The spotlight dims on Lana del Rey

Sometime between the first time the world heard her sultry, gorgeous track “Video Games” and the release of her full-length album, “Born to Die,” Lana del Rey became more of an Internet meme than a singer.

A turning point came when debates about her ceased to be about her music and began to be about her “gangster Nancy Sinatra” persona, her potentially surgically-enhanced lips and her efforts that may have set women’s rights back 100 years.

All of this is, of course, beside the point. Lana del Rey is a pop singer, and like many pop singers, her album is a bloated collection of ace singles and inscrutable filler. “Video Games,” “Blue Jeans” and “Born to Die” are pretty excellent; “Diet Mountain Dew” and “This Is What Makes Us Girls” are almost unlistenable. This dichotomy is no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the radio pop promotional machine.

Del Rey is ostensibly more interesting than the likes of Ke$ha and Katy Perry because, instead of manufactured hip-hop beats, she typically lays her vocals over manufactured orchestral beats.

She’s often called Lynchian, though I’m not certain mentioning PBR in a lyric means you’re of one blood with “Blue Velvet.” The sum of these quirks and more is what initially ingratiated del Rey to indie audiences, but they’re rightly turned off by now.

It’s tempting to give too much credit to the audience that has turned on del Rey. After all, they’re the ones who canonized her. “Video Games” was promising, but it was a mighty small sample size to make the leaps her fans made.

What we know now is that Lana del Rey’s persona is less “gangster Nancy Sinatra” and more subservient sex kitten, as nearly every song on her album pledges sex and adoration in exchange for loyalty and attention. We know her songs aren’t as original as we thought. In short, we know her too well.

If mystery is what fueled the Lana del Rey mystique, now that it’s all gone, what remains is thin gruel. Just as “Yonkers” remained when Tyler, the Creator’s “Goblin” disappointed, we’ll always have “Video Games.”

“Born to Die,” meanwhile, is all too easy to ignore.