Lana Del Rey is all about wrong combinations: sunset dreams and dirty water, Mexican-American braids and a wetsuit, hip-hop flow and torch song feeling, conventional feminine submissiveness and post-feminist self-possession. Cognitive dissonance is the essence of her art, the way she builds her dream logic. Satin slips, Freudian slips: Throughout her tenure as a pop star, Lana has pursued revelations about how desire disassembles and recombines elements of a woman's personality. "Heaven is a place on earth with you," she whispered in her first hit, 2011's "Video Games." She sang it just the way you do a line from a song that pops into your head unbidden, wondering if you're quoting your favorite current pop star or the one your mom loved in the '80s or something some guy said back in the '60s to a girl trying to be his perfect date. The sentiment is soaked in banality, but also in the perfume of all those other girls. "Tell me all the things you want to do," Lana continues. "I hear that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?" And so a dream of romantic fulfillment slipped into self-negation, the way it has since time immemorial in the scripts that young women learn from those songs and from movies, their moms, other girls and the boys who benefit. The tone of her voice as she uttered these words was forever after labeled "sad," but was really something different. My mom would have called it "needy"; today, more common descriptions are "disempowered," "self-sabotaging," "unwoke." "Women hated me," Del Rey told writer Alex Frank in 2017. "I know why. It's because there were things I was saying that either they just couldn't connect to or were maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a vulnerable place."