I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else,” said the 23-year-old known to her mom (eating lunch nearby) as Stefani Germanotta. “I don’t see myself as an heir.” Yet there she was, Lady Gaga in a blond Hollywood bob and black tuxedo-bra combo much like the costumes Madonna wore 20 years ago, discussing her show Monster Ball, that conjures the spirits of Michael Jackson, David Bowie and the punk-rock drag queens of downtown New York and promoting music — the newly
expanded edition of her 2008 debut album, The Fame, greatly enriched by eight new songs and repackaged as The Fame Monster — that pays blatant homage to ABBA, Queen, Eurodisco and Marilyn Manson.
Gaga doesn’t care. She wants you to trace her references. “John Lennon talked about how with every song he wrote, he was thinking of another artist,” she said, making a less expected connection to a pop deity.
She’s yet to attain the status of the Beatles, but in the ever-accelerating pop cycle, Gaga is a top sensation, and many people’s vote for the most exciting artist of 2009. The Fame has sold nearly 2 million copies in the US and
reportedly double that internationally.
The Fame Monster continues this sales sweep, but it also considerably advances
Gaga’s artistic project with some of her strongest songs yet, including the earworm-infested Bad Romance and the sumptuously emotional ballad Speechless.
The world is responding. She’s made friends with Madonna, been interviewed by Barbara Walters and met the Queen of England at the annual Royal Variety Performance. The Monster Ball tour has sold out multiple nights in major cities including Los Angeles.
This is all happening not because Gaga is cute or takes off her clothes but because (to use her favourite word) she is a monster — a monster talent with a serious brain.
Over two hours of conversation, she not only reiterates her assertion of total originality but also finesses it until it’s both a philosophical stance about how constructing a persona from pop-cultural sources can be an expression of a person’s truth — à la those drag queens Gaga sincerely admires — and a bit of a feminist act.
Her new songs address serious themes like women’s shame about their bodies and the need for open communication in relationships; her often physically distorting costumes show that the pursuit of the feminine ideal is far from natural. Her commitment to confront the changing notion of what’s “natural” puts Gaga on the same road travelled by artists she admires, such as the photographer Cindy Sherman. Her frank talk about how female artists aren’t expected to write their own songs or about how young women are afraid to ask for what they need from their sexual partners inches her toward a new
articulation of feminism.
Gaga does view her music as a liberating force. “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves,” she continued. “I don’t make it as a defence. I make it as, OK, guys, it’s been two years, and I’ve made a lot of music, and I know my greatness is individual. And I want every woman to be able to say that.”
This is one of Gaga’s gifts, maybe the one that most distinguishes her from the other talented women directing the pop zeitgeist right now, such as her recent collaborator Beyoncé, her fellow couture hound Rihanna or her rival in redefining blondness, Taylor Swift. Gaga makes outrageous declarations — which, when you break them down, actually make sense. And then she backs them up, not only through her now famously provocative interviews but in her videos, her collaborations with designers and artists, her live performances and of course, those infernally catchy hits.
As good a game as she talks, Gaga’s real language is visual and, of course, musical. Discussing videos like the one for Bad
Romance, which she says is about “how the entertainment industry can, in a metaphorical way, simulate human trafficking — products being sold, the woman perceived as a commodity,” or the Ace Bandage-adorned costume she wore at the American Music Awards, which she said was “meant to be feminine, healing, bondage gothic,” she sounds more like an art critic than an evolving club kid.
Gaga has tapped into one of the primary obsessions of our age — the changing nature of the self in relation to technology, the ever-expanding media sphere, and that sense of always being in character and publicly visible that Gaga calls “the fame” — and made it her own obsession, the subject of her songs and the basis of her persona.
“Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves,” she said. “I guess what I am trying to do is take the monster and turn the monster into a fairy tale.”
“It’s kind of like a crusade in its own way,” she said. “Me embodying the position that I’m analysing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.”
Since the release of The Fame, Lady Gaga has been uncovering new layers within her basic themes. Her public appearances began to not simply provoke but disturb. She made a video for her song Paparazzi that had her in gilded crutches and a leg brace. She turned that vision of crippled glamour even bloodier on the MTV Video Music Awards, an appearance she described as “my first truly original moment.”
She’s worn costumes that recast childhood icons like Kermit the Frog and Hello Kitty into ingénue’s pelts. She’s painted her eyes to look like an anime heroine. In the climactic dance sequence from Monster Ball, she adorns herself in the black feathers of a vulture and the yards-long blond braids of a victimised princess.
“The great thing about Gaga is she always want to push for the most extreme option,” Gary Card, who made the skeletal headgear she and her dancers wore on the AMAs said. “She’s brave enough to let herself be a canvas for a designer to go and really express themselves. Nothing is off limits! With Rihanna and Beyoncé there is an end result of desirability and unattainable sexiness, whereas Gaga is a really interesting bridge between the desirable and the grotesque. She’s not at all worried about looking ridiculous or hideous; actually, I think she thrives off it.”