@wesheadley You say, “…the fake divide between male and female artists…” yet you also say, “For female pop artists I’d put Lana Del Rey...”
Further, if we actually entertained such dumb sexism in this way (comparing ‘female artists’), and then took your assertion that Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre could be placed “among the best,” “in any era,” we’d still be walkin’ on reeeeaaaal thin ice.
If we looked at the songwriting output in the era of mid-‘60s-through-mid-‘70s by the likes of Carole King, Ellie Greenwich, Cynthia Weil, Nina Simone, Dolly Parton, Valerie Simpson, Aretha Franklin, Loretta Lynn, Nico, Bobbie Gentry, Joni Mitchell, and Betty Davis, and then looked at Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre, and then said hers could be “put up there with any of them,”…um…uh…yyyyeeaahh, no.
If we threw her oeuvre into the mix of ‘90s artists like The Breeders, Aimee Mann, Björk, Lauryn Hill, Sinead O’Connor, Liz Phair, Iris Dement, Sleater-Kinney, Gillian Welch, PJ Harvey, Lucinda Williams, and Fiona Apple…um…uh…yyyeeeaaahh, no.
Throw Lana (or Taylor for that matter) into a room with either of those eras’ artists in their primes (we could do it with other eras…mid-‘70s-through-mid-‘80s, for example…same result) and she’d likely pull a Wayne’s World-esque, bowing-on-her-knees-on-the-floor, “We are not worthy! We are not worthy!” (in this case, the ‘we’ being her two-dozen-odd different co-writers the last decade)