Go further down the track list, and you keep coming across other titles you imagine might be meant to be sarcastic, but aren’t.
It’s not actually a dance track - Del Rey is still bereft of those (though remixers have long found her material ripe for reinterpretation) - but with her voice gradually drifting to the uppermost end of her register, it is startlingly beautiful. Del Rey has a song title on her album that seems to promise the same theme: “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing.” Except here, after asking “Is it the end of America?,” the diva in question is actually endorsing our way of hoofing through the present hysteria, suggesting that if we got through a world war or two by ballroom dancing, then cutting a rug can get us through this. Give her credit for creating the “purposeful pop” album Katy Perry thought she was making, then gave up on after one song, “Chained to the Rhythm.” In that single, Perry chided Americans for dancing through what she saw as the political apocalypse, a scolding that didn’t really seem to fit with the blithe escapism of the rest of her album. But she wears the more hopeful songs that bookend “Lust for Life” surprisingly well, considering that she and producer/co-writer Rick Nowels haven’t made too many adjustments to a musical thermostat that earlier lent itself to icier material about drugs and death wishes.
The idea of a Del Rey who’s suddenly committed to personal growth will inevitably lead to some “Little Lana, happy at last” chortling.
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