I watched the lights of the Manhattan skyline whizz past me through the car window, all of the buildings peaking over trees and a brick wall, serving as a backdrop for the 66th Street transverse. It was late, and I was coming home about an hour past my curfew. The battery on my phone was slowly dwindling down, and I hoped there was at least enough left for the music to get me to my front door.

That sultry voice filled my ears like the buildings filled the sky, the melody echoing around the walls of my mind, the lyrics seeping their way into the blood flow of my brain. The song was “Video Games,” and the singer was Lana Del Rey.

Not only does Lana accompany me in humid summer air on late-night drives home, but she is with me on cold winter school days, on the 6 Train and sometimes the Q, on a walk through the rain in Central Park, or on a bench by the East River, studying oncoming storm clouds. Wherever I am, Lana is too. Her romantic and wistful lyrics are what my thoughts would sound like if they had a melody. And in return for her giving me the soundtrack to my life, I offer a declaration back - naturally, in the words of her own musical refrain: “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you, everything I do.”

So, I feel it in my heart when people criticize Lana, almost like a personal slight. And to my dismay, she’s faced quite a bit of criticism. In fact, controversy seems to follow her around.

Lana Del Rey’s debut album, Born to Die set the stage for who she would be as an artist. From the start, she seemed to capture the essence of hip hop combined with a gritty, old Hollywood brand of American imagery - from sleazy Coney Island love stories…to L.A. parties in lipstick and heels (“I’ve got my red dress on tonight, dancing in the dark, in the pale moonlight”). But criticism came early too, with her second album in 2014, Ultraviolence: Some branded her as “anti-feminist,” pointing to her throwback, 1940s pin-up sexuality, her descriptions of abusive relationships, and what they saw as weakness within her constant, palpable sadness.

Music writers (and not to mention my cynical friends) are quick to endorse this claim. I’ve sat at the cafeteria table during our school lunch period many times, and listened to my classmates attack Lana as anti-feminist. Admittedly, Lana herself has claimed in the past that “feminism doesn’t interest me,” but not every artist will tell you bluntly what’s on their mind; even Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan once defined himself as just a “song and dance man.”

Image: Justin Higuchi through Wikimedia Commons

Born Elizabeth Grant, the singer renamed herself Lana after Lana Turner, the movie star, and Del Rey, after the Ford Del Rey, the vintage car. Yes, Lana’s image harkens back to the 1940s, a time of the submissive housewife, but her voice belies that veneer. It has the edge - and the power - of a film noir heroine. When Lana sings about abuse and sadness, there’s more hidden in her lyrics than what might seem superficially like an ode or a glorification.

I would argue that Lana Del Rey is in fact the voice of feminism’s new guard. Historically, it’s men who sexualize women, but in Lana’s music, we find a powerful woman embracing her own sexuality, and taking control out of the hands of men. Lana inherits the mantle of owning one’s own sexuality from Madonna, now widely seen herself as a major feminist figure in popular culture. Madonna’s sexuality onstage was brash and physical, whereas Lana’s sexuality is more cerebral, written in verse (“Oh God, I miss you on my lips, it’s me, your little Venice [censored].”) Madonna performed for young women of the time; now Lana sings for their daughters.

In some respects, Lana sees herself as a voice for women - ordinary women, flawed women, women who have made mistakes - who have been overlooked by the larger feminist movement. “There has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me," Del Rey said in an Instagram post, “...the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves; the kind of women who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger women or by men who hate women." (Does that really sound like an artist uninterested by the concept of feminism?)

Journalist Mark Savage, referencing music critic Lindsay Zoladz, writes that Del Rey's “portrayal of a woman who stumbled, fell and picked herself up again [is] a more realistic alternative to ‘empowerment as the default aspiration of the pop star.’" Feminism is not the exclusive domain of enlightened activists; it also belongs to the everyday feminists who, like the characters in Lana’s songs, drink beer and play video games with the wrong guys.

Image: Jaguar Cars MENA through Wikimedia Commons

And then there’s the matter of Lana’s consistently melancholy music. The critics have been after her for her sadness too, confusing it with an absence of strength (“They mistook my kindness for weakness, I f***** up, I know that, but Jesus, can’t a girl just do the best she can?”).

But let’s consider that sadness in the context of Lana’s chosen era. Welcome to 1940s America. Picture aprons, kitchens, men with mustaches and slicked-back hair, maybe even Lana Turner on a black-and-white TV in the distance. Here, sad women get a special title: Hysterical. But Lana knows that sadness is a testament to being alive, and she embraces her sadness to create art. Her sad girl persona is really a feminist manifesto, hardly hysterical but rather unabashedly and shamelessly expressive of her own emotions. And in being so emphatic, she’s turned years of male pathologizing into female power.

To be sure, it is difficult - maybe even impossible - to defend certain aspects of Lana’s art, especially her songs about domestic abuse. I’m thinking of lyrics like her pouty and plaintive repurposing of The Crystals’ 1962 line, “He hit me, and it felt like a kiss.” But Lana herself has said that now she tries to distance herself from this earlier work.

And I happen to think that when Lana addresses abuse, it’s not because she loves the idea; rather, she’s forcing us to think about an uncomfortable reality that is often swept under the rug (“My old man is a bad man…and he grabs me, he has me by my heart”). Still, I get the discomfort and controversy here. I watched my parents shift in their seats when I played them that song for the first time.

But beyond that, Lana’s poetry is deceptively feminist, even if she’s misunderstood. And when I hear her sing, she gives me a rare ability: Wherever I am, whatever block I am on in the city, I can put on one of her albums (from “Born to Die”...to “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard?”), and a feeling like none other washes over me. It’s not just a dopamine rush; it’s something far more profound. It is a sense of fortitude; it’s the knowledge that Lana is singing to me, a 17-year-old hanging on her every lyric, as well as to my entire generation, basking in her feminist anthems.