All I wanna do is get high by the beach and watch “High By The Beach,” get high!
I have expressed my appreciation for this song in no uncertain terms, and the video is even better. As with the good Lana Del Rey videos (“National Anthem,” “Born To Die”) she steamrollers through and well past self-parody, landing at an utterly obvious, laughably semiotic, total aesthetic bliss—her imagery so on the nose that it is the nose, as well as likely the coco within it. Let’s just take a quick little walk through.
We start with Lana cooped up in a beach house: just a Santa Monica Rapunzel on quaaludes, in viewed from the sightline of the helicopter that’s watching her, simultaneously dreaming of being even more captive and also of being free.
There’s our drone guy:
Ugh! DRONE GUY! She flops on her bed about it, twirls around in a patch of sun about it. All she wants to do is get high by the beach, DAD!
Powder-blue silk robe trailing behind her on the stained-wood staircase, Lana floats down through the empty white house to the empty white kitchen—empty; white; get it—to stare out the window at the helicopter for the line “Looking at you/ looking at me,” and then somehow, inexplicably, it cuts to a shot of Bobby Finger reading the tabloids for Midweek Madness.