【Norman Fucking Rockwell!】Pitchfork乐评翻译

NORMAN

FUCKING

ROCKWELL!

Norman f**king Rockwell音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

Venice B**ch音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead. For a woman whose songs are like miniature syllabi in American Studies—saturated in references to jazz, girl groups, heavy metal, Springsteen; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; money, power, glory; excess and loss; Whitmanian multitudes—it felt like an act of defiance.

Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana at her deepest, and it arrives at a time when the history of America as we know it is being rewritten. Norman Rockwell himself illustrated idyllic images of American life and its history, spending 50 years with the Americana propagandists at the weekly Saturday Evening Post. His best-known works used a wondrous narrative style to center comfort and simplicity: A pastoral idea, painted and personified, of the American Dream. Lana neatly cuts through that outmoded fantasy with an emphatic fucking hyphen mark of irreverence, or enthusiasm, or both. As Lana revives American myths, with an empty deadpan that would make Lou Reed proud, she also exposes them. Like the Beach Boys, she’s looking for America; like Elvis, she’s discomfiting; like Dylan, she’s a trickster, and we are all potentially fooled.

2017年，拉娜德雷决定不再在巡演舞台的背后放置一面美国国旗。拉娜·德雷，本名伊丽莎白·格兰特，一位歌手兼词曲作者，一位曾在美国星条旗的衬映下登上舞台演出的表演者，一位吃着苹果派穿着蓝色牛仔裤长大的爱国者，如今却看着飘扬的国旗不顺眼，甚至还不如用投屏来代替。她的歌曲就像研究美国学习的教学大纲，其中充斥着爵士，女团，重金属及布鲁斯·斯普林斯汀风格的音乐元素，歌词的创作也充满着海明威和菲茨杰拉德的气息，金钱，全力，荣耀，得与失，对诗人Walt Whitman的引用；鉴于她的过往作品，这张专辑更像是一次反叛。

《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》是拉娜德雷发自内心的想法，而这张专辑也恰好正值美国历史改写的重要时刻。诺曼·洛克威尔是一位以田园形象展现美国生活和历史的插画家，他曾在《周六晚邮报》与一群美式乡村宣传者工作了足足50年。他最广为人知的作品采用了一种奇妙的叙述方式，以舒适和简洁为中心，描绘出了栩栩如生的田园式美国梦。

而拉娜德雷则巧妙地将“Fucking”作为连接词，以一种不敬，狂热表达了对这老式幻想的讽刺。当拉娜德雷用一种能老爷子卢·里德感到骄傲的空洞又不动声色的方式重现美国经典形象时，她同样也揭开了他们的面纱。就像海滩男孩乐队一样，她也在找寻所谓的美国梦；像猫王一样，她也令人不安；也像鲍勃·迪伦一样，是一个恶作剧家，而我们也都不知不觉被她愚弄了。

How to disappear音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

Lana is one of our most complicated stars, a constantly unresolvable puzzle—someone who once called her own work “more of a psychological music endeavor” than pop. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! that ground-swelling complexity coheres to reveal an indisputable fact: She is the next best American songwriter, period. Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk—equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and 2019 parlances—Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity. “I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic,” Lana once said, and she exalts each syllable more than ever here. Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour—singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. The stakes have never been higher.

Sometimes Jack Antonoff productions seem to fly because they have been given a trampoline or a children’s bouncing castle. But here, with delicacy and grace, he and Lana find new wings in minimalism, fresh air to breathe, a structural relief. From its cascade of opening piano notes—“God damn, man child” are felicitous first words and the national mood—Norman Fucking Rockwell! achieves levity, tension, and a disarming self-awareness. The languor of Mazzy Star and downbeat skitter of Portishead meet the easy pop-rock breeze of Carole King on 1971’s Tapestry, or the searching resilience of Joni Mitchell on 1972’s For the Roses. It feels like a wall has come down, like Norman Fucking Rockwell! is less to do with camp, and more to do with real life; less to do with scripting the incandescent character of Lana Del Rey and more to do with human complexity; less about aesthetics than being. You can hear the room everywhere, and for all the spectral harmonies and cinematic splendor, it sounds like Lana alone, embracing classic Angeleno isolation.

拉娜德雷是最令人捉摸不透的明星之一，就像一道永远解决不了的难题——她曾称自己的作品“更像是精神音乐尝试”，而非流行音乐。但在《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》中附着的那如海浪汹涌的复杂性在此揭示了一个不争的事实：拉娜德雷毋庸置疑就是美国下一位最优秀的词曲作者。拉娜德雷舍弃了她大部分的冷硬风格陷阱流行和心神不安的迷幻舞曲，将风格转向了巴洛克式钢琴抒情歌和令人眼花缭乱的民谣，歌曲制作也变得像布里尔大厦工程一样精细，像风中的月桂谷一样凌乱。而在2019年，拉娜德雷在深刻中进行了一次有活力的发言：“我真的相信文字就是魔法仅存的表现形式。”她比以往任何时候都更赞赏这音节的神奇魔力，而她那优雅的文字游戏也曾让其成为网络情感的守护神；而现在她的音乐听起来就像一位千禧年代的吟游诗人——吟唱着她与挚爱的酒保及渣男们间的风流韵事，颂唱着在车上飞驰及其他不同的感受，包括对自由和变革的渴望，对生而为人所经历的事的反思。拉娜德雷从未如此孤注一掷。

有时杰克的歌曲制作似乎给人一种飞升的感觉，仿佛是因为歌曲本身被嵌入了一张蹦床或是一个儿童充气城堡一样。但在专辑那精细，优雅的制作下，杰克和拉娜在极简主义风格开拓了新的境界，新的元素，让歌曲在结构上更具起伏。比如专辑同名曲开篇那如瀑布般倾泻的钢琴声后呈上的那别具匠心的第一句歌词：“该死，男人永远长不大”，铺垫了一个全国人的感同身受的情绪；歌曲表现了一种轻浮，不安，放松戒备的自我意识。那种如迷星乐队般的慵懒和Portishead乐队经典的强拍与Carole King于1971发布的《Tapestry》相似的轻流行摇滚风格碰撞在一起，同时又会像Joni Mitchell在1972年的歌曲《For the Roses》一样探寻韧性。这一切又一切给人一面墙坍塌的感觉，正如《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》一般，与其说是一次露营经历，不如说是现实生活的写照；与其说是塑造拉娜德雷这一内心炽热的人物，不如说是在探寻人类本身的复杂性。比起美学，这专辑更关注“存在”。你能在这张专辑感受到空间感，即便其中有无数空灵的和声和电影般的绚丽场面，它听起来就像拉娜独自拥抱这经典的洛杉矶人孤立感。

Happiness is a butterfly音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

Lana’s pillars are intact before you even hit play: glamour, eccentricity, the absurd, wit. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she proclaims on the title track, with a raised eyebrow, and this forthright song grows more savage from there. On a nine-and-a-half-minute lullaby called “Venice Bitch,” she sings the line “fresh out of fucks forever” like a lilting lady of the canyon—in pop tradition, Lana treats California like a conceptual promised land, and here is the smoggy sprawl, stretching into a neo-psychedelic ballad for a new age of acid festival jams. She curses like the sailors on the cover. She employs old-school lingo on the one hand (“Catch ya on the flipside”) and a narcotic slur on the other. And there is no other pop star who could palatably cover Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” and turn its mall-reggae into something so balmy and sweet.

Above all, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the sound of a heart shattering and reforming just to shatter again—of troubled people attempting to navigate the mess of love. Her ache is from empathy: for our crumbling world, for the down and out, for lovers at war with their minds. “If he’s a serial killer/Then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl that’s already hurt?” she sings like a crime novelist on “Happiness Is a Butterfly,” which is to say it is fleeting, setting herself up for a kind of heartbreak so torturous it should be possible to have it surgically removed. Many of these exquisitely narrated songs contain reminders that the trappings of masculinity—breaches in communication, emotional stiltedness, fear of vulnerability—come from the same toxic status quo as systemic patriarchy. On the wrenching “California,” Lana processes as much: “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are,” confessing in a tumbling rush that “I shouldn’t have done it but I read it in your letter/You said to a friend that you wished you were doing better.” Each word is on a pedestal; the song exists to amplify them. Her faint country warble wells more with each verse, and it’s devastating.

即便是在你按下播放键之前，拉娜德雷的顶梁柱也是完好无缺的：魅力，怪僻，荒诞，智慧。“你写的诗糟透了，而你却责怪时事”，她在同名曲上挑起眉头宣告道。从这句词开始，这首本来就挺直率的歌就变得更“野蛮”了。在时长9分半的催眠曲《Venice Bitch》中，当拉娜唱着“永远都渴望着肉体之欢”时，她就像一位在峡谷中漫步的女人。正如

流行音乐传统那样，拉娜德雷将加州视作是一个概念性的理想之地，这里烟雾弥漫，并诞生出了一种新迷幻抒情歌曲，营造出一个新时代的迷幻音乐节氛围。拉娜德雷就像封面上的那位咒骂着的船员。在歌词上，她一边用着老式的隐语（在世俗的另一端与你会面），一边又说着如迷幻剂般的省略话语。另外，我想也没有另一位流行明星能悦耳地复刻出这Sublime乐队的《Doin’ Time》，并将原来这雷鬼风格演绎成如此温柔甜蜜的一首歌。

首先，《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》专辑是关于将破碎的心拼接起来，然后再任其破碎的故事——也是深陷泥潭的人尝试去从混乱的爱恋中走出的故事。拉娜德雷的痛源自同情——同情那支离破碎的世界，那孤苦无助的人，那与自己内心斗争的恋人们。“如果他是一个连环杀手/那对一个已经被伤透的女孩来说，最糟糕的事还能是什么呢？”拉娜以犯罪小说家的口吻在《Happiness is a Butterfly》中唱道，歌名的含义就是，爱是转瞬即逝的，在歌中她正被情感的心碎感折磨至深以至于可能都需要进行手术将心脏切除。专辑里很多这种制作精细的叙述歌曲中都在提醒着人们这男人的标志——交流上的疏漏欠虑，感情上的过度理性，对表现脆弱的抗拒——这些都同样来自那万恶的父权制下的社会现状。在同样令人心痛的《California》中，拉娜同样倾注了许多感情：“你不必假装自己很坚强。”；她跌跌撞撞地坦白道：“我本不该告诉你着，但我读过你的一封信，你对你的朋友说，你想成为一个更好的人。”一字一句都有力到入木三分，歌曲的存在只是让这些歌曲墨香味更浓。拉娜德雷那田园式颤音让歌曲的每一部分都更加美妙，无与伦比。

The greatest音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

Radiating new dimensions of sensitivity and eloquence, “Mariners Apartment Complex” is a towering peak on Norman Fuckng Rockwell!, a four-minute drama about fateful potential romantic energy. But its turbulent grandeur could speak to the whole Lana Del Rey story. “You took my sadness out of context” and “They mistook my kindness for weakness” are bold refusals to be misunderstood. Referencing Elton John with her pristine declaration “I ain’t no candle in the wind,” a phrase originally inspired by the early deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, is a patent embrace of life from a woman who once wrote, “I wish I was dead.” When she sings, “I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?” it could be a mic-dropping rebuttal to the ludicrous standards she faced from the start (and the overblown, Internet-engineered Lana outrage that now seems sexist and pathetic). The Hollywood author Eve Babitz once wrote, “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Lana’s evolution follows suit. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is the sort of ballad that makes teens want to bang on pianos and spill their souls.

Lana zooms out to find her zenith. A piano ballad to close down the bar at the end of the world, “The greatest” collapses time, as if Lana is writing the zeitgeist on a typewriter, her lines raving up with fevered reference to rock’n’roll and depression and a proverbial “Kokomo.” Turning the weight of a generation into light, her words crest like the white of a tidal wave—“L.A.’s in flames, it’s a getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone/‘Life On Mars’ ain’t just a song/Oh, the livestream’s almost on”—and they feel on arrival to have existed forever. As ever, Lana regards the despondency of existence as a realist, offering a funhouse reflection of the way we live.

《Mariner Apartment Complex》是这种专辑中无比卓越的巅峰之作，一首时长四分钟的音乐剧，讲述了命中注定又潜在的罗曼史，同时发散着关于敏感和雄辩的新维度。但歌曲之中狂涌的宏伟足以代表这拉娜德雷的专属故事。“你对我的悲伤断章取义”和“你将我的善良视作是软弱”这样的歌词是对人们对她的误解的有力回应。那引用了Elton John歌曲的歌词“我并非是风中残烛”是在得知玛丽莲·梦露和詹尼斯·乔普林逝世的消息的启发下写出来的，这是专属于女人敢于拥抱自己生活的歌词。“我多希望我已经死去”她唱道，“我知道我把一切都搞砸了，但主啊，难道一个女孩就不配做到最好吗？”这是拉娜德雷在生涯早期遇到到的那些可笑条条框框的惊人反驳（而如今这些在网络助长下滋生的暴行变得更性别歧视化且可悲）。好莱坞作家Eve Babitz曾写道：“一旦你认清自己的定位，除你以外的所有人都只是完美的，那种工厂流水线制作的完美……而你正因为自己不完美，你可以肆无忌惮搞破坏”。拉娜德雷的进化经历便可以这样形容。《Mariners Apartment Complex》就是那么一首能让青少年们想坐在钢琴前，随心所欲地为灵魂独奏的抒情歌。

拉娜德雷拉远镜头拓宽视野来寻找她能力的顶峰。《The Greatest》仿佛是在世界尽头的一间即将关门的酒吧中播放的一首钢琴抒情歌曲，时间支离破碎之际，仿佛拉娜德雷正一字一句地敲打这深涵非凡思想的歌词，她的歌词中充满了狂热地对摇滚和抑郁的引用，以及对广为人知的歌曲《Kokomo》的致敬，她把那一代人的地位变得不那么重要，她的话语就像浪潮上那白色的浪峰一般——“洛杉矶陷于火海之中，热浪灼热难耐/Kanye West染着一头金发，身影逐渐远去/《Life on Mars》不仅仅是一首歌/噢，现场直播差不多要开始了”——他们来到这个世界就注定着会被人们铭记。一如以往般，拉娜德雷以她现实主义者的身份看待心气消沉这一问题，为我们的生活提供了一个有趣的反思。

hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it音乐：Lana Del Rey - Norman F**king Rockwell! (Explicit)

Call her Doris Doomsday: “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she resolves with ecstasy and fire, a lightning rod of humor, sadness, and perception; flip jadedness and abiding love. Fanning the flames of a culture ablaze, Lana sings each word like a prayer, finessed with conviction and smoke, chaos and control. “The greatest” is a galaxy-brain moment in the pantheon of pop, and it belongs to a generation fully aware we are at risk of being distracted into oblivion, Juuling towards early death while watching Earth burn.

But hope does not elude us yet. And Lana has an anthem for that, too. The title of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s grand finale is itself a doomy 16-word poem called “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it.” Whatever it was that brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen together half a century ago, that middle ground is in the solemn mood, hollowed space, and spiritual fortitude of this haunting song. In the muted resignation of her voice you can see her “trust no one” tattoo. She rejects a world of luxury, rejects happiness and sadness both, calls herself “24/7 Sylvia Plath.” And in this slow, glowering procession, she points more directly to her own personal history than ever—“spilling my guts with the Bowery bums” as a volunteer, FaceTiming her father “from beyond the grave”—and soberly she sings: “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman with my past.” In the vacant spaces between her dark phrases is the unassailable fact that people bury their pasts in order to endure them.

不妨称拉娜德雷为桃瑞丝审判日:“文明已被点燃/如果事情无法改变/我愿纵情享乐”，她手持释放幽默，悲伤和洞察力的雷电法杖，用醉心和狂热，直面这腐败的世界；她或许表现得有些许厌恶，但她无比爱这个世界。Lana将她的歌词用作祷告，巧妙地用信仰和迷雾、混乱和支配，煽动着文化革命的火焰。《The greatest》是流行音乐殿堂中的漫漫星河中的一颗明星，它属于我们这随时被岁月长河掩埋的一代人，在目睹地球一片火海的同时早早地走向死亡。

但是希望并没有和我们在玩躲猫猫，拉娜也为此写了一首歌。《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》的宏大标题的结局本身就是一首忧伤的16字诗歌，名为《对于像我这样的女人拥有希望是件危险的事——但我永远抱有希望》。无论在半个世纪前是什么让Joni Mitchell和Leonard Cohen走到了一起，这首令人难忘的歌曲中所蕴含的庄严的气氛、无限的空间感，以及精神上的坚毅，都完美地嵌合在一起。她的声音充满着缄默的顺从，你可以从中看到她身上的“不信任任何人”纹身。她拒绝奢华的世界，拒绝快乐和悲伤，并称自己“每时每刻都是西尔维娅·普拉斯”。在这个缓慢的、庄严的过程中，她从未如此将枪口指向自己的过往经历——作为一名志愿者，她“与波威里街的流浪者们互诉衷肠”，“在坟墓之上”同她的父亲“视频对话”——她清醒地唱道:“对一个有着同我一样经历的女人来说，希望是一件危险的事情。”在她消沉歌词间的空隙里，躺着一个不容置疑的事实：人们埋葬过去，是为了克服过去。

Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the apotheosis of Lana Del Rey, songs of curiosity and of consequence, darkness and light, a time capsule of 2019, proof that a person cannot escape herself but she can change. Lana has said hope is dangerous because of her own experience, because in Hollywood she “knows so much.” Hope is dangerous because women are rarely taken seriously, from matters of authenticity to cases of assault. Hope is dangerous because the world fails women, and the bigotry to which American power is currently pitched ensures it. Lana calls herself “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution,” witnessing “a new revolution,” with “monsters still under my bed that I never could fight off.” What makes this final song of survival so cutting is the palpable difficulty in her delivery. When she lands on “a gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off,” it sounds like an oblique image of corrupted power, as upsetting as it ought to be, one to finally drain her of hope. But she still has it. In a piercing falsetto we rarely if ever hear from Lana, perhaps saved for her most pressing truth, she touches the sky: “I have it, I have it, I have it.” And when she does, you believe her.

《Norman Fucking Rockwell!》是拉娜德雷的封神之作，其中歌曲有堪称珍品的，有对自己和世界有深刻意义的，黑暗与光明并存，是关于2019年的时代缩影，印证了一个人虽无法逃离自己的过去，但可以改变自己的现状。拉娜说希望是危险的，因为她自己的经历，因为在好莱坞她“知道这么多。”希望是危险的，因为从现实中的种种琐事到性侵案件，女性很少被重视。希望是危险的，因为这个世界辜负了女性的期望，而美国掌权者目前所表现出的顽固不化也使之变本加厉。拉娜称自己是“体质虚弱的现代女性”，见证了“一场新的革命”，“床下还有我永远无法击退的怪物”。让最后这首关于生存之道的歌如此尖锐的原因正是她在唱这首歌时那种难堪与难以开口。当她唱出“是地狱的守门人粗心将钥匙扔进了我的夜晚”时，这听起来像是一个腐败权力的不光彩画面，如此令人沮丧，最终也让她的希望落了空。但她依然存留着希望。在这里拉娜用了一种打动人心的假声，这是我们在她的歌中极少能听到的声音，或许只尘封于她最恳切的实质中，她以这样的声音抚摸着天空:“我拥有它，我拥有它，我拥有它。”既然她这样说了，我们怎能不相信呢？