“A&W”: It’s Still Lana

Catherine Gilligan Contributor

Lana Del Rey has embodied innumerable personas throughout her career: troubled starlet, trailer park princess, old money debutante, tormented mistress. Needless to say, she’s been around the block. It’s easy to imagine a version of Lana in which she’s still clinging to the vulnerable nympho bit; Lolita pushing forty, if you will. Instead, it seems as if she has managed the opposite; her latest single, “A&W,” showcases a refreshingly mature, if jaded side of the pop princess as she delivers the ballad of the keenly self-aware side piece.

One thing Lana is often maligned for is her reliance on cliches — the various “female archetypes” she personifies, her cloying Old-Hollywood sound, her middlebrow cultural reference points. While none of these critiques are wrong, per se, I think they minimize just how weird a lot of her songwriting actually is. Her maximalist approach to lyricism and hyper specific anecdotes (Fuck you Kevin!) can be as rich and compelling as they are off-putting and heavyhanded.

“A&W” features a cleaner, but equally engrossing, more “grown up” version of the same word salad Lana has been honing since “Maybe we could go to Coney Island/Maybe I could sing the national anthem/ Buy a white sweater for the last white day of the summer/ Buy my purple wig for my mermaid video.” The seven-minute track contains a host of dark, funny and bizarre lines. Among them: “Called up one drunk, called up another/ Forensic Files wasn’t on”; “Did you know a singer can still be/ Looking like a sidepiece at thirtythree?”; and naturally, the bril liant hook, “It’s not about havin’ someone to love me anymore/ This is the experience of bein’ an American whore.” Her frankly corny air of melodrama, coupled with the track’s many excruci atingly earnest lyrics make for something uniquely tongue in cheek — the gallows humor of a grown woman scorned.

Of course, I’d be remiss not to mention the real star of “A&W,” which is none other than its fi nal three minutes. After nearly four years of little but saccharine tracks about wanting to love her police lieutenant fiancée “like a woman,” Lana has finally re leased something fun for the girls! Interpolating Little Antho ny and the Imperials’ “Shimmy Shimmy Ko- Ko Bop,” the sec ond half of the track is an upbeat electropop dance party, perfectly punctuated with the marvelously snide “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fucking up big time.”

So say what you will about Ms. Mesh Mask, Lana “Question for the Culture” Del Rey, but over a decade after her commercial de but, she seems to just get better with age.