(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Alamy)
Thu 1 January 2026 21:30, UK
In 2025, music saw the return of the diss track.
Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ put music back into the gossip columns, and proved that for better or worse, the subtle art of slagging someone off seems to boost record sales. Perhaps more importantly, though, it was an expertly crafted song that not only had a loud bark, but an intensely powerful bite, and so it got us wondering at Far Out, is a little rivalry all that bad?
Sure, hearing a good old-fashioned love song is great, but there’s no denying that rage, anger, and outright hate are some of life’s most powerful emotions and rightly make for great music. Paul McCartney and John Lennon proved that with ‘Too Many People’ and ‘How Do You Sleep?’, while 1990s hip-hop undoubtedly took it too far outside of the studio, but had outstanding moments of recorded rage inside it.
So revelling in my newfound enthusiasm for a diss track, I began scouring the record collection for what might be the next great version of one and found what might just be the most bizarre of all time: Lana Del Rey and The Beach Boys.
Now, being the songwriter she is, it comes as no surprise that Del Rey positions herself as a Beach Boys fan. The careful consideration of a record like Pet Sounds would undoubtedly have had an effect on Del Rey’s ability to pen a ballad. So like many, she would have winced at the sharp U-turn the band would have taken in 1988 upon the release of ‘Kokomo’.
The song was rightly considered a dud for the West Coast band, ditching any sense of arrangement nuance to instead write a cheesy and lyrically vapid number that baselessly showcases their vocals. It very much sounded like the ghost of the band we once knew in the mid-1960s, and the track was rightly criticised.
Five years before the release of the song, Dennis Wilson had sadly passed away, and so many remarked on ‘Kokomo’ as somewhat of a soundtrack to this new, underwhelming chapter of the band that existed in the wake of Wilson’s death. At least Del Rey certainly did, singing “I miss the bar where The Beach Boys would go / Dennis’ last stop before Kokomo” on her 2019 track ‘The greatest’.
When you analyse the line within the wider context of the song, it becomes clear that the band are simply caught in the crossfire of a wider, more pointed argument. The entire piece sees Del Rey pining for a time when she lived through a happy relationship. Reminiscing on better times, she uses The Beach Boys’ underwhelming sonic change to describe a moment when something has flipped, and the greatness that once existed can no longer be salvaged.
But it’s not just The Beach Boys that were used to make this point. Pop culture references are pulled from all angles, be it the Los Angeles wildfires, Kanye West’s political activism or the simple idea of David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’, Del Rey is commenting on a time where romance has made way for dystopia.
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