One obvious answer is that Del Rey is “everything straight men idolize about the sultry sex queen tradition of the American Pacific, a sweet sad California golden sunburnt lover wrapped in an American flag who tastes like cigarettes and broken dreams.” Also, it doesn’t hurt that she looks like this: Lana Del Rey in Hollywood California, February 2012 (Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty) An ambiguous ode to youth: the lyrical message is be-young-be-foolish-be-happy but the tone of the vocal coolly indifferent, there’s something noticeably ominous about the music. How you take it probably depends on how old you are, but there’s no arguing with the power of the tune, or the sweet reference to the Beach Boys’ troubled ballad Don’t Worry Baby. 6. Ride (2012) Best Known For: Singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey took the world by storm with her single "Video Games" in 2011. Since then she's built up a body of work that features languid, melancholic tunes and fascinating videos. When it came out, Tropico was lambasted for cultural appropriation. “Dressing up like an entire culture and calling it ‘fashion’ is offensive,” wrote one Jezebel article . “Using another person or culture as an outfit to make your art edgy is in poor taste.” Some fans also feel that while Del Rey’s proximity to Latin culture is cute or touching, she does not necessarily do anything to ‘help’ Latinos in a meaningful way. Speaking to Dazed, Mexican fan Danielle says she is a fan of Lana’s work, but notes that she doesn’t think Del Rey is “in necessarily any solidarity with Latinidad or our culture […] she is in no way an activist trying to uplift Chicano culture.” On the inaugural night of Lana Del Rey’s concert circuit in Mexico, an audience of 65,000 chanted “ ¡Lana, hermana, ya eres Mexicana! ”, or “Lana, our sister – you are now Mexican!”

That heartbreak, those moments of raw honesty that center on herself instead of an identity group, are her appeal. Women want to be her. Men want to be with her. She is the spirit of American possibility, independence, resilience. She is the pin-up singer who is most definitely still a woman in an age when people struggle to define what a woman is.

‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’

saw the arrival of the dark, critically praised Honeymoon. Del Rey has described the album as "a tribute to Los Angeles." She moved to California in 2012 and says it's a place where she's found more musical collaborators than in New York. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and landed at No. 1 in countries like Australia and Ireland. 'Lust for Life' Lana Del Rey at the 2016 Outside Lands Music and Arts festival in San Francisco in 2016. Photograph: C Flanigan/WireImage 11. Mariners Apartment Complex (2018) And that’s absolutely fine. If a woman wants to live a life that, for some, may be seen as traditional, that’s completely her choice, and it’s nobody’s place to say otherwise. However, the point at which it becomes a little more complicated is when abusive notions, much like many women who were forced to take up such roles without the luxury of choice, are exercised under the guise of romanticism. Del Rey’s penchant for glorifying abusive spaces has been widely discussed, and the singer has routinely defended herself, but if we teach more women that being a victim is something to celebrate, doesn’t it perpetuate harm? Lana Del Rey’s favourite song from Honeymoon, apparently because it was “jazzy”. It’s jazzy in the sense that a torch song is jazzy, but – beyond the parched, reverb-heavy guitars that recall Mazzy Star – the most obvious influence is John Barry’s Theme From Midnight Cowboy, echoed in the lovely descending vocal melody. 14. Lust for Life (ft the Weeknd) (2014) Early the following year, it was revealed that Radiohead asked for some of the publishing rights to Del Rey's "Get Free" due to similarities to their hit song "Creep."

Many who think of her almost immediately think of the American flag next. On top of that, she’s been closely associated with Republican values for a long time, even once being accused of voting for Donald Trump. She stands as a charming yet confidently assertive homage to an era when aspirations leaned towards meritocracy and progressed into triumph rather than conceding to withdrawal. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. As a teenager in the small community of Lake Placid, Del Rey started drinking heavily. She'd attended Catholic school, but her parents sent her to Kent School, a boarding school in Connecticut, because of her drinking. A cynic might suggest that, from its title to its lyrics (“24/7 Sylvia Plath”, “spilling my guts with the Bowery bums is the only love I’ve ever known”), this is a song that teeters on the verge of self-parody. But it’s hard to be cynical while it’s playing – just a piano and voice, it’s the model of elegant simplicity. 12. National Anthem (2012)At least, that’s what I thought, until listening to the song with my fifteen-year-old, who informed me that Del Rey had a boyfriend who got engaged to another woman while they were together. Alas, that story seems to be one of those too perfect internet rumors, easily rebutted by the fact that the couple wasn’t especially camera shy. On the other hand, she did put up only one billboard for Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel. It was in the former lover’s hometown — so maybe Reddit posters had a point and she’s speaking for herself rather than a group, which would be normal for the singer. Many diasporic Mexicans also regard Lana as the Anglophone heir to the cultural tradition of tragic, elder female singers – colloquially dubbed “señora music”. In señora music, outsidership features as a gendered position: one of underappreciation and martyrdom. TikTok often compares Del Rey to Jenni Rivera , a Long Beach-bred Mexican-American singer, while Danielle suggests that she’s also reminiscent of Amanda Miguel and Jeanette. “This is the music introduced to us by our parents,” she says, describing it as exploring “dramatic vulnerability and unhinged emotional release”. Del Rey’s lyrics – an alchemy of love, duty, desire and neglect – clearly chime with this. As Kimberly, another Mexican fan, says: “She suffers in her relationships, [and that parallels] the sort of imbalanced relationships dynamics we see play out at home.” Before Del Rey adopted the professional moniker of Lana Del Rey, she made an album titled Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant (spelling Ray with an "a," not an "e"). It came out in 2010, but the digital release was only available for a couple of months. 'Born to Die'

As it happens when it comes to my amazing friends and this cover, yes, there are people of color on this record's picture and that's all I'll say about that," she wrote. "We are all a beautiful mix of everything - some more than others, which is visible and celebrated in everything I do."

To her ultra-devoted fans, she is the patron saint of the misunderstood. But along with forging a deep personal connection with her core audience, Del Rey’s baroque, retro-pop style, intense intimacy, and unapologetically honest lyrics have changed the sound of pop music in the past decade. This has become an entire subculture in itself, with many on social media platforms like TikTok showing off their ‘Lolita aesthetics’ to the familiar sounds of Del Rey hits. Society has always had paedophilic undertones, but this movement has become a powerful contributor to its reign. What’s more, Hollywood has washed over Nabokov’s initial sentiment, rendering it lost in a mosaic of visually pleasing images, catering to a cultural infatuation with young girls. To honor the release of the singer’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, we’ve ranked her 50 best songs, from modern standards to deep cuts to an unreleased gem we can’t get out of our heads. Now, when people ask me those questions, I feel a little differently…. When you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like that, it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women.”