Never in the history of pop has so much been written about so little. The mere existence of Lana Del Rey has generated more opinion pieces than David Cameron farting on the Euro. Her lips alone have launched a thousand blogs. And yet, with the release of her first proper album Born To Die, it’s starting to seem like a lot of fuss over… well not quite nothing, but hardly anything deserving of this much agonised debate over her merits, authenticity and intended audience. Born To Die is just a pop record, containing very few ideas but a heap of questionable, clunky lyrics. At the time of writing it’s at number one in 11 countries.

Video Games is a great record, we’ve no argument there. And the accompanying video was inspired and compelling. Everything that came after, in the Lana Del Rey campaign, has been a steady watering down of that initial creative spark (with her Saturday Night Live performance being the point where an entire bucket was poured over her pretty head, and a nation laughed like the prom-goers in Carrie).

Born To Die is not an album to buy if you loved Video Games. It’s an album to buy if your musical needs are ably fulfilled by mildly distracting, modern hip hop influenced, post-Britney, post-Gaga, simpering pap.

Lana Del Rey is Tiffany to Katy Perry’s Debbie Gibson, which’ll come as a surprise to those who believed the formerly struggling singer songwriter Lizzy Grant had reinvented herself as a post-modern, urban, Lynchian chanteuse.

It was presumed the hasty deletion of her downloadable debut album (now clogging up YouTube) was because it was unrepresentative of Grant’s new enigmatic persona. If anything, the newer songs on Born To Die (and by the way, how inane and unimaginative is that title?) are far less subtle and intriguing. Lyrically they make the Spice Girls read like Andrea Dworkin.

The character Lizzy has created with Lana Del Rey is one hatefully passive and boringly superficial sap.

Off To The Races starts with a pleasantly woozy M.I.A. feel to it, but within seconds she’s sing-rapping about sipping on Cristal (yawn) and squeaking (literally) in an obnoxious baby girl voice about some “tough man” she wants to kiss her on her “open mouth”.

Diet Mountain Dew (sung in three syllables) is an older and stronger track – all breakbeats and plinky piano. But the lyrics are slight, moon-eyed and fluffy. If this is 21^st century kitsch you can keep it.

National Anthem manages, against a budget pastiche of Bittersweet Symphony, to make the Del Rey creature seem like the kind of vulgar, spoilt caricatures that MTV make docusoaps about. Having namechecked The Hamptons, she intones in a Gaga-esque narration: “Money is the reason we exist / Everybody knows it / It’s a fact, kiss kiss”. And if you get to the bit where she talks about holding her man “like a python” without your lunch taking the quickest route of escape then you’ve a stronger stomach than us. If this is irony we’ll leave it thanks.

And no, we don’t believe for one second that Lizzy and Lana are the same person. But what do we get out of that? Who does this wet monster serve? When do we get to see that the tongue was in the cheek all along? Will there be some big reveal, with the next album, as she confesses she’d been murdering all these lovers as an act of revenge on the patriarchy? That’d be nice.

To buy into the world of Rey, you’d need to assume she’s a million times smarter than the flaccid, lazily rhymed tales of submissive love and lust she regales us with here. But she sounds like a fucking idiot, so we don’t buy it.

Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die says nothing to you about your life, and as an escapist distraction is no more substantial than a Kate Hudson romcom; don’t be fooled that it’s billed as a film noir.