Everyone knows Lana Del Rey’s so-called true identity: she was born Elizabeth Grant, daughter to an entrepreneur who sold domain names. In the press, there’s been a perverse joy in labeling her a phony, whether that’s regarding her supposedly surgically enhanced lips (she has always denied this), or the rebranding that marked her early career. She was born in Lake Placid, in upstate New York, and went to boarding school in Connecticut. When she first started doing shows in 2006, while studying metaphysics at Fordham University in the Bronx, it was with a folky bent and a guitar that her uncle taught her how to play. The F chord was too hard, she later told the BBC’s Mark Savage—“Four fingers? Never going to happen”—but she recorded an acoustic album as May Jailer just the same. (That record, Sirens, was never released, though it eventually leaked online.) In 2008, while still in college, she signed a $10,000 record deal with an indie label called 5 Points and moved to a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey. index Magazine filmed a giddy interview with her there; she appears in a car mechanic’s windbreaker, her platinum blonde hair tied up with a baby blue scarf, and, when asked about the “very cohesive package” of her musical identity, says, “It has been a lifelong ambition and desire… to have a defined life and a defined world to live in.” During this period, she teamed with David Kahne, a producer for Paul McCartney and The Strokes, and developed a more idiosyncratic sound for her self-penned lyrics, with affected jazz vocals, synthesized orchestra sections and hip-hop drums—an uncanny mix of old and new. Under the name Lizzy Grant, she released an EP, Kill Kill, and recorded an album, Lana Del Ray A.K.A. Lizzy Grant, which sat on 5 Points’ shelf for two years before it was digitally released in 2010. By then, she’d gone brunette with swooping Veronica Lake curls, and was spending time in London in search of another deal. With the help of a newly hired manager and lawyer, she bought back the album rights and pulled it from the market. Henceforth, she would be known as Lana Del Rey.

But her past was still there in traces online, the story of a small-town girl with big dreams and the cunning to change herself to make them come true. It’d be an all-American tale, if only she seemed self-made; instead, there was a discomfiting sense of someone else behind the scenes, orchestrating a bait-and-switch with secretly funded videos that only slummed their DIY aesthetic. For an artist who broke online, her father’s background raised red flags—beside selling domain names, he’d worked in advertising and helped market her Lizzy Grant releases. And there was a suspiciously short time between “Video Games,” which was listed by many blogs as a self-release, and the announcement that she’d signed with two major labels. In any case, she was never especially embarrassed about her ambition; rather, she embraced it as a defining trait. On “Radio,” the pluckiest song on Lana Del Rey’s relentlessly downtrodden debut, Born to Die, she sings of success like a taunt: American dreams came true somehow/ I swore I’d chase em until I was dead/ I heard the streets were paved with gold/ That’s what my father said… Baby, love me cause I’m playing on the radio/ How do you like me now? She was a star who announced her own arrival, singing of fame with a wistfulness even as she was just beginning to taste it.

Many critics were bristled by her supposed fraud. The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica pronounced Lana Del Rey D.O.A. in a scathing review, concluding with: “The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing.” Pitchfork’s Lindsay Zoladz called Born to Die “the album equivalent of a faked orgasm.” It was an unusual time for music, with major labels chasing the internet’s whims by poaching unproven newcomers off the strength of a viral track and a look. For skeptics, Lana Del Rey became a symbol of puffed-up online buzz itself. (Before Zoladz’s 5.5 review, Pitchfork had notably awarded “Video Games” Best New Track and granted her a Rising profile, ostensibly reserved for artists they recommend.) The Hipster Runoff blogger Carles, a one-man peanut gallery to the indie press, was Lana Del Rey’s most visceral and obsessive critic, but also one of the most insightful, because criticizing her always came hand-in-hand with criticizing himself and the music web’s ceaseless appetite for breaking artists to sell to brands (or take down in think pieces). He called it their “dark, abusive, co-dependent relationship on the content farm.”