The 66th annual Grammy Awards are scheduled to air on February 4th, which means that by the time this is published we will already know who won Album of the Year. But at the moment of writing this article, I am currently in a state of blissful unawareness, and while all of the nominees are deserving of the award, I believe one album stands out in particular: Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey. This album is a masterpiece. It is, in my opinion, Lana’s best record thus far, in terms of vocals, songwriting, artistic direction, and maybe even production (although NFR! could arguably take that spot). Ocean Blvd -- though not having received as much mainstream attention as other nominations like Taylor Swift’s Midnights, Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS, or SZA’s SOS -- is in my mind the true winner of Album of the Year.
There are a few reasons why I think Lana should take home AotY. To start with, we have to discuss what makes an album worthy of such an award. One of the most important aspects is cultural impact: years from now, will people look back and consider the album to be an essential part of this time period? By this metric alone, one might argue that Taylor Swift’s Midnights should win, and if it did, I’d be happy. It would make her the only artist to ever win AotY four times, which is something I would love to see. 2023 being the Year of Taylor Swift is undeniable -- I sincerely believe that historians will view the pop culture of our present day as being dominated by Swift in the same way that Beatlemania swept the world in the 1960s -- and the record-smashing Midnights definitely has a part to play in that. But I would argue that the primary contributor to Taylor’s success this year was The Eras Tour, which focused on Swift’s entire discography, not just Midnights. Furthermore, Swift has won AotY three times in the past, and it has always coincided with her making significant changes in her artistic style: she won for in 2010 for Fearless, which was when she began to explore pop-country fusion; in 2016 for 1989, which was her complete crossover into pop; and in 2021 for Folklore, which was her transition into more emotionally-potent acoustic music. There was always a definitive new direction in her genre, sound, and aesthetic, which had an impact both on her public perception and on the music industry as a whole. With Midnights, however, she’s simply transitioned back into pop. Yes, the album has brought her back into the forefront of the music industry, but the artistry of the record itself is very… safe. Don’t get me wrong, I love Midnights with a passion, but I think the album did not take the creative risks that made some of her other music so impactful. I feel the same way about Olivia Rodigo’s GUTS, which, although brilliant, feels like an expansion on the work from SOUR, and therefore also very safe.
But this article isn’t about Swift, or Rodrigo, or any of the other nominees. It’s about Lana. So what makes her so special? This year, she certainly hasn’t had the impact on pop culture at the same level of many of the other nominees. However, Ocean Blvd’s influence cannot be understated from a critical point of view, because the album has cemented an overwhelmingly positive reception that was not present for most of Lana’s career. Especially early on, Lana’s music was often dismissed for a variety of reasons, with many reviewers regarding her Americana aesthetic as tacky, contrived, and sometimes problematic. Add to that her infamously terrible performance on SNL, and most critics took her as an untalented joke -- a 2012 Rolling Stone review of Lana’s debut album, Born to Die, called her “just another aspiring singer who wasn’t ready to make an album yet,” while Pitchfork noted that the album’s “point of view” feels “awkward and out of date,” and that Lana’s “dreamworld…relies on clichés (‘God you're so handsome/ Take me to the Hamptons’) rather than specific evocations.” This would help explain why, although her albums like Born to Die and Ultraviolence have seen massive commercial success, she has never won a Grammy. Lana’s reception by critics only began to change with the release of NFR! in 2019, which many view as her best album to date. It is also her only other album to be nominated for AotY. Yet she still struggled to escape the criticism of her early work, despite releasing two more arguably very mature albums. Some even argued that Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters, the two records after NFR!, were trying too hard to seem more “adult” and came across as pretentious. It wasn’t until 2023, with Ocean Blvd, that music critics truly took her and her work seriously. Even Anthony Fantano, an online critic who has infamously given Lana scathing reviews for years, referred to himself as “Lana-pilled,” and Ocean Blvd made it to number three on his list of top 50 albums of 2023 (higher than any of the other nominees for AotY).
How did Ocean Blvd so fully turn Lana around in the eyes of music critics? To put it simply, the album is brilliant, genuine, and beautiful. One of the other main factors in deciding the winner of Album of the Year is, of course, if the album is good, and beyond that, what the album contributes to the landscape of music as a whole. The first of these questions is very easily answered with a resounding YES. Ocean Blvd is a stunning display not just of Lana’s vocals, but also of a full realization of the aesthetic she’s been weaving into her music and persona for her entire career. It’s Americana, but it is developed and personal, and it demonstrates a growth in her character and style. Of course, an album can be wonderful without having maturity, but to see such wisdom and reflectiveness from Lana is refreshing and a significant improvement (to be clear, I still immensely enjoyed her work before). Many of the songs on this album feel less like music and more like sung poetry, with ballads like “Margaret” that offer a take on a relationship that isn’t riddled with the heated passion of most love songs, and embittered reflections like “A&W” creating a narrative of self-discovery and personal growth that manages to be both joyful and incredibly depressing.
The second question is a bit trickier to answer. There have been other albums that deal with the same themes and have a similar poetic style. Lana didn’t reinvent the wheel with Ocean Blvd. But what I think this album contributes to the music industry goes back to what I said earlier about Lana’s critical reception. Lana’s work has always had a distinct sound, and her vocals are quite unique from most artists in the industry today. At least to me, she has never felt like a knockoff of someone else, especially not anything from this time period. The problem was that it seemed unclear exactly what was being added with her perspective. The Pitchfork reviewer I cited earlier hit the nail on the head when she wrote that “The ultimate disappointment of Born to Die, then, is how out of touch it feels not just with the world around it, but with the simple business of human emotion.”
Simply put, Lana’s music was so consumed by “America/California/Beaches/Money/Bad Boys/Summer” that there wasn’t any room for the person communicating those themes -- Lana Del Rey. Whether or not her persona was intentionally superficial is up for debate, but the effect was that much of her early work didn’t really say anything new beyond restating an aesthetic. However, in the past five years Lana has dug deeper, adding pieces of herself to each album and thus bringing more and more authenticity into her work. When her songs are in the first person, it now really feels like she’s singing about herself, and that she’s actually lived the “forever wild” life, as opposed to just pretending to. Ocean Blvd is the masterful culmination of this progression -- it perfectly connects Lana Del Rey the person with Lana Del Rey the persona. The record finally conveys who Lana is, and what she has been contributing to music all these years. It’s as though she has reintroduced herself to us. She no longer seems like a vessel for her aesthetic, but rather, a creator of it. When you consider that, it becomes very clear what Ocean Blvd’s impact on pop culture and music has been -- the impact is Lana.
Realistically speaking, I think Lana only has a slim chance of winning AotY. If I had to guess, I think the top contenders are Taylor Swift’s Midnights, SZA’s SOS, and boygenius’ The Record. Those three albums have seen a lot of popularity, critical acclaim, and have generally had some major part to play in music this year. Additionally, Lana was nominated in five other categories this year, and she’s only been nominated six times before that in her entire career. My best guess is that she will win in another category besides AotY, possibly Song of the Year for “A&W” or Best Alternative Music Album. After over a decade of being snubbed at the Grammys, dismissed by critics, and generally overlooked despite her successes, I think Lana has finally hit the sweet spot of her career, and there’s no way she could justifiably go home on February 4th without an award.
Later: Well. I was wrong. Once again, Lana Del Rey walked home with exactly zero golden gramophones at The Grammys, and Album of the Year went to Taylor Swift’s Midnights. I’m an avid Swiftie, and I do think that Taylor’s impact this year deserves to be recognized. But it seemed even Taylor felt like Lana had been snubbed, as she brought her on stage to accept the award (Lana had contributed vocals to Midnights, but it seemed she initially had no intentions of going up with Taylor) and commented on her legacy and contributions to the music industry. It absolutely baffles me how out of touch the Academy is. Year after year, they somehow always choose the most popular choice over the best one, or a contrarian choice because the best one is too popular, and yet they always get it wrong. Not only was Midnights under no circumstances the best album this year, but giving it the award is going to bring even more unfounded hate on Taylor, and it isn’t her fault. The Academy refuses to take Lana seriously, even when she has shown such considerable growth from the shortcomings of her early career, and even when the influence that she’s had on the music industry is astronomically higher than most artists can ever dream to achieve. If anything, this only continues to prove how irrelevant The Grammys are -- of any major award for arts and entertainment, from Oscar to Tony to Golden Globe to Emmy, The Grammys consistently provide the least valuable metric of quality. I’d watch a movie because it won an Oscar, but I’d never listen to an album just because it won a Grammy. But regardless, I am happy for Taylor Swift, and although Lana deserves better, she has proven that she doesn’t need a Grammy to succeed in making brilliant music.