Lana has never been known as the wokest of the lot. In between her glamorization of domestic violence, lack of intersectionality and sorority at addressing black female musicians, and her out of touch pandemic face masks, she has been called up for accountability quite a few times. So A&W is far from being a woke song, and yet, it is possibly one of the harshest art representations of rape culture and patriarcal culture that have ever been created. But it's possibly that lack of wokeness what makes the song even more powerful: it's not about victimization or a reclamation of power, it is a complex self-portrait of a woman in all her shades. There's mentions to her estranged relationship with her mother, self introspection while watching an indie teens film, and cover up lies for living in a cheap motel. But above all, there's a lot of sex going on, whether it is with random hook-ups or with a married man who tries hard to hide his affair; and she owns it, she reclaims being, to the eyes of patriarcal society, an "American whore" (A&W, which in Lana's Americana mythology also stands for a fast food chain famous for its root beer).

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"Look at the length of my hair, the shape of my body", she demands so we can all acknowledge that her looks have been a factor in our perceptions of her since the beginning. She's aware, she has had to put with that misogyny for all of her life. But when she goes back to those lines in the second verse, they have an even deeper meaning "If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn't ask for it?".She has never been so confrontational. But the greatness of the track goes beyond how powerful it's her poetry, but also on how she structured as an ever evolving song, there's a clear narrative in the instrumentation, starting as a folk ballad, then subtly adding guitar riffs, but then doing a clear break introducing deranged dark synths so we know what we're actually facing: a descent to hell. If the first part is a melancholic afternoon of loneliness in a hotel room thinking about her past and present, then she clears the tears and puts on the make up and the high heels. Over some trap beats, she almost raps like in her Born to Die era about a night of excesses with a random guy. After all we've heard, we know it's an empty night out, and that "Jimmy" and his "cocoa-puffs" are just the flavor of the night to fill the existencial void. This is a work of an artist at the height of her creative powers, and she might have just crossed the line to become the clear best songwriter in her generation.