Rightly or wrongly, Raitt has become mired in AOR, representing exactly the type of music that punk, indie rock and other left-of-the-dial genres were meant to displace. It’s been too easy for a new generation to overlook or simply dismiss Raitt as music for their parents. Adele, for instance, was a tween the last time Raitt released a new album. But those two covers, along with a recent duet with Alicia Keys at the Grammys, has prompted a reconsideration of Raitt as a vocal interpreter and guitar player.

Her early albums, recorded in the early 1970s, reveal an omnivorous musician who makes no distinctions between styles and genres, whether it’s reggae, country, blues, West Coast rock or East Coast folk. She has covered songs by, among many others, Fred McDowell, John Prine, Chris Smither and Randy Newman (check out her incredible version of his song “Guilty”), and her version of the reggae hit “Wah She Go Do” was anthologized on Van Dyke Parks’ excellent “Arrangements Vol. 1” last year. During her comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she focused almost entirely on her vocals, occasionally to the neglect of her impressive slide guitar work. But she has always had a good ear for a good tune, and her voice communicates tenderheartedness with effortless grace. Her version of “I Can’t Make You Love” still sounds wounded in its understatement, and if Raitt is truly informing a new generation of singers, her influence can only be beneficial, especially after so many years of tacky vocal pyrotechnics.

Following that surge of renewed interest, Raitt is releasing “Slipstream,” the 16th album of her 40-plus-year career, on April 10 through her own label, Redwing Records. Most of the album was recorded with her long-time band, but four of the new songs were produced by Joe Henry and feature his crack backing band. Those sessions, which produced two excellent Dylan covers, suggest all new directions for Raitt, who says she hopes to work with Henry again on a future album. Especially considering the tragedies she’s faced in the last decade, “Slipstream” is the liveliest she’s sounded in years, her voice seemingly ageless and her guitarwork as inventive as ever.

This is your first album in seven years. Was there a moment or an event that prompted you to get back to recording?

I made “Souls Alike” in 2005, and we did our customary two-year tour promoting that. Then my brother developed another brain tumor, and I took some time off to be with him and to nurse him. Unfortunately he lost his battle, as did one of my best friends. So I was pretty devastated. And my good friend Stephen Bruton passed away as well, also after long and very stressful illnesses. I knew I wanted to take a break, and I finally got the chance to spend a whole year at home and take care of a bunch of things that had been neglected. I learned to grieve and process a bunch of emotions that had been pushed away when I was so busy. By the time 2011 came along, I was going to see Jackson Browne and David Lindley and a bunch of different shows by friends of mine. And I got that itch again — which is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to wait until I really felt like I missed it. At that point I called some friends of mine to see if they wanted to collaborate. One of them was thinking of calling me, and that was Joe Henry. We worked together for a couple of days, with Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz and the people that Joe works with a lot. We went into his home studio to see how we would do on two or three songs, and we ended up doing eight. After that, I decided to book my guys and keep looking in earnest to find more songs and we finally got into the studio last summer.

How did those tragedies — the deaths of Bruton and your brother — color “Slipstream”?

I’m 62, and this is the time of life when your parents are quite elderly and a lot of them are passing. I’m not alone in having suffered a great deal of loss. By having the luxury of taking time away from work to really process all of that and take care of my home life, which a lot of us on the road don’t really get to do, I didn’t really have an agenda for making an album. By the time I got into the studio, that loss wasn’t something I was using as an inspiration for the record. It was more about the benefit of taking time off, which helps you re-energize when you go back in. When you have the luxury of waiting until you really want to go in, then you really are more refreshed and inspired.

These songs were mostly written by songwriters of your own generation. What do you look for in a song? How do you know when you can make it your own?

Sometimes I don’t go into the studio for quite a while because I haven’t found enough good songs. They have to have a certain caliber and connect with me because I’m going to be playing them for the rest of my life. I start off with a circle of friends whose songs I love anyway. Mostly they’re a group who were influenced by the same people who influenced me. I guess I don’t really think of their age. I just look for something that knocks me out. The impetus for finding these songs is to have a different feel or a groove that I’ve been missing in my live shows. If I don’t find enough of what I want to play, I don’t feel like I have to write something. I’m not that motivated ego-wise to have my own expressions of what’s going on in my life — unlike some other people who do use their lives as inspiration. I didn’t really want to dwell on the sadness or the loss. Maybe in the future I’ll write something that’s a tribute to the people I lost, but basically I was reaffirming the joy of singing great songs. I can’t wait to get on the road and play them.

Were you surprised when Adele and Justin Vernon both covered “I Can’t Make You Love Me” last year?

I think it did surprise me. I know after I had the hit, Prince and George Michael covered it, and I think Nancy Wilson did a version. I had the great thrill of having Aretha sing it to me at a concert. Ten or 15 years ago, I was visiting my brother in Minneapolis and went to see her live show for the first time. I didn’t even know she knew I was in the audience, but she said she had a special dedication and sang it to me. It just floored me. I had not been aware of anyone covering it again, except maybe the “American Idol” people would email to say someone did something with “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About” or “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” But I was really happy to hear Adele sing it. I admire her a tremendous amount. And I love Bon Iver’s music, and I was very surprised that he liked what I do as well. I didn’t write that song, but certainly one of my big gifts was to be given “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by the two songwriters [Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin]. I’m sure they’re thrilled to be getting this attention as well.

What’s your relationship with your older material like? Do you still do songs from “Give It Up” and “Takin’ My Time”?

There are certain songs from then like the Fred McDowell medley “Write Me a Few of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues,” and “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy,” that Mose Allison song. And “Angel from Montgomery” of course, from “Streetlights,” the fourth album. There are certain ones that have stayed with me, that I have a really soft spot in my heart for, and there’s a lot of them that I don’t know what they’d sound like if we resurrected them. When you get 18 or 19 albums, you run out of stage time to put them all in there.

Those early albums are very stylistically adventurous, as is the new one. Are you thinking about genre when you’re arranging or recording songs?

Not really. I think that’s just what my style is. I’m never self-conscious about it. People ask, Why don’t you do a blues album? And I say, Because I would be so bored. I’m aware of not duplicating anything thematically or musically — I wouldn’t want to repeat myself. I just try to get to all the different styles that I love so that when I go on the road, I can pick from those. That “Down to You” song has a Stones feel that I love, and “Right Down the Line”… I knew the minute I heard it a few years ago that I wanted to cut it in that style.

You’re pretty well known for your social and political activism. What is an artist’s responsibility in that regard?

I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary. That was the music I cut my folk roots on — at 1o or 11, I would sit in my room and learn those songs. Being Quaker, my folks were involved in the peace movement and the civil rights movement. That was a very fertile time for music and politics, so by the time I was playing in clubs, it was just natural for me to play for a women’s health clinic or for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and that has dovetailed into most of the other causes that I’m involved in, whether it’s safe energy or no nukes. The whole idea of the election year being an auction instead of an election is just so abhorrent to me. Thank God for Occupy and thank God for “The Daily Show,” Colbert and the rising up that’s going on around the world. I salute all the people who are finally pissed off enough to get out in the street.

Is “Used to Rule the World,” the opener on “Slipstream,” meant to comment on Occupy?

I liked the song before the Occupy movement was happening. Randall Bramblett wrote the song, and he’s been doing it for years. It’s not just about America; it’s about how everybody gets a reckoning in their lives. When you’re in your 20s, you think you’ve got it made, but by the time you’re in your 40s or 50s, you realize there was more to it than you thought. But also, we just have to take a look at the hubris and arrogance that makes us think we’re the quote-unquote First World, that we have a right to go on a rampage and have more than what we need and ignore the rest of the world. That’s broad strokes. I don’t mean to be so reductionist, and certainly the song has resonance on a lot of different levels. A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it’s done right — like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there’s nothing better.

Nothing much happens in the video, but its muted color palette, patient pace, and most of all that looming threat make it unusually effective. With its piercing guitar theme and the subdued production courtesy of T Bone Burnett, the song reflects that mood, even as it gives so much time over to lyric-less passages. Swift may be better casting than even Jennifer Lawrence, who plays the heroine Katniss Everdeen in the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ young-adult novel. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter is arguably the most successful musician of the moment, and her two songs — “Safe and Sound” and “Eyes Open” — will ensure that the “Hunger Games” soundtrack will sell very well.

More than that, however, it makes sense to get an artist whose primary subject has been adolescence to soundtrack a movie about adolescents. Swift has written evocatively and knowingly about teenage conflicts and confusions — the intensity of young love, the reassurances of friendship, the stormy passage of adulthood — which are issues addressed by scores of young-adult novelists, who lately have been turning them into metaphors involving werewolves, vampires and other supernatural phenomena. Few novelists are quite so ambitious in this undertaking as Collins, who sets the three “Hunger Games” books within a post-apocalyptic totalitarian state where teenagers are forced to fight each other in the name of entertainment and political oppression. Swift’s music may be apolitical, but she knows how the metaphor works and, more important, why it’s proved so popular with young readers.

But in 2012, “The Hunger Games” seems a bit old-fashioned for investing so much in a blockbuster soundtrack. Produced by Burnett, it includes new songs from the Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, Miranda Lambert with the Pistol Annies, Maroon 5, Kid Cudi and the Civil Wars, among others. Very few contemporary soundtracks prove quite so ambitious, not only because consumers have stopped buying them but also because studios and labels are no longer producing these tie-in albums.

Film has always enjoyed a close relationship to pop music, as each bolstered the popularity of the other. The first talkie, of course, was a musical: In 1927, “The Jazz Singer” employed a synchronized soundtrack that not only made dialogue audible but provided sound for iconic hits like “My Mammy” and “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye.” Three decades later, “The Blackboard Jungle” made a smash hit of Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” helping to launch the rock and roll explosion. Studios and labels worked together to sell films with soundtracks and soundtracks with films, a trend that peaked in the 1980s with a string of multi-platinum tie-in albums, including “Top Gun,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “The Big Chill,” “Footloose,” “Purple Rain,” “Pretty in Pink” and “Dirty Dancing.”

During the next decade, that trend abated somewhat. “The Bodyguard” and “Titanic” sold well, “Singles” shone a spotlight on the then-burgeoning Seattle scene, and “Pulp Fiction” and “Natural Born Killers” innovated the genre by including not just carefully chosen older tunes but also sound snippets and bits of dialogue. A soundtrack could sell well based solely on one song: Take “Benny & Joon,” the 1993 Johnny Depp vehicle that packaged the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” with Rachel Portman’s nondescript score. That album’s success would be unthinkable in the digital era, when you could simply download the single (or grumble that the label had made it a soundtrack exclusive).

Perhaps the soundtrack’s last real hurrah was “O Brother Where Art Thou?” at the turn of this century. Despite the Coen Brothers’ tongue-in-cheek depiction of the Depression-era South, the album’s straight-faced revival of old rural blues, folk and gospel songs struck a mighty chord with listeners. Produced by Burnett and featuring a raft of artists who were far from mainstream (Gillian Welch, Ralph Stanley), the release sold millions and even won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001. More impressively, its influence still ripples through the industry, as acts like the Avett Brothers and Trampled by Turtles continue to draw from and update these same traditions.

But the days when every summer action movie or franchise entry had a hit album or single attached are long over. With the rise of file sharing and downloading, not to mention the downfall of MTV and other music video channels, most movies forego the expense of a star-studded soundtrack, placing less and less emphasis on pop music in movies. That trend seemed to reach a head this year when only two songs qualified for the Best Original Song Oscar. On the other hand, many films are putting renewed emphasis on composed scores, which has produced adventurous work by Trent Reznor and Michael Giacchino.

If anything can reverse this trend, it’s the young adult novel adaptation. When “Twilight” hit theaters in 2008, its tie-in album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts — the first soundtrack to do so since 2002. Other collections followed with each sequel, and while none sold quite so well as that first installment, they did prove especially successful by corralling indie-rock acts like Bon Iver, Lykke Li, Sea Wolf and Florence + the Machine. It was a boon to struggling musicians who could fund tours or albums based on the royalties.

The songs on the “Twilight” soundtrack were written and recorded specifically for the movies, usually to express a character’s emotions or side with Team Edward or Team Jacob, but aside from general moodiness, there’s no particular aesthetic unifying any of these albums into a whole. They could be mixtapes made by a lovesick teen with a particularly adventurous iTunes library. “The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond,” on the other hand, is “O Brother” for the tween set, and not only because it’s also produced by Burnett. More crucially, the soundtrack uses pop music to reflect the film’s setting and cultural/political themes. The heroine Katniss Everdeen hails from District 12, a rural outlier in what’s left of the United States following an ecological disaster and a bloody civil war. As Katniss observes in the first book in the series, District 12 is located in what used to be known as Appalachia, and its residents still mine coal hundreds of years later.

The soundtrack relies heavily on artists well versed in traditional Appalachian music to evoke this setting, which means bluegrass-fusion experts the Punch Brothers and African American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops rub elbows with the likes of rapper Kid Cudi and Maroon 5. The stark acoustic music represents District 12; the heavier, busier songs evoke the hyper-modernized Capitol. Sure, it divides the music into easy groupings, where spare and acoustic equals pure and good while electronic connotes urban and shallow. But at least “The Hunger Games” is even thinking about such differences rather than just throwing everything together in a hasty tracklist. No dry history lesson in old-time folk, it works more as an album than as a souvenir of a moviegoing experience. Which is exactly what any good soundtrack ought to do.

Born in Oregon but based in East Nashville — and it’s crucial to distinguish that bohemian enclave from Nashville proper — Snider emerged in the 1990s as a roots-rock singer and a sharp-eyed songwriter, yet the serious songs on his debut album, “Songs for the Daily Planet,” were upstaged by a humorous hidden track, “Talking Seattle Grunge-Rock Blues.” Since then, he’s developed a keen eye for character and an ear for phrases that work as both punch lines and emotional gut punches.

Snider is fascinated by oddball Americans, writing wittily about FBI agents investigating the lyrics to “Louie Louie,” Catfish Hunter pitching a perfect game on LSD, even a ne’er-do-well political scion who becomes president of the United States of America. “Agnostic Hymns” adds some indelible characters and tunes to his catalog, but more than that it stands as a potent combination of anger and humor.

“New York Banker” was suggested to you by Rahm Emanuel. What’s the story behind that song?

Yeah. He’s my friend. I love that guy. He first came to see me in Washington, D.C., and he was about to go to some big meeting. The next time I met him was in Chicago. I was telling him about this song I was making up about the military-industrial complex. I was telling him it’s a stoner fable. All the stoners in the world are convinced that the world is run by these people that Eisenhower warned us about. He said, “You’d be surprised how much power the banks have now by comparison.” He pointed out that there’s a song about “the military and the monetary” by Gil Scott Heron called “Work for Peace.” So it’s been tackled. He said, “What would Woody Guthrie do? He’d figure out a way to point out what the bankers are doing right now.” So I thought, OK, I’ll try that. It’s not something I know much about, but I did some research on it. I read a book called “The Big Short,” and my father-in-law helped me find a person whose story I could tell.

It sounds like a good explanation for why the financial system is so blatantly and openly one-sided.

It’s unconscionable. I don’t get how that’s possible, but it is. I learned a lot doing this one song. It made me sit down and try to understand it. The guy who creates those pension funds with the teachers’ retirement money, he creates them to fail. That’s the thing … John Paulson created a thing called the Abacus deal [the agreement with Goldman Sachs that allowed Paulson to sell risky collateral debt obligations and then bet against them] and he’s just running around New York, isn’t he? That seems weird.

I think I know what a stoner fable is, but what exactly is an agnostic hymn?

I consider myself an evangelical agnostic, actually, which means I don’t know what I’m doing here and you don’t either. I feel like there aren’t any songs for that religion. They don’t even have a church for that, where people get together and hit tambourines. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to come up with that kind of song — an agnostic hymn. There’s a song called “Too Soon to Tell” that I made up first: “It’s too soon to tell what happens when you die.” That song was originally titled “Agnostic Hymn” and then the song “In the Beginning” was originally titled “Stoner Fable.” A couple of my friends said that all the songs are that, so I came up with new titles for those two and implied that all the songs are agnostic hymns and stoner fables.

In “In the Beginning,” you sing about religion being the only thing that keeps the poor from rising up to kill the rich. That seems to be a major theme on this record. Was that intentional from the beginning, or an idea that emerged as you put the songs together?

I was just trying to make up the best songs I could and try to let myself say whatever. When it was done, it all felt right. I was listening back with a couple of my friends in Maryland, and they said, look, there’s a theme here. I didn’t realize until we were done that there are two occasions where it sounds like the singer is supporting the idea of poor-on-rich violence. I’m not not supporting it.

On your records, agnosticism seems to inform a very strict moral system.

I’ve always been a little put off by the idea that you need a reason to be nice to people. I’m just going to be fair with people, not because I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to me if I don’t, and not because I’m going to get good luck if I do. But because it’s right. I’m rooting for God as much as the next guy. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than go to heaven with my wife and just sit there forever, but I’m not going to ignore logic or base my life on superstition, especially when it becomes something that’s going to impact another person.

It’s not actually a new theme for you, though, but something you’ve explored on previous records. Do you consider these protest songs?

I feel like I’ve always sung anti-suburban Christian songs. I grew up conservative Christian and all that, and now when someone tells me they’re conservative politically and also a Christian, I think, Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a hydrogen bomb made out of dumb. Because those two ideas don’t gel. There’s one group that’s saying, Take everything you have and give it to the poor. And there’s another group that’s saying, Don’t tell me what to give to the poor. How can you join both groups? That’s like you’re joining Puppy Kickers Animal Rights of America. It just doesn’t gel, and that’s what I ran away from.

Are you concerned about alienating a potential audience?

I would almost like to alienate that audience that would disagree. If somebody takes offense to something that I’m saying, that would probably make me happy that I needled them a little bit.

The idea of music as a vehicle for protest seems to be popular right now. Do you identify at all with the Occupy movement?

On the chaotic side, I definitely identify with hippies in the park and Frisbees and weed and all that. But on a more linear side, I don’t see a plan. It’s almost like we saw the Tea Party and they looked dumb, so [we decided], Let’s show everybody our dumb. To a degree I get it. But even the Tea Party is a little more focused. I think the people at the bar I hang out at in East Nashville are offended by the 1 percent for two reasons: Their greed is just cruel, and their supposed connection to some sort of religion is embarrassing.

What attracted you to cover Jimmy Buffett’s “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown,” about a debutante who gives up high-class cotillions to hitchhike around the country? It was surprising to hear him espouse those ideas back in the 1970s.

That’s an interesting song of his. He wrote it when he lived in this town, and as I was hearing what I was saying on this record, I thought that song fit. It made me think of myself. I come from a jock house that I didn’t want to be a part of. I mean, I like to play hippie concerts, and I like Phish fans and stuff like that. A lot of them left nice homes to get away from greed and superstition.

One thing that definitely separates this album from a lot of other, for lack of a better word, “protest” albums is that this one is really funny.

Bill Hicks is probably my favorite — I would even call him a folk singer. He was three chords from a folk singer. I take a lot of his ideas. At the very least humor keeps you from being pretentious as you’re trying to be somebody that people go out to see on a Friday night. It’s good for vaudeville, and it’s also probably good for your heart. I’ve heard that laughter is pretty good for you, so I feel thankful that that’s a part of my life.

The band is led by Kurt Wagner, a man who wears the dapper blazer of an English professor and the farmer’s cap of a tractor parts salesman. Each of the group’s 11 studio albums mines some new corner of a deceptively large sound that mixes Owen Bradley’s countrypolitan sophistication with variant strains of lush soul (Motown and Philly more than gritty Memphis, despite Wagner’s ties to that city). There are flourishes of Brill Building professionalism, Sinatra-style croonerism, and old-school soundtrack composition, and it’s all mixed together to create a sound that is subdued, low-key, laid back to a fault.

As consistent as Lambchop has been throughout the 200os, “Mr. M” marks a decided uptick, not just for the music but for Wagner’s lyrics. It heralds him, quite simply, as the best American songwriter working today. There’s more thematic and emotional heft here, as these 11 songs examine the nature of loss and life, albeit from obtuse angles. Weepy or cathartic these songs most certainly are not; Wagner confesses, but never in the mode of a confessional singer-songwriter. His lyrics are simultaneously impressionistic and concrete, using seemingly meaningless events — the kind most writers would never consider important enough to hang a song or even a verse on — to evoke something larger. “Took the Christmas lights off the front porch / what felt like February 31st,” he sings on “2B2.” What that means specifically is only the listener’s guess, but that line implies some low-level drama, some matter that has preoccupied Wagner such that he puts off such tasks until some nonexistent date. His songs talk assiduously around the big issues, which come across as too large, often too painful to confront directly.

Remarkably, Wagner never intended to be a songwriter. He trained as a painter, first at the Memphis College of Art and later at the University of Montana. Returning to his hometown of Nashville, he worked as a manual laborer to support his art — mostly laying floors. In the late 1980s, he and some friends started a band, although it was less a professional project than a pickup group. Membership was loose and often ballooned into double digits, both in the studio and on the stage (which often negated any potential profit from touring). Signing with the North Carolina independent label Merge Records — currently home to Spoon, the Arcade Fire, She & Him and Destroyer — Lambchop grew successful enough that Wagner was able to quit his job and devote himself full-time to music. On the other hand, music became so time-consuming that he had to give up painting for most of the 2000s. (In recent years, he has returned to the canvas; he did the portraits that grace the cover and liner notes for “Mr. M.”)

He’s never had much use for the conventional subject matter of rock or country. His milieu is the household; he’s a domestic poet instead of a Southern rebel poet. His songs pad around the house in slippers and a robe, wandering from room to room as if trying to remember what they’re looking for. Car keys? Wallet? That old Jim Nabors record? Eschewing the typical verse-chorus-verse format, his song structures tend to be loose and fluid, subtly mimicking their everyday subject matter. And yet, Wagner can make even a line like “clean the coffeemaker” resonate with deep implications, and such observations accumulate into a portrait of life in all its mundane glory. Closing the album with a declaration of renewed love (“my stupid love has proved that to be without it would be a loser’s bit”) never sounds cheaply cathartic, but like an epiphany in the literary sense — a revelation writ perfectly life-size.

Lambchop is very much a product of the South in general and of Nashville in particular, with a back-porch ambience that mimics the slower pace of life below the Mason-Dixon. Geography informs his artistic temperament as well as his subject matter: This is a man who wrote a song based on Swap Shop, an East Tennessee radio program where listeners can sell anything from tractors to appliances to farmland. More crucially, Wagner is a student of Nashville music history, one well versed in the city’s raft of long-forgotten or never-remembered country hits. He routinely peppers his lyrics with references to unlikely heroes: “I saw the light beyond the sunset, nearby a little country church,” he sings on “Nice Without Mercy,” before undercutting the bucolic kitsch: “And it felt a bit like Little Jimmy Dickens.”

“Mr. M” is dedicated to the memory of another idiosyncratic Southern songwriter, Vic Chesnutt, who died of a possibly intentional overdose of muscle relaxants on Christmas Day 2009. He and Wagner were close friends and collaborators: Chesnutt sang on Lambchop’s 1998 album “What Another Man Spills,” and the band backed him on “The Salesman and Bernadette” that same year. Chesnutt is never named in the lyrics, yet his spirit informs every line, apparent in Wagner’s turns of phrase and roundabout insights. “Loss makes us idiots,” Wagner sings on “Mr. Met.” “You made me spare, like used software.”  These aren’t songs about sobbing grief, but they do take in loss, estrangement and distance. How do you get back to the business of everyday life after such a loss? How do you make art despite your audience dwindling by that crucial one? According to “Mr. M,” you simply notice the small things and let them accrue into some semblance of normalcy, however long and painful the process may be.

But thanks to the upstart pop star’s disastrous performance on “Saturday Night Live” a few weeks ago, Del Rey inspired fountains of Internet ink dissecting her persona and the critical responses to her persona before most people even knew who she was — let alone had a chance to gripe about hearing her songs all the time. She was Twitter famous — Rebecca Black famous — which these days is more famous than you get by releasing a hit album. Now that she has released a hit album, however, the response from critics and fans has been fascinating for what it reveals about the pop-culture machine — as well as the idea of success in America.

Consensus seems to be forming that “Born to Die” is neither as bad as her detractors claim nor as great as her defenders argue. The album is occasionally compelling, but it’s rarely daring. It’s catchy, but more often strained. There are a few fine songs, but many more that stumble about awkwardly. Perhaps more telling, “Born to Die” is most interesting when it’s terrible. Critics are quoting clumsy lyrics about drinking top-shelf liquor and taking bodies downtown, and certainly there are cringe-worthy lines weighing down all these songs. But Del Rey is a risky songwriter, peppering her lyrics with concrete imagery and specific nouns, depicting her world in exacting detail. On “Off to the Races,” she paints an afternoon skinny-dipping as an all-American tableau: “White bikini off with my red nail polish / Watch me in the swimming pool, bright blue ripples.” It’s often evocative, immersing listeners in her private world, but too often the details seem off; lines about “Pabst Blue Ribbon … on ice” and “Jesus on the dashboard” break the spell and deposit you right back in the real world.

Some observers have detected a knowing wink in Del Rey’s performance, as though there’s an element of parody in a song like “National Anthem,” on which she hints she’s “blurring the line between real and the fake.” But that song is bad-movie bad, one of several tracks that drag down the second half of “Born to Die.” Like “Manos: Hands of Fate” or “The Room,” it confounds all critical faculties and almost dares you to read too much into it. As the song wanders from a perfunctory verse to a vacant chorus, it picks up lyrical detritus in its wake, the most famous being:

Money is the reason we exist

Everybody knows it, it’s a fact

Kiss kiss

Is this a Swiftian satire of pop culture in the “Real Housewives” era, or is Del Rey actually embracing a Randian view of existential capitalism? Does it even matter? A bad song is a bad song, no matter its intentions. Besides, even when she begs, “Tell me I’m your national anthem,” her expressionless vocals come across not as ironic, but sourly uninvested.

Neverthelesss, of this writing, it was No. 1 on the iTunes album chart, with the deluxe edition (featuring three additional tracks) at No. 2. That’s higher than Adele and Leonard Cohen, Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay. For an artist with more ups and downs in her short career than the Republican primary, that’s a fairly impressive feat, more or less assuring a decent showing when Billboard announces its definitive sales chart next week. That’s the rub for many observers: Del Rey has achieved a level of success that many feel she hasn’t earned yet.

But pop stars are rarely born; more often they’re made, whether via the popularity of a YouTube clip or the machinations of the musical-industrial complex. It’s not that Del Rey has been heralded and celebrated before she has had a chance to develop her talents and get some experience under her belt. Rather, it’s that Lizzy Grant has been heralded and celebrated before she’s had a chance to truly develop Lana Del Rey as a character. Back in August, she came across as fully formed on her debut single, “Video Games,” billing herself as a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” and taking full advantage of the mystery that surrounds every new artist.

But that was three minutes; “Born to Die” is just under 50 minutes (the deluxe edition comes in closer to an hour), and Del Rey can’t command the audience’s attention for that length of time. There’s no consistency, no sustained point of view as she toggles between Sue Lyon in heart-shaped glasses and Tura Satana in ass-kicking boots. Her voice has some dramatic range, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be much internal logic to how she deploys it from one measure to the next. Of course, we’re not supposed to develop a fully formed impression of Lizzy Grant from “Born to Die,” but we should come away from the album with some idea of who Lana Del Rey is.

Music, it would seem, is merely a means to an end for her, rather than an end in itself. These songs are tools by which Del Rey partitions out her idea of our collective consciousness, and much like Lady Gaga’s debut album, of course titled “The Fame,” “Born to Die” treats celebrity like the inevitable outcome of simply making a record. “Baby, love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio,” she sings on inevitable single, “Radio.” It’s a pretty desperate plea, not least because it assumes that people still listen to the radio.

Perhaps more than the fact that it aspires too blatantly to celebrity, “Born to Die” is divisive because it’s lifestyle music for a lifestyle that Del Rey arguably hasn’t achieved yet. It’s entitlement pop that puts the cart miles before the horse. Del Rey has become a dubious figure not because she’s playing the poor little rich girl during a recession, but because these songs collectively imply that the 99 percent really want to be the 1 percent. If she has turned herself into what she thinks we all want, then we resent her for thinking so lowly of us.

Whatever the case, writing about Lana Del Rey may actually be more interesting than listening to her music. In fact, there are much better pop albums that never receive a fraction of this press, from the compassionate and complex anthems by Swedish singer Robyn to the latest release by tUnE-yArDs, which topped the recent Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll and deals with some of the same issues that Del Rey takes up, only with much more nuance and passion. So Del Rey joins the ranks of Rebecca Black, Charlie Sheen, Tim Tebow, Newt Gingrich — people we debate and discuss not because they excel in their profession, but precisely because they do not. Success has become mundane and predictable — and, as everybody knows, too easy to have bestowed upon you. Spectacular failures, however, are always unique and uniquely fascinating.