‘A&W’: Lana Del Rey’s rawest song yet
‘A&W’ is the absolute standout of Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Del Rey is so keenly self-aware as a songwriter that when she ushers in new eras and albums, she takes the time to exorcise old ghosts, revisiting old motifs but emerging reinvented.
‘A&W’ is littered with old hallmarks of her aesthetic, most pointedly in the songs name, either meaning American whore or a nod to A&W Root Beer, the perfect balance of her unflinching take on female sexuality and a career-long preoccupation with distinctly American tokens of consumerism (see also: Born to Die: The Paradise Edition’s ‘Cola’, and ‘Diet Mountain Dew’).
Co-produced with Jack Antonoff, the song stars slow and morose, a resigned sadness about her mother clouding the opening: “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine, I haven’t seen my mother in a long, long time.” Her fraught relationship with her mother has bled into her writing before, like on 2021’s ‘Black Bathing Suit’, when she declared: “I’m not friends with my mother but still love my dad.”
In a tongue-in-cheek pivot for someone constantly hounded by accusations of daddy issues, she effectively lets female figures fill the boots of the absentee fathers she used to sing about. She leverages that same painful relationship dynamic to taunt her lover in the song’s closing line: “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fucking up big time.”
She gives matriarchs a lot of power on ‘A&W’, in a twist that feels fresh and daring after drawing constant criticism for her penchant for older men. In her infamous ‘A Question For Culture’ post, she begged audiences to let her “go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money – or whatever I want – without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorizing abuse??????”.
But on ‘A&W’, trysts with married men aren’t thrilling – “Sneaks out the back door to talk to me, I’m invisible, I’m invisible, look how you hold me” – but loveless and empty – “Ended up, we fuck on the hotel floor, it’s not about having someone to love me anymore.” On this track, the abusive relationships clung to in Born To Die and Ultraviolence have lost their lustre all on their own, a realization that feels like a poetic coming of age for Del Rey.
There’s a sense of fragmentation on ‘A&W,’ which is split into two parts: ‘American Whore’ and ‘Jimmy’. The first portion is melodic, with light strings and piano backing her romantic resignment: “Call him up, he comes over again – yeah, I know I’m over my head.”
This takes a sharp turn around the four-minute mark. The second half of ‘A&W’ is trappy, electronic and frenzied. Del Rey interpolates ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop’ by Little Anthony & The Imperials, a 50s soul track with a seedier tone that speaks to the manipulative relationship she’s suffering through.
It features that same resignment to loveless relationships but seems like a moment of self-acceptance at the same time, sealing her own fate with: “I don’t care, baby, I already lost my mind.”
