A&W, also known as “American Whore” by Lana Del Rey is one of my favorite songs by her, even though it’s incredibly dark and heartbreaking.

This is a song that I truly do believe deserves a music video, and if it had gotten a music video, I think it would’ve been considered for a Grammy Award.

This is a song that absolutely, 100% deserved visuals, and to this day, I find it extremely unfortunate that it never got them.

I was wondering how late is too late when it comes to putting out a music video, since this song was released on Valentine’s Day in 2023 and a lot of time has passed.

I’m still not ready to make peace with the idea that a music video will never happen.

In the meantime, I want to dive in with an analysis of the lyrics.

A&W has been described as a seven-minute rant of a song narrating Lana’s anecdotal life scenarios, starting from the innocence of her childhood through some of the most toxic moments in her adulthood.

I want to start by diving into verse one’s opening line where she says, “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine.” A child doing cartwheels represents how carefree and innocent they feel in their youth before they’ve faced anything truly traumatic or potentially even abusive.

After that, she says, “I haven’t seen my mother in a long, long time.” Over the years, many reports of Lana’s strained relationship with her mother have come to the surface, including the time Lana said, “My father never stepped in when his wife would rage at me, so I ended up awkward, but sweet,” in her 2021 song Wildflower Wildfire.

That line always stood out to me because Lana didn’t even call her mother her mother in that line. She said it was her father’s wife, which creates a lot of energetic distance between her and her mother.

So in A&W, when she says, “I haven’t seen my mother in a long, long time,” it’s as if she’s describing the emotional abandonment she feels toward her mother and the disdain she feels for being put in a position to navigate life as a woman without a soft, loving, and accepting mother figure.

After that, Lana seemingly shuts down the narrative that she ever cared about what haters had to say about her appearance. She says, “I mean, look at me. Look at the length of my hair and my face, the shape of my body. Do you really think I give a damn what I do after years of just hearing them talking?”

As a celebrity, Lana has always been put on the chopping block in the media, heavily scrutinized for every little detail, from her hair to her face to the shape of her body. This line was her way of saying that she’ll continue operating as she sees fit regardless of what people have to say.

Skipping down to the chorus, Lana sings, “Call him up, come into my bedroom, ended up fucking on the hotel floor. It’s not about having someone to love me anymore. This is the experience of being an American whore.”

These words really emotionally impacted me because, as a woman, craving the feeling of love that is passionate and mutual has been so heavily normalized, starting from a young age. Little girls are taught to seek their happily ever after with a soulmate thanks to all the fairytale movies we grew up with. In these words, it sounds like Lana is making peace with the fact that she may never be truly loved beyond what she can offer sexually in the bedroom.

She describes them hooking up on the hotel floor, which means they didn’t even make it to the bed, which suggests it was a passion-filled moment that was hot and heavy. But it wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t gentle or loving enough to make it onto the actual bed.

And in Lana’s song Ride, she said something very profound in the monologue that sort of goes hand-in-hand with this statement when she said, “I was born to be the other woman who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone.”

Knowing you’re having wild and casual sex with someone who doesn’t really love you and only sees you as a whore is pretty depressing, but the lyrics are an indication that she’s doing her best to make peace with it.

In the second half of verse two, Lana says, “I’m a princess, I’m divisive. Ask me why, why, why am I like this? Maybe I’m just kinda like this. I don’t know, maybe I’m just like this.”

What I took from those lyrics is that she’s questioning how she’s viewed by the men she has romantic relationships with. Some of them see her as a princess, while others see her as divisive. If they were to ever ask her why she is the way she is, she doesn’t really have an answer.

But after living so many years of her life in the spotlight, being scrutinized by the media and having her heartbreaks heavily analyzed by the masses, it makes sense that some would see her as divisive, especially those who are looking for a reason to pick her apart.

The rest of us who view her as a princess are more understanding of what she’s gone through, and we have a well of patience that will never dry up for her.

In verse three, Lana takes things to an extreme level, shedding a light on the prevalence of rape culture in today’s society and the fact that victims are constantly blamed and shamed. Even though that’s extremely wrong. She asks, “If I told you that I was raped, do you really think anybody would think I didn’t ask for it? I didn’t ask for it. I won’t testify, I already fucked up my story.”

In other words, unless a woman is seen as the perfect victim, it seems that she’s not really taken seriously when she reports that she’s been violated. Perfect victims are those who are extremely innocent, women who are still virgins, women who were completely sober at the time of an attack, women who were dressed modestly, etc.

If you’re not considered a perfect victim because you were under the influence or you were dressed in a more provocative way, then you’re generally not taken seriously as a victim. This section of Lana’s song is extremely heartbreaking for women everywhere because no one should have to be considered a perfect victim in order to have their voice heard.

After that, she says, “Did you know a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?” When I heard this line, it made me do the math on who Lana was romantically involved with when she was 33 years old.

She was dating G-Eazy in 2017 when she was 32, and then she started dating Sean Larkin in 2019 when she was 34. So when she was 33 years old, it was a sweet spot right between her relationships with G-Eazy and Sean Larkin. Interestingly enough, there’s a chance Lana felt like a glorified side piece while dealing with G-Eazy, since he rebounded past their relationship with Halsey so rapidly.

He and Lana were seen spending time together for months starting in April 2017, and then suddenly his collaboration with Halsey hit the radio in the summer of that year. The fact that he moved on with such quickness could have possibly left her feeling like a side piece he abandoned and turned his back on without much thought. As a reminder though, we don’t exactly know why Lana and G-Eazy broke up, and there’s a chance she was the one who ended things.

Then there’s her relationship with Sean, where we know he treated her like a side piece because she ad-libbed lyrics to her song Chemtrails Over the Country Club during a live performance, revealing that they were still very much involved when he married his current wife, Carrie Cadeux.

Lana ad-libbed lyrics to Chemtrails Over the Country Club in 2023, singing, “He was born in December and I’m born in June. He was born in December and he got married while we were still together. Sometimes I wonder what his wife would think if she knew that I didn’t know anything. He got married while we were in couples therapy together.”

For more context, Lana was born on June 21, 1985, and Sean was born on December 7, 1973. According to those lyrics, Sean treated Lana like a side piece, and she dives into that concept even further when she sings, “Puts the shower on while he calls me. Slips out the back door to talk to me. I’m invisible, look how you hold me.”

The man she’s singing about had to call her privately, turning the sound of the shower on to keep their call a secret from the main woman in his life. She describes him sneaking out the back door to talk to her because she’s nothing more than a side piece to him.

And then she describes herself as feeling invisible to him as he holds her. Being a side piece, being a mistress, being the woman who isn’t his first choice sounds incredibly heartbreaking and lonely. It goes hand-in-hand with the title of the song, “American Whore.”

After that, Lana returns to the chorus, where she repeats that it’s not about having someone to love her anymore, it’s the experience of being an American whore. She repeats it a couple of times as if she’s self-soothing and consoling herself with the reality that being loved may simply never be in the cards for her. Being seen as a lovable woman who’s worthy of coming in first place for someone just doesn’t feel attainable to her in that part of the song.

The end of the song changes pace and gets super repetitive in a legendary way, with Lana singing about Jimmy hitting her up just to get high together, which also goes hand-in-hand with being seen as an American whore. If someone only calls you up to dabble in illegal substances together, they don’t see you as someone super valuable or someone they want to love and protect.

They see you as a good time, a fun time, and not someone who will be around for a long time. It’s unclear who Jimmy is, but we do know that Lana sang about an abusive romantic partner named Jim in her song Ultraviolence when she sang, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss.”

This song is a lyrical masterpiece by Lana, and it’s one of my favorite songs, despite the darkness of it. And for any woman who’s felt used and thrown away by men throughout her life, these lyrics really hit home and deeply resonate. Feeling used by men is one of the most damaging experiences a woman can go through, and the sad part is that many women start going through these experiences at a super young age because women who are seeking love and acceptance often find themselves in bad situations where they’re vulnerable and taken advantage of.

I remember the moment Jack Antonoff first announced this song on Instagram back in December 2022, claiming it was his favorite song he ever did with Lana as part of her Ocean Boulevard album.

They did an excellent job with intense storytelling in A&W, so I will always have a lot of love and respect for this song. Like I said before, this song hits home for any woman who’s ever felt used and abused by men.

It’s not just an anthem for OF models, escorts, or people who are super promiscuous. Anyone who’s been vulnerable with the wrong person can understand the depth and pain of what Lana describes in this song.