A New Americana

Musing on the Digital Western Frontier

I recently visited Japan for the first time and frequented many vintage clothing stores during my stay, many of which were ironically adorned with unmistakably American decor. Amid racks of J. Crew, Eddie Bauer, and Ralph Lauren, retro ad images of cowboys wrangling cattle graced the walls. Musty flannels and saddles filled shelves. Crewnecks displaying the names of mid-Atlantic and Southern universities were folded neatly, well-preserved from the mid-century. U.S. Air Force jackets, popular today for their flattering cropped fit, were quite glaring on the racks, as well as buttons and patches advertising brands as unequivocally American as Mobil and The Home Depot. My eyes popped out of my skull slightly upon seeing a Confederate flag keychain hang innocuously near a cash register, a sight not to be seen in any of America’s cosmopolitan hubs. This was all quite surprising, especially considering the violent history between America and Japan. Though I knew, of course, certain elements (like the Confederate flag) were surely taken out of context. Shoppers browsed casually and with great interest. The clerk smiled kindly in his respective flannel and bronze belt.

It’s popular to trash-talk America for being without culture. But at a little over 200 years old, what the country lacks in age, it certainly makes up in influence - even in tandem with the brutality of its past and present, and perhaps as a result of it. The nation merely appears to be descriptionless because of its ubiquity - American culture sits comfortably in its unmarkedness. It contains nothing because it exists everywhere.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The image of a pristine, untouched American West - ripe for pillaging and exploring - has long punctured the imaginations of Americans and non-Americans alike. Western films incidentally ascended in popularity while the United States underwent an industrial revolution at the close of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth. Further alienated from God’s Green Earth, rugged, all-American cowboy protagonists connected American viewers back to the virtues that helped justify their Western conquests to begin with, namely adventure, nature, and committing riskful acts in the name of good-doing, restoring justice, and spreading their faith. 

For The Atlantic, Michael Agresta similarly writes that Americans have long relied on Westerns “to teach us history and reflect our current politics and our place in the world.” Agresta also suggests that global interest in Westerns developed because of the genre’s ability to “explore thorny issues of American history and character,” specifically through a more detached, fictional lens. Western films often epitomized the American dream in a way that influences Americans to this day, cementing that the threat to good Christian values is an economic system rigged for the rich, or individual evil-doers overcome with Wrath, Pride, Greed, etc. 

Westerns not only told the world what America is but showed them, never shying from adopting dramatic flair. As time bled into the mid-century, the American Western became a product of cultural exchange, interpreted and reinterpreted in various forms, namely as the “Spaghetti Western” across Europe. Denim jeans - a cowboy staple, a clean encapsulation of American toughness and individualism - and patchwork garments were later elevated by Japanese brands like Momotaro Jeans and Kapital. Just as America absorbed other cultures, the nation offered its own symbolic exports. Exports that have only further permeated the world via the internet.

When I think of “Americana” today, I think of cowboys and Campbell’s soup cans. Of cherry pies baked by Betty Draper-types, cooling in window sills for corn-fed husbands. I also, incidentally, think of violence. And of veneers. Of toothy smiles lacquered with layers of grease. And in true Gen Z fashion, I always arrive at Lana Del Rey.

Still from Lana del Rey’s Ride (2012) music video

Aside from her talents as a singer and songwriter, Lana’s appeal as an aesthetic commodity has largely been driven by her ability to subvert reference. Much like an Industrial-era Western, Lana thrives off evoking the images of an idealized America - a red-lipped, old-money heir, a runaway riding through the Southwest, or a Coney Island princess. However, what makes her references especially evocative is their ability to simultaneously romanticize the West, while flashing glimpses of its underbelly. Alongside the polished society woman and wide open spaces, we’re given peaks at the unglamorous: greasy bikers, drug abuse, and the plights of Other Woman-ism. Lana’s America is a blend of what we want it to be and what it is.

Nonetheless, following her release of Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019, Lana’s aesthetic preferences have slinked closer to the aforementioned underbelly, particularly on Chemtrails over the Country Club (2021) and Blue Banisters (2021). She assumes a simpler American identity - a waitress in a white dress, an Oklahoman girl waiting for her distant paramour to return to help her paint her banisters for spring. Beer, John Deere, and cornfields - less classically romantic icons, to me at least. In many ways, this identity has also become more lived than performed.

Despite her material success, Lana has often been found, on her “days off,” sporting plain, TJ Maxx-coded ensembles, dating law enforcement types, and jokingly dressing as an employee at her favorite Waffle House. Describing something as “so Lana Del Rey vinyl” has since become a way of labeling these apropos, liminal, Edward Hopper-esque American images. Shopping at the mall. Smoking a cigarette outside a gas station. Midnight dinner at a Denny’s. Figures like Lana, and even more so, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, and the extremely talented Ethel Cain are often propped up as symbols of this grungier, “realer,” slightly more sinister, and quite a bit more online version of contemporary Americana, particularly by young people.

For The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka has also written about #Americacore on TikTok, a response, in part, to the rampant exoticization of various cultural facets found under hashtags like #Japancore, #kawaiicore, and the like. Produced by non-Americans and Americans alike, “Americancore” makes the mundane seem exotic, centering non-American users sampling common, mass-produced American snacks from chain stores like Walmart. The tag also features a number of montage videos, featuring slideshows of suburbs, football games, hot dogs, and chain superstores - set to the Stranger Things theme - in an attempt to make the banalities of the country appear beautiful. Some fall for the mystique, others are quick to call the facade on the carpet.

In 2022, Ethel Cain - an artist who occupies a twisted House on the Prarie aesthetic and weaves Southern Gothic themes into her music, quite masterfully - told W that she often wears a cross necklace and a T-shirt displaying the American flag, though she’s not fond of either of them. She tells the magazine:

“I just keep them as close to my heart as possible, in my own way of staying above them. I think that’s why I talk so much about it in my art, because it’s easier to get the upper hand: I’m not gonna get rid of you, so I might as well have this power over you.”

Since its birth, Americana has served to idealize. But today online, it seems to reflect more than refract. Stripped of its smoke and lassos, the digital American aesthetic identity is largely a sterile one, made transparent by attempts to romanticize it or expose its rougher edges. It’s the stale lighting in a CVS. A sad hot dog rotating under a 7-11 lightbulb. Eight-lane highways with cars stacked bumper-to-bumper, leaking gas into a once, supposedly, pristine American West.

Like any interpretation, there is inevitably at least a shred of the original found in the copy. The rugged, individualist spirit of original American Westerns is perhaps found in its more grizzly, Noveau iterations. There are feelings of freedom to be reaped from the image of a cowboy galloping across his land, gun in hand, defending his herd. Perhaps the freedom in Lana and Ethel’s America and today’s Americancore lies in the bleak freedom to decay. To succumb to the uniformly produced, consumerist wonders. To swim deeper into promises, delusions, and self-medication. To label the mundanity, and attempt to mark the unmarkable.

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