I didn't think I’d ever have to justify this. Right now I’m not even sure I can. I accept that any attempt to explain how Cola by Lana Del Rey makes me feel seems implausible at best and impossible on a bad day. The best I can do is explain how it’s obviously a work of genius.  From the moment you hear Lana sing the opening line, "My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola," you’re going to have to have some sort of reaction. You’re not going to feel nothing.  

Just try explaining why your favourite lyric of the twenty first century is, "My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola." You’re going to be hit by people saying, “What's so clever about that?” The cheap reaction is to say, “Whatever turns you on?” A subtle way of saying, “Ha! You like a song about sex. You're a bit pervy.” Sex in song somehow becomes taboo, a different type of song.

Cola doesn't even make it on to the original debut album. It’s a proverbial B-side in spirit, seemingly too dirty for a chart hit. “And in at number ten in the charts this week is a song about how Lana Del Rey’s pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola. This isn't dirty like Relax by Frankie, a thumping orgasm of a song, filthy enough through subtlety and inuendo to be banned. This isn't Madonna unmercifully telegraphing that she is a sexual being and free to be so.

You want filth? You should hear some of the things that come out of Liz Phair’s mouth. Making the short list is:

“You act like you're fourteen years old

Everything you say is so

Obnoxious, funny, true, and mean

I want to be your blowjob Queen.”

Nothing much there for those who like to read between the lines.

The James song, Laid, is another one:

This bed is on fire with passionate love
The neighbours complain about the noises above
But she only comes when she's on top

If you Google it you’ll find that it’s written “But she only comes when she’s on top,” which actually doesn’t grammatically make as much sense as what was actually meant. You’d think if you had a song called “Laid” then you’d not be pushing it to cheekily admit to the song being about fucking. Maybe you could literally spell things out by spelling the word “cum” rather than “come.” I can imagine a meeting in which Tim Booth of James is insisting that it’s about a girl who he knew who would only travel on the top deck of a double decker bus and hence she would only come to meet him if she could be on top. I suppose the record company would be happy to have an alibi there. “Yeah Tim, if anyone asks, you all tell that story about the girl on top of the double decker bus.”

You have songs that are overtly about sex that seem to have shock value. There are songs that pretend they aren’t about sex, but everyone knows they really are. And then there are songs that can be dismissed as cheap shocks, when really, they are so much more. It misses the point if Cola is instantly dismissed as a shamelessly dirty song. There’s plenty of fan and muso debate about it and in these times it’s hard to find a consensus of what’s rock and roll or just peurile. I’d have to say: What’s the difference?

Lana Del Rey is all about seduction and Cola is just that, and cunnilingus aside, it's not so cheap at all. Questions about the sexually explicit lyrics seem to have been brushed aside in interviews with a simple revelation that it’s just something her Scottish boyfriend told her. So what?  It makes me think of the author Fay Weldon telling our writing class that sex is just “something else you write about.”

What follows is sex and sensuality. You can’t ignore the opening lyrics but after that intro the song is devoid of any explicit references to any kind of sex, not until the refrain that echoes to the very end.

The Americana of Lan Del Rey is both dirty and glamorous. It’s not hard to find. It does somewhat smack you in the face. “I fall asleep in an American flag. I wear my diamonds on Skid Row.” It’s an American dream wrapped in sex, drugs and diamonds and sung in sultry husky dreamy tones.

The Harvey Weinstein angle has been played to death and I don’t want to make this all about one individual. Yes, it’s hard to ignore that the “Harvey” in, “Harvey's in the sky with diamonds and he's making me crazy. All he wants to do is party with his pretty baby,” was a reference to sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein. But he is just a character in this landscape, representing a dirty grubby side of the American dream as lived through the Entertainment industry. As such Harvey is just a name for an unpleasant element of the world. He’s just where the diamonds, the ones you wear on Skid Row, come from.

That does lead to it being hard to know who’s in charge here. The simple answer is that I don’t think anyone actually knows, not the starlet narrator, not Lana and not the listener.  I certainly don’t get the feeling that Harvey is in charge. There is the point of view where the song is sung by a naïve starlet, who thinks that she is in charge, that sex is just a way in, a currency to be spent in the name of career advancement. But that would do away with any obvious indicators that the starlet seems to want to be devoured.  

My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola
My eyes are wide like cherry pies

You can choose to see it as a cautionary tale, that our starlet is plain wrong. Don’t be the starlet. You do not need to sleep your way to the top. That then makes every seductive move, every “Let’s Rock,” a very different proposition. If that is what’s going on, then we’re in a sleazy world where sex becomes destructive and the American dream is literally fucked. All those rocks, whether that’s diamante diamonds, or the ones that get you high, come at a cost. The ride isn’t worth the price you pay. But if you do see it this way I don’t think you and I are on the same ride. 

There is a long-celebrated tradition in the “Land of the Free,” of going off the rails. In film and fiction that usually involves sex and drugs and rock and roll. It’s all about the things that adults tell you to avoid. How can we not want our “pretty baby” to have some fun, to satiate her “taste for men who are older?”

Cunnilingus is the reason that this song gets the attention that it does. And that one act is essential to the song. So, no one is going to say that it’s not about sex. But sex is part of what makes it a hard American Dream. That Scottish boyfriend, who we can thank for the infamous line, was actually very direct in what he said. It wasn’t meant as an honest appraisal. It’s not a come on. What he actually said was that all American girls have pussies that taste like Pepsi Cola. As such it doesn’t get much more “cultural commentary” than that. On the one hand you have the boyfriend’s idealisation of American Pussy and the “good enough to eat” sweetness of cherry pie and cola and the American way. And on the other, you have Lana’s vision of what happens to that cherry pie pussy. The juxtaposition of ideas gives us Cola’s dirty yet sweet cultural landscape. The language used needs to be dirty. It needs to be seedy. The levels to which civilised society disapproves needs to be irredeemable and unapologetically so. Civilised society is not rock and roll enough to hear what anyone’s pussy tastes like.

The end of the song, those infamous lyrics echoing to the end, is utterly liberating. With each “come on come on baby,” there’s a freedom, a sense of defiance. Cola clings to the right to be bad, like singing “My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola” is “bad,” like the grown ups tell you that sex is “bad.” With each squeal and yelp and every elongated “ooh,” it feels good to be bad. That’s about as rock and roll as it gets.