“This Is What Makes Us Girls” is the last song on Lana Del Rey’s 2012 album, Born To Die. The album explores ideas of love, sadness, death, and risk. Many of the songs on the album are inspired by Lana’s real-life experiences, including “This Is What Makes Us Girls”. It is a very meaningful and powerful song, and should definitely be considered poetry.

“This Is What Makes Us Girls” is based on Lana’s real-life experiences as a teenager in a small town. The central theme of the song is that teenage girls often grow up too early or act older than they are, which comes with real consequences and makes them miss out on just being teenagers. She is writing this from the experience of her and her friends’ lives but the message can still be applied to teenage girls in general.

Throughout the song Lana emphasizes youth and innocence in order to establish the idea of how young and naive the girls are despite attempting to act older. In the beginning of the song she sings,

Sweet sixteen, and we had arrived

Walkin’ down the streets as they whistle, “Hi, hi!”

Sweet sixteens are a symbol of growing up and becoming a young woman, something that Lana and her friends leaned into, despite not legally being adults. They were already thinking they were adults when they were still young girls. She continues on to discuss the attention they received from presumably adult men who would catcall them.

Another example of the emphasis on innocence are the lyrics

While she starts to cry

Mascara running down her little Bambi eyes

“Lana, how I hate those guys”

Her friend is described as having running mascara which shows a way she is trying to make herself appear older. Even though many sixteen year old girls wear makeup, it generally has the effect of making one look older. However, this friend’s goal of looking older is not achieved because of her tears ruining her makeup. This showcases the central idea that these girls can try to be older but in the end they are still young girls. Lana describes her eyes as “Bambi eyes”. Bambi is a young deer from the Disney movie Bambi. Deer are seen as wide-eyed, innocent, and prey. By comparing her friend to Bambi, Lana is showing how she is prey to older men, leading into the next line. Her friend tells Lana that she “hate[s] those guys”. The “guys” are presumably, like the cat-callers, older men or men that took advantage of her naivety.

The chorus of the song is also an incredibly powerful addition to the message of the song. Some of the most important parts of it are

We all look for heaven and we put love first

Somethin’ that we’d die for, it’s our curse

Don’t cry about it, don’t cry about it

This is what makes us girls

We don’t stick together ’cause we put love first

These lines again emphasize how clueless and naive these girls are. They value love over their friendships and do not realize how it is harming them. The chorus shows that they do not have the maturity to value things other than boys and love.

Continuing on with the message of innocence, Lana describes another instance

Baby’s table dancin’ at the local dive

Cheerin’ our names in the pink spotlight

Drinkin’ cherry schnapps in the velvet night

Lana describes how her and her friends are again acting older than they are, dancing on tables and drinking alcohol. However, they are drinking cherry schnapps, a sweet drink. This choice emphasizes their youth again because even though they are acting like adults, they still drink sweet flavored alcohol because they do not like the taste of regular hard liquors and/or they cannot handle them.

One lyric that was particularly striking to me was when Lana describes her and her friends as:

A freshman generation of degenerate beauty queens

By describing them as a “freshman generation”, she shows that her and her friends are only a small part in the cycle. Soon, there will be other young girls that will do the same things as them and the cycle will continue. The syntax of the sentence is also very meaningful and adds another layer to the theme. The phrase “beauty queens” is a stereotypical label and these short words after “freshman generation of degenerate”-a string of long words- is noticeable. This sentence shows how other people view Lana and her friends versus what is actually happening. Her small town only sees them as beauty queens and probably thinks they are just reckless and self-absorbed teenage girls. However, they do not recognize the issues these girls are having and how their actions are hurting them.

Later in the song, Lana shows a different kind of negative outcome for her and her friends by saying:

I got sent away, I was wavin’ on the train platform

Cryin’ ’cause I know I’m never comin’ back

Here, Lana is being sent away from her small town, her friends, and their perilous lives. But more importantly, she is saying goodbye to her teenage years. After all the time her and her friends spent trying to not be teenage girls, she cries because she will never get to actually live as a teenage girl because when and if she returns, she will be an adult. This final layer of complexity is astounding because they naively wanted to be adults but ended up regretting not acting like teenagers.

The way that Lana displays innocence through actions, memories, and even Disney characters along with layering the complexities of the experience of teenage girls proves that this song is poetry.