Rarely is a breaking artist as polarizing as Lana Del Rey.

The 25-year-old songstress became one of 2011's most seemingly organic upstarts. Following the release of her breakout single "Video Games" and its vintage-shaded video, apparently filmed and edited on her Macbook, the Lake Placid, N.Y., native racked upwards of 13 million YouTube views and has sold 20,000 copies of her double A-side "Video Games" single since its October 2011 release, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It debuted and spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Singles Sales chart. Joining Ellie Goulding and Jessie J, Del Rey recently signed with Next Model Management.

But it's her all-important authenticity that's had the Internet atwitter. Multiple blogs have painted a target on Del Rey, whose previous musical incarnation as Lizzy Grant, her birth name, was almost entirely wiped from the Web. On the surface, her tactics could appear calculated: Del Rey's 2010 5 Points Records debut, Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Ray, was on iTunes for only two months before vanishing from the store, while her website and social networking profiles were deleted and relaunched under her current guise.

Has a major label been silently orchestrating one of 2011's greatest indie viral success stories? With her Del Rey debut, "Born to Die" (Interscope), arriving Jan. 31, the pillow-lipped singer/songwriter is the new year's buzziest commodity, becoming the first artist since Natalie Imbruglia in 1998 to play "Saturday Night Live" (Jan. 14) before releasing her first major-label LP. She's confirmed for "Late Night With David Letterman" on Feb. 2 and scheduled to appear on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" later the same month. Still, character assassination attempts on the Internet are a daily threat, even if acclaim outweighs the conspiracy theories.

"The Internet's been well-established for 14 years," Del Rey says. "It's not like 1962 where you can't find out about me. My intention was never to transform into a different person. What other people think of me is none of my business. Sometimes, it hurts my feelings. But I have to just keep going. The good stuff is really good. Some of the other stuff is difficult, but I'll be able to tour now, probably sing for a while. That's nice for me."

Sites like Hipster Runoff, which (at press time) has dedicated 29 posts to Del Rey since last September, have taken her integrity to task, needling her artistic reinvention and dissecting supposed misconceptions. From the start, Del Rey has felt the sting of Internet ire, which coincided with her rise in stature. "I began getting messages on my personal Twitter account, really creepy messages, like, 'The blogosphere that created you is about to destroy you,'" she says. "And within three days, the strangest things were happening." At @LanaDelRey, she has 93,000-plus followers. Her bio: Everything I want I have. Money, notoriety and rivieras -- I even think I found God -- in the flash bulbs of your pretty cameras. It's in all-caps.

Many of the attacks question her personal history. Sharpening her octave-spanning pipes in a church choir, Del Rey initially came to New York as Grant, performing at open-mic nights with the likes of Lady Gaga (then known as Stefani Germanotta). She soon signed an indie deal with 5 Points Records to release debut EP Kill Kill in 2008, followed by her full-length, Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Ray, on the imprint.

The record, finished in 2008, collected dust for two years before its release. During a performance at the CMJ Music Marathon in 2009, she met her current manager, Ben Mawson, an entertainment lawyer (with the United Kingdom's SSB Solicitors) intent on untangling her contractual obligations. Contrary to reports, Mawson claims that he and co-manager Ed Millett had nothing to do with naming her, or dictating her direction, instead negotiating her out of her deal with 5 Points and agreeing on joint ownership of the album.

"I'm a lawyer," says Mawson, also of Hear No Evil Management. "And if I gave her advice on dressing, it would not be right." His first move was to pull the album from iTunes two months after its release, so as not to confuse future consumers of music sold as Lana Del Rey's. He hopes to release it as a collection of B-sides and claims it's nothing that she's ashamed of, but is more surprised by the overanalysis of past decisions. "It's pretty crazy, this whole whirlwind of attention. Some of it's great, but obviously, there's been a lot of stuff -- which is basically total fancy -- about what she is and where she's come from."

David Kahne, who produced Grant as well as albums for Paul McCartney, Regina Spektor and Kelly Clarkson, thinks otherwise. Agreeing to work with her in 2008 after 5 Points connected them, he witnessed the beginnings of her reinvention from a platinum blonde guitar-cradler to an alt-indie princess. Contrary to what Del Rey asserts, Kahne is under the impression that she bought the rights back from 5 Points to stifle future opportunities to distribute it--an echo of rumors that the action was part of a calculated strategy.

"I think Lizzy Lana owns it, so [her team] wanted it out of circulation. That's why they bought the rights from them," Kahne says. "I think she wanted to be Lana Del Rey and didn't want to be Lizzy Grant. That was her family name, and she's very dramatic. She wiped [out] this other person. I think she actually thinks that she's that other person, and she probably is. So that was the decision that she made, that she didn't want traces of that whole person around, as far as I can tell." He hasn't worked with her since 2008.

To jump-start her transformation from Grant to Del Rey, she relocated to London and spent 2010 taking meetings with "every label," but, she says, she was repeatedly rejected. Though his work with Del Rey ceased after they recorded three post-album songs, including "Yayo" and "Gramma," Kahne observed the physical transformation that's become a focal point of criticism.

"She looks different. [She] doesn't sound different to me, though," Kahne says. He claims that she was operatically trained, which Del Rey denies. But when it comes to songwriting, he praises her abilities. "She's a clever writer, but she definitely has a very powerful angle on the image, the perfume of the thing that she wants to be. I think she probably didn't feel that she was far enough into that, and by making this change, she's more like what she wanted to be in the first place."

NEXT PAGE: Del Rey's Rise + Major Label Signing