor Swift and wiping her social media backlogs clean are still unknown, but this decision has certainly fuelled curiosity about her what she might have up her sleeve. If you (like me) expected a more explicitly political stance - in light of a surviving tweet and a song that expressed concerns about America’s rising nuclear tensions with North Korea - she has yet to deliver on that expectation.
The recently released music video for “White Mustang” - which follows the music videos for “Love” and the title track of her latest album Lust for Life - sees her comfortably ensconced within familiar personal turmoil. It returns comfortably to the unfulfilled longing of her earliest hits like “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans”, albeit in a more subdued fashion (the song is sung in past tense). Once again, there is a magnetic male figure (a fellow musician) that cannot be tamed: ‘Everybody said you're a killer … I was such a fool for believin' that you/ Could change all the ways you've been livin'/ But you just couldn't stop’.
The mid-tempo ballad is steeped with haziness and nostalgia, backed by synths, pianos and some evocative sound samples of cars whizzing by. During the bridge, the automobile metaphor and man merge into a revelatory menace: ‘You're revvin' and revvin' and revvin' it up/ And the sound, it was frightenin'/ And you were gettin' a part of that/ You're gonna hit me like lightnin'.
The accompanying music video draws out the song (at 2:45, it is the shortest cut on the album) with a dance interlude and an extended outro (scored by a mariachi band and segments of the album’s closing track, “Get Free”). Set in a retro-futuristic LA - with impossibly tall buildings in the distant skyline and futuristic audio mixing software at hand, cast in soft lighting and pastels - the video flips the power script in the song’s narrative. Wearing a billowing floral dress with a dangerous thigh-high slit, it is Del Rey who stands over her erstwhile lover (played by red-headed Icelandic actor Eðvarð Egilsson) as the song begins. She is the beautiful woman behind the wheel of the titular car - driving off into the night after the ill-fated romance dissolves (this dissolution coincides ambiguously with the launch of a missile) - with a brief (and rare) smile gracing her face.
