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Along with announcing that her next album will be released March 10th, the same day as Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Miley Cyrus also seems to be giving a nod to Lana in other ways with the teaser for her forthcoming eighth record, Endless Summer Vacation. The title itself smacking of Del Rey’s rolodex of stock vocabulary for many of her CA-themed songs. Indeed, she even had a tour in 2015 called Endless Summer, with Courtney Love and Grimes as the openers on varying legs of the North American crusade to promote Ultraviolence. But, of course, like that latter title taking from something else in 60s and 70s-era pop culture (i.e., A Clockwork Orange), so, too, does Endless Summer have its roots in the name of a greatest hits album from The Beach Boys. And, yes, anyone who knows Del Rey’s work on even the most cursory level is aware that she’s just about as “goo-goo-eyed” over California as The Beach Boys. As such, she’s become something of the unofficial spokesperson for the state in a way that said band used to be—giving it an update with her darker motifs pertaining to decay and ruin (though she’s all for finding beauty in that as well).
Seeming to inuit the weight of taking up the mantle for a band that wrote a Golden State anthem as untouchable as “California Girls,” Del Rey finally had to name-check a Beach Boy in Norman Fucking Rockwell’s “The Greatest,” singing of “Dennis’ last stop before Kokomo” as a reference to his 1983 death after the preceding line, “I miss the bar where the Beach Boys would go.” In this instance, “Kokomo”—the paradisiacal (and fictional) island off the Florida Keys—is meant to represent Heaven, where Del Rey would like to imagine that Dennis went after drinking all day on December 28th and then jumping into the water in Marina Del Rey (how appropriate for another Lana connection). His drunken stupor led to his drowning and, much later, immortalization in a Del Rey song. In fact, the entire crux of “The Greatest” expresses a deep yearning and nostalgia for the music of the past (in the spirit of The Beach Boys), and even the way the music industry used to be (replete with free-wheeling sexual predators and all).
Miley isn’t exactly conveying that sentiment (not yet anyway) in her Endless Summer Vacation teaser, but she is performing the whole “California myth” shtick, going so far as to deem the album “a love letter to Los Angeles” (what Billie Eilish also called her filmed-for-Disney concert at the Hollywood Bowl—literally: Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles). One can imagine Del Rey internally commenting (in the style of Janis Ian in Mean Girls) of Miley saying such a thing, “Hey, that’s only okay when I say it.” And it’s true, Del Rey was the one who jump-started California’s shift back toward being the apple of the U.S.’ eye, even amid all of its many and increasing climate disasters ranging from fires to floods. She being the one to remain consistently committed to it while other musicians only dabble (even California native Katy Perry, who tried to one-up The Beach Boys with her own “California Gurls”).
But it isn’t just that Miley is serving up “California as a concept” vibes for Endless Summer Vacation that reeks of Del Rey. She’s even taken to adopting the ethereal spoken word manner of Del Rey that first materialized on Honeymoon’s “Burnt Norton,” wherein she recites the T. S. Eliot poem of the same name. A manner that was ultimately a precursor for releasing a spoken word album of her poetry book, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. The album itself offers fourteen of the thirty poems from the book spoken by Del Rey, with musical accompaniments by her usual bitch, Jack Antonoff. Among the offerings was the, you guessed it, “L.A. love letter” called “LA Who Am I To Love You.” The answer to that being: a native of the state of New York who rightly turned her back on NYC and the East Coast in general by fleeing to the West. Miley, too, fled the East in favor of the West, but being from Tennessee makes it slightly less “traitorous” by East Coast standards. Especially New York ones that perpetually champion that eponymous city as the “greatest” in the world despite kind of being the shittiest.
Maybe that’s why Miley feels that she can also try her hand at bringing “profundity” to L.A. with some spoken word verses in the Endless Summer Vacation teaser that include, “We met each other on the neon dinghy. Past the manta rays and palm trees. Glowing creatures beamed down from great heights. Electric eels in red venom. In the sky, we could see the riders on horseback.” It sounds like a lot of acid and/or weed-induced nonsense, which continues with, “On comets, coming toward us kicking up with laughter” (side note: the way she says “On comets” briefly makes one think she might just continue with, “On Cupid, on Donner, on Blitzen…”). Throughout this entire time, we’re shown “impressionistic” imagery that so often gets associated with California, namely a pool, paraded again toward the end of the teaser in spotlighted darkness next to empty outdoor furniture. As the Bret Easton Ellis-inspired (think: Less Than Zero) musical ambience continues, Cyrus gets even more faux poetic with the lines, “My friend Big Twitchy rode the boat to the light, surfed the north break. We danced until there was nothing left. Just me and Twitchy. ‘Cause that’s all we knew.”
Having commenced the teaser with a close-up on a clear, blue pool that harkens back to the “Slide Away” single cover, we’re reminded of a visual like “Blue Jeans,” where Del Rey firmly established her California aesthetics in music video format. Another scene in Miley’s teaser includes a looming, blurred-out helicopter that correlates to Del Rey’s “High by the Beach” video motif. Shaky camera work trying to focus on a bleach blonde, cherry red lipstick’d Cyrus wearing black shades adds to the DIY/“found footage” look she’s going for. Of the very variety that Del Rey repopularized with “Video Games.” Elsewhere, an image of a 5G cell phone tower posing as a palm tree additionally evokes the dystopian feel Del Rey has also cultivated in her lyrical portrayals of Los Angeles and California. Not to mention highlighting the “ersatz” quality L.A. and CA are frequently mocked for. And yet, for as maligned and made fun of as this milieu still is, it seems to keep inspiring. Even if much of that inspiration appears to be yielding similar statements and visuals. All of which can now be linked back to Del Rey kickstarting the “California trend” with her sophomore record (heralded by “West Coast” being the first single from it).
In any case, it is said that all great artists inspire imitations (e.g., Easton Ellis ripping off Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays for Less Than Zero). And Del Rey herself is but an imitative pastiche of so many California-centric bands and musicians past. So perhaps there’s no harm done, per se, by Miley emulating the chanteuse she once collaborated with on “Don’t Call Me Angel” (which seems to be crying out for a follow-up single from just the two of them entitled “Call Me City of Angels”). She might even have something slightly new to say about the state. But don’t get your hopes up on that front. Only time—and California—will tell.
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Genna Rivieccio
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