i have a new victory song

why lana del rey's "white dress" captures the sensation of success

White Dress by Lana Del Rey has become my new victory song. For five plus years, this role was fulfilled by Nicki Minaj’s Moment 4 Life. When a dream-manifest traveled my way, I’d tap open my Spotify app and play the song out of my phone speaker almost immediately. “I fly with the stars in the skies… I am no longer trying to survive…”. I committed to this ritual because I noticed that often, when good news came my way, it also came with a tangle of complex emotions that made it hard to celebrate. I wanted an easy way to express the clear “thank you” suffocated under layers of fear and anticipation. Sometimes we get exactly what we want, but it lands heavy in our hands. A victory song is an accessible way to honor something as it arrives.

Moment 4 Life was my chosen prayer up until recently. Winning moments began to no longer feel like a wave of redemption or overcoming (the sentiments of Moment 4 Life), but more so a psychedelic yet calm processing of time, emotions, and the evasive definition of success. 

I am a firm believer that we cycle through about 5-10 of the same energetic states throughout our lives, from birth to death. The 100s upon 1,000s of words we can use to describe these states that we call “emotions” (angry, sad, in-love, excited, etc) make us feel as if there are far more, or that we are constantly discovering new ones.

Recently, upon reflection, I noticed that the euphoric satisfaction I felt leaving my retail job to work for myself full-time at 24 was no different than the colossal rush I experienced when I got my first minimum-wage-paying retail job at age 18. I observed this same comparison in 2020, when in the middle of the pandemic, I found myself going on lengthy 4 to 6 mile fast-walks with music blaring in over-ear headphones. More often than not, by mile two, I had acquired an uplifting workout high that temporarily diminished all of my worries. I noticed that this high, too, was no different than the one acquired from milestones far more “worthy” of the sensation.

How is it that I could receive the same heaven-on-earth rush from moving my body for three miles during a global terror as I did from seeing my book propped up for sale at The Strand in New York City?

My theory, once again, is that we’ve already felt everything we could feel, and the only thing that fools us into believing that “bigger moments” create “greater satisfaction” is the changing physical backdrop, as well as our constant cycling from bad feelings-to-good feelings, allowing every high that follows a low to feel like a brand new, glorious gesture in that moment. 

How is this relevant to White Dress? Well, White Dress is essentially Lana Del Rey paying homage to her pre-fame identity as a waitress, uplifting this past life of hers to a standard greater than her success and fame now, claiming she was “better off” then. This song is most obviously the classic tale of the famous woman longing for normalcy, but to me, it also captures the theory above. Lana was filled with empowerment and grace and flirtatious abundance during that waitressing period, claiming it “made her feel like a god”. The memory was enough for her to conjure an immense nostalgia over ten years later. But, those big feelings (energetic states) being recalled from the past are identical to those she has expressed during major milestones in her career (shared in other songs, such as “Radio”).

Some days of my time working retail - especially when I worked in the museum bookstore - were absolutely divine. Maybe I put together an outfit I really loved, maybe I got to be in control of the playlist that day, or maybe it was one of those special press Mondays where floods of art world A-listers were passing through and my entire job was to just be a pleasant, polite shopkeeper to high-profile entities that I had read about for years. I remember that high so well. I recall the way it would hit me when I would close the shop alone, sometimes to the point of tears. Maybe it was pride, or joy, or love, or excitement, or gratitude - but as I said, the words we have for emotions are just that; words. Beyond descriptors, it was the same brought-to-tears energetic state that I felt in hotel rooms this past year, for “reasons grander” than simply having a stimulating day at your $15/hr bookstore job. The exact same. I have even, multiple times, called my time at the museum bookstore, “as good as it gets”.

White Dress encapsulates this feeling for me. It’s a pre-fame longing song, yes, but it’s also a recognition of that expansive emotion of pure glory that can be felt in the mundane. The way the world will tell you that true satisfaction comes when you finally get the house, and the car, and the family, but in reality… it can very well creep up on you during a 3-mile-walk or waitressing shift.

White Dress transcends time - as I listen to it, I feel I am passing through victories of the past, the present, and potentialities for the future. The way that any moment, minute or outstanding, one day, will be worthy of that potent nostalgia, worthy of a song sung so passionately as White Dress is.

As a victory song, it compliments how I’ve felt myself receive moments of success this past year. Not a shiny new token of redemption, but a reminder that I have always felt victory, in every single season of my life. I felt victories then and I will feel them now. The backdrops will change at a rapid rate, and the losses in between will lift these victories so high that I will be lead to believe that they exist on the greater end of some imaginary scale. But this isn’t so. The energetic sensation that we have labeled “success” or “victory” is an ever-flowing well, it is always with us, and it will never cease to offer its sweeping embrace on all ends of a glorious spectrum.