Lana Del Rey: a great American poet

The corner parcel of 100 E Ocean Boulevard isn't mythic. It's a little fix of scrubland, rubble and grass, graffitied wall boards, two or three vertebral palms. Round the back, a parking area, black-top blanched and wiped out under the Los Angeles sun, and a steel wall, effectively versatile. It wasn't similar to this all of the time. Worked in 1919, the Jergins Trust Building used to remain on the site, its square-jawed congruity tempered by the cut support points that used to enhance the highest point of its ten stories, straight-upheld against the blue sky. The workplace block was crushed in 1988, notwithstanding the humble endeavors of government authorities to save it - the proprietors guaranteed an inn would be based on the grounds and impeded all endeavors to add it to the legacy register. The Jergins Trust Building exists now just in several filed paper reports, a nearby history blog and the recollections of some more seasoned LA occupants. What's more, that is all there is to it: a blip, an intriguing tale, a piece of mostly secret neighborhood history.

However, there is one remainder of its presence. Behind that unremarkable wall in the parking area is the south access to the Jergins Person on foot Metro. The 181-foot-long passage was worked in 1927 and ran the width of Sea Lane, empowering people on foot to walk securely from the arcade underneath the Jergins Trust Working to the Pike, a now-destroyed amusement park that stuck, bubblegum-on-bottom, to the Long Ocean side coastline. It its prime, an illuminated sign that read "ENTRANCE TO THE BEACH", parasol cheerfully reaching out from the "A" in "beach", enticed walkers down underneath road level, where stalls selling sweets and 50-penny jugs of orange-bloom scent lined the walls to During. The sellers left, gradually, until there were none left by any means, and in 1967 the metro was shut: passages bricked up, bay window buried.

In "Did You Knowa That There's a Tunnel Under Sea Blvd", Lana Del Rey makes the passage an American legend. The melody begins with a breathe out, the sort of breath taken to repress a fit of anxiety, or deflect the beginning of tears. It's the reason her voice, when it shows up, is consistent. "Did You Knowa That There's a Tunnel Under Sea Blvd?" she inquires. "Mosaic roofs, painted tiles on the walls". A rhythms, bearing us constantly back into the past, interminably forward into the present. Violins call to something lost, hopeless, something that won't ever exist. "I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul" she sings. "Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls/When’s it gonna be my turn?… Don’t forget me"

It endlessly constructs, then there is the cosmic explosion. On the off chance that, as Del Rey sings, Harry Nilsson's voice breaks at definitively 2.05 in "Don’t Forget Me", then, at that point, hers breaks at the four-minute imprint. Her voice ascends as she pleads her final “Don’t forget me!/Like the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard”, a vision of pain that sounds like ecstasy. The song circles a central enquiry: the question “did you know?” is seemingly the star that it orbits. But only at the end do we understand that it’s really a black hole – swallowing all questions, all answers, until all that remains is the inescapable gravitational pull of that desperate “Don’t forget me!”. It’s telling that the title contains no question mark. Del Rey always knew that the tunnel – and all of LA, all of America, including herself – was doomed to be forgotten. If, for Jean Baudrillard, LA was the apotheosis of “American reality”, then Del Rey is the city’s greatest poet. She understands that the story of the Jergins Trust Tunnel is part of some greater American story, one of boom and bust, of oil money and land banking and short-sighted capitalism, of pioneer spirit and metropolitan decay. And so she immortalises it, gilds it: spins it into the myth of the United States.