Lana Del Rey has caused quite a ruckus on the Internet recently. Her first major album, Born to Die, was released a week ago to mixed reviews, with most critics citing the hollowness of her image as the album's primary downfall. The Diamondback's own Robert Gifford said simply that the album was "boring," though he also hinted at its inability to capture either the charisma of pop music or the presumed emotionality of indie.

Which was, before her album actually debuted, the whole debate.

For those of you who are not Internet people, i.e. those of you who play sports/have real lives/use your free time to volunteer at the animal shelter/etc., the name Lana Del Rey may mean little more than a bad Saturday Night Live performance and/or a pair of Angelina-worthy lips. But for bloggers and their ashamedly faithful devotees, Del Ray has been stirring up cyclical pools of controversy for far too long now.

The point of Del Rey's authenticity is, as Gifford mentioned in his review last week, a moot one. The music she writes clearly follows the formula of pop, and honesty is not expected from pop musicians. But having respectfully sat shiva for the starlet's career, I would now like to raise what I feel is a more relevant question: Why all the bitterness? What is it about Del Rey's image that has touched one of the indie world's many sensitive and introspective nerves?

Del Rey's career was born to die (sorry). But it's not her fault, or at least not for the reasons we think it is. The backlash she suffered at the hands of those who brought her to stardom was not because she is "inauthentic," or even because she failed to create a fantasy that anyone could believe. No, what doomed lovely Lana from the start is that she failed to create a fantasy that anyone would want to believe.

Pop musicians have turned themselves into caricatures for decades now and gotten away with it. But their aesthetic has nearly always been as upbeat as their choruses have. Katy Perry, as mentioned in The Diamondback's review of Born To Die, is also an image of herself — but Del Rey's indulgently morose "dark and lonely/ I need somebody to hold me" would never appear between "it's a blacked out blur" and "but I'm pretty sure it ruled" on a Perry track. The point being, of course, that lying is only okay when you're lying about having fun.

I don't think Katy Perry's image — or that of any other starlet, for that matter — is any more convincing than Del Rey's. But her aesthetic failed not because we believed her less than any other larger-than-life character, but because the world of emotionalism is supposed to be left to artists who do not aim to be larger than life. Fantasies are fun; emotions are real. And to a world that has stereotypically found social and economic impetus in this dichotomy, Del Rey may seem a little bit too much like a grammar school crybaby. Everyone knows she's faking, but she still won't shut up.

Not only is Del Rey's fantasy not fun (which is arguably the point of fantasy), but her melodrama — like the kid who cries about everything — also seems to trivialize the actual human experience. Which is, after all, the opposite of what good art should do — and the opposite of what the hipster Internet community has always fancied itself concerned with.

Alex Leston is a freshman agriculture and resource economics major. She can be reached at leston@umdbk.com.