Brooklyn Baby
However many times I get tired of her, Lana Del Rey pulls me back into her muddled world of retro-hipster-melancholy-depressiveness. I downloaded Ultraviolence while on a business trip to a particularly boring European city, that, in the absence of this album, could have driven me into an actual depression. Almost all of Ultraviolence is amazing, but Brooklyn Baby managed to put me in a delicious trance. To me this song embodies everything I think an ideal summer evening should be - hot, sticky, a bit blurry and incredibly sexy. If I had to pick a song to hear in my head while making out on the streets of Paris, this would be it.
Well, my boyfriend’s in a band
He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed
I’ve got feathers in my hair
I get down to Beat poetry
Maybe these lyrics make some sort of sense to you; to me, they really don’t, and I guess that’s the beauty of it. They’re like an untethered stream of Utopian consciousness, I hear “boyfriend,” “hair,” “feathers” and “poetry,” all beautiful words that have somehow been put together in random phrases. My brain can’t make sense of them, but my romantic soul seems to know what they are talking about.
So let’s imagine a bridge in Paris. Let’s say it’s the Pont Alexandre III. It’s the beginning of August, the air is thick and warm, and it’s around 10pm when the sun is on its way down. Heck, let’s make the whole thing black and white. You've just had a few glasses of Sancerre at Rosa Bonheur docked below. You're in the middle of the bridge, looking at the Eiffel Tower do its sparkly thing. And then you turn and smile at the boy you like and sort of know (or maybe not, who cares, it’s summer!) and engage in the most wonderful of activities in Continental Europe - making out on a bridge in Paris in the middle of summer, chords of Brooklyn Baby playing in your head and making you not care about decisions, consequences or death.
