Editing Lana Del Rey (section)

==Artistic Identity and Themes==

Lana Del Rey's work returns obsessively to a cluster of interrelated themes: the romance and tragedy of the American Dream, the glamour and violence of California mythology, the intersection of desire and self-destruction, feminine melancholy and agency, the seductiveness of the past, and the experience of being young, beautiful, and already aware of impermanence. Her most frequent cultural reference points — [[Marilyn Monroe]], [[James Dean]], [[Elvis Presley]], [[Bruce Springsteen]], [[Jim Morrison]], [[Hollywood]]'s golden age — constitute a coherent mythology of American longing and decay.

Her vocal style — a deep, unhurried contralto capable of both whispered intimacy and sudden dramatic swell — is one of the most immediately recognizable in contemporary music, and has been widely imitated without being successfully replicated. She has spoken about her voice as an instrument she discovered gradually rather than trained formally, and there is in its best deployments a quality of found beauty — something that sounds as though it could not have been manufactured.