What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
August: Lana Del Rey — “High by the Beach”
If I knew nothing else late last August (and sometimes, it also felt like I knew nothing at all), it was that I was tired of taking care of myself—of myself and of others. I was tired of being asked for permission to do things. I was sick at the thought of having to say yes; I was bored of having to say no. It was high summer, and it had never really gotten hot in that New York way, the one in which the air shimmers in its stillness and the only way to be really cool is to lie down on the floor and sink into it until you feel your heart and head slowly slow down. But, no, it didn’t get that hot in New York last summer. It was possible to walk around even in the middle of the day without wanting to collapse. And yet: The death drive that time of year is always strong. And I felt it.
Maybe there are other musicians who better embody the twin concepts of death and love (which, forget impermanent life, death and love are the only two things in possession of real staying power) than Lana del Rey, but, for me, there is nobody else who more regularly inhabits that particular realm of the sublime. And so it happened that when I was in a dark part of my summer, pretty certain that this life I had constructed around me was less a home than an institution, a fortress (a prison, when I was being especially dramatic), I first heard “High by the Beach.” And it crashed over me like a wave of pure, shimmering white-blue heat.
What’s funny about that is: There’s nobody cooler than Lana del Rey when she’s singing “High by the Beach.” The song itself is fire, but she stays ice-cold in its center, clear and strong in the middle of that nebulous sonic halo. Every emotion is articulated with the strength and sharpness of a diamond, even as the musical edges vaporous around her. Del Rey sings of want and need, of her desire to reclaim herself in a world where everyone else is ready to take something, and even everything, from her. But she’s over it now; she’s over them. And so, I realized more and more, was I. Bye-bye. It was time to start again. And that realization was like a lightning bolt to the heart, and to the head. I can’t say that my life appeared to change all that much to anyone looking in from the outside, but for me, the dismantling of the fortress had begun. I was escaping something of my own making, shedding a persona to become more of a person, making myself happier and higher and more open to the love that I wanted, love on my own terms. And sometimes it felt like I was flying.—Kristin Iversen