LADY GAGA, THE MOST FASCINATING ARTIST OF 2009
Things weren't going well for young Stefani Germanotta, an 18-year-old from the Upper West Side, at the Bitter End. It was Friday night at the famed Greenwich Village club and the chattering NYU kids in the audience -- there because the place didn’t card -- outnumbered the handful of misfit East Village friends who had come to see her play. “See the lonely girl,” she sang in her agile and slightly husky voice, letting her fingers fly up and down the keyboard of the beat-up house piano like the child prodigy she once was, “out on the weekend, trying to make it pay.” Set up on the piano’s soundboard, Germanotta’s own portable disco ball spun tiny shards of light and her laptop spat out beats, but no one was listening.
She thought of her hustle to book the show, calling the club and posing as her own manager. She thought of the cramped, piss-smelling dressing room she’d have to go back to and how, if she failed here, the Bitter End would be her bitter end. Fuck this, thought Germanotta. I’ve got to do something. So Germanotta shrugged her shirt from her slender shoulder and pulled it over her head. She tugged off her skirt. The little Italian firecracker sat on stage in the Village in her fishnets and her underwear and sang. The audience was gape-mouthed and agog, unsure whether this was part of the act or not. They gawked and, almost unwittingly, began to nod their heads to the music. They were hooked. Later, Germanotta would identify that moment as a turning point. “I felt a spontaneity and nerve in myself that I think had been in a coffin for a very long time.” By the time her set ended, Stefani Germanotta had disappeared and Lady Gaga was born. “At that moment,” she says, “I rose up from the dead.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Abk1jAONjw
Five short years later Lady Gaga -- whose name was inspired by the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga” and bestowed upon her by producer Rob Fusari because her theatrical vocals reminded him of Freddie Mercury -- has become an international pop sensation. But even that description is too modest. Tiffany was an international pop sensation. Neneh Cherry was an international pop sensation. Though she has released only one album, 2008’s The Fame, Gaga is much more. Her style is imperious, her defense is impregnable -- in short, she’s ferocious.
At 23, Gaga has become only the third artist in history to score three number 1 hits from a debut album on Billboard’s Mainstream Top 40 chart, and her fans, pledging allegiance to Gagaland, are a nation unto themselves. Her music, catchier than a cold in February, is compulsively hummable and burrows so deeply into the psyche, you’ll catch yourself staring into your fridge at 3 o’ clock in the morning murmuring, “muh muh muh mah” and not know how long you’ve been standing there. In the dying light of the CD era, and at a time when pop music has been run off the charts by hip-hop and mopey emo, The Fame has sold more than 3 million hard copies -- plus another 20 million track downloads -- worldwide. But even the fame of The Fame fades next to Gaga herself, whose wild, shocking outfits have spurred an interest in avant-garde fashion unseen, perhaps, since King Louis XIV.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bESGLojNYSo&feature=channel
The influence of Gaga is pandemic. In Belgium, The Fame went gold; in America it went platinum; in New Zealand it went double platinum. Try to remember a night out at any gay bar anywhere when “Pokerface,” “Just Dance,” or “LoveGame” wasn’t played at least once. Statistically speaking, if you have ears, you’ve probably heard Gaga’s music. If you have eyes, you’ve seen her. If you have a mind, you haven’t forgotten her. That’s the first rule of Gagaland: Be life-changing, historical, and memorable. “Those are,” she says, “the three things that are important to me.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mB0tP1I-14
A little brunette lighting bolt of energy born in Manhattan to Joseph and Cynthia Germanotta -- Catholics with a healthy appreciation for the arts and the good sense to recognize a star when they bore one -- Gaga began playing piano at 4 and composing at 13 under the tutelage of several gay mentors. “I had a few gay piano teachers. I was in acting class and ballet from a very young age, and I remember being around a lot of gay boys in dance class. I feel intrinsically inclined toward a more gay lifestyle.”
She did Ellen before Leno, performed in gay clubs before straight ones, and plugs the gays constantly in interviews, even those with straight publications. Despite a lesbian subtext to “Poker Face” -- the song is about, among other things, a woman lusting after a woman while dating a man -- Gaga says, “I myself am not a gay woman -- I am a free-spirited woman: I have had boyfriends, and I have hooked up with women, but it’s never been like ‘I discovered gayness when I was dot dot dot.’ ”
A life of glamour is an ethos to which every gay -- from the 17-year-old Dominican tranny voguing in his bedroom to the tanorexic middle-aged Miami circuit queen -- can relate. It’s one reason we love Gaga. Another, of course, is that Gaga loves us back. Gayness is in Gaga’s DNA.
Her devotion to gay culture is unparalleled by any other artist operating at her level of visibility or success. “When I started in the mainstream it was the gays that lifted me up,” she says. “I committed myself to them and they committed themselves to me, and because of the gay community I’m where I am today.” Earlier this year, in her acceptance speech for her MuchMusic award for best international video, Lady Gaga thanked “God and the gays.” That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. “I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,” she says, “It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.” 
If glamour and vanity and music are the sparks that animate Gaga, she relies on a vast reference library to give herself a body. She regularly plunders her predecessors, finding time in her whirlwind schedule to make stops at museums. The ’80s synthesizers of The Fame are just part of Lady Gaga; she herself is synthesis. She’s been compared to and compares herself to Christina Aguilera (who thought she was a tranny), Madonna, Debbie Harry, David Bowie, and Grace Jones, but her reading list is more Patti Smith (Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is one of Gaga’s favorite books) and her frank sex talk is straight out of blueswoman Bessie Smith’s 1920s catalog. “I need a little hot dog on my roll” isn’t so different from “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin.”
Gaga may sing about sex a lot, but she does it with a hyperbole and naïveté bordering on ironic. Unlike her provocative predecessors, most notably Madonna, Lady Gaga seems less interested in sex than in talking about talking about sex. Lady Gaga doesn’t care whether you think she’s sexy. She just wants you to think. Her body is a small, highly bosomed, well-proportioned, deadly delivery system programmed to explode the way you look at music, sex, fashion, fame, and everything that came before. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVEG793G3N4&feature=channelShe’ll take, as she did at the MuchMusic Awards, the missile cone bra, last seen during Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour, and rig it to shoot fire from her breasts. Madonna and the other pop matriarchs should take cover. Lady Gaga may nod their way, but she won’t bow. “Lady Gaga is more like a collection of quotes than a singular performer,” Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers wrote. “Every move she makes, every crazy ensemble she wears, can easily be traced. She’s a human mash-up, a sample bank, recycled and reused.” As Gaga herself puts it: “You’re only as great as your best references,” and in the epic eight-minute clip for “Paparazzi,” she proves it by riffing on film noir, Cindy Sherman, cyborgs, Macbeth, Lindsay Lohan, and horror films of the ’50s. Of the video she notes, “There’s an art to fame. Even in the most humiliating and defaming moment of your life, you’re still ready for the camera.”
The monster lives and demands to be fed. Gaga cannibalizes herself to feed it, exposing more and more of herself. She finds immunity in confession, detailing her shocking drug antics and sexual peccadilloes with an avidity that outstrips the paparazzi.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ladygagaofficial?blend=1&ob=4#p/f/6/d2smz_1L2_0
“Everyone knows what my breasts look like, who I’m sleeping with, what my real hair looks like, and when I’m wearing wigs—all the information is out there,” she says, not without pride. “But somehow there’s an ambiguity that hovers.” That ambiguity is the constant desire to peek behind the curtain to glimpse the real Gaga. Too bad the curtain doesn’t exist. As Powers put it, “the split between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ seems to have closed. This isn’t because the quest for authenticity has been abandoned. It’s because, for artists like Gaga, fake has become what feels most real.”
Though Lady Gaga is rarely caught in the same outfit twice, the disco ball runs like a leitmotif through her wardrobe. She wore a homemade disco ball bra in the video for “Just Dance” and a dress made from dissected disco balls at the Glastonbury Festival in England in June. On stage, the angular mirrored dress refracted the fervent faces of her fans, happily bouncing up and down. Each one sees in Gaga a reflection of him or herself, picking from her array of looks and melodies and messages those that appeal to them. Gay, straight, misfit, mall rat, teen, tween, or twink, look at Gaga and you’ll see yourself.
Lady Gaga made The Fame and The Fame made Lady Gaga famous. In return, she’s become fame’s greatest apostle.
“What I want to deliver, as a message about fame, is that anyone can have it. My fame lives in my friendships, in my convictions about the power of art and love -- you could have 500 pairs of shoes that cost 10 cents and still be famous.”
In a culture where kids close their eyes and dream of being a contestant on Big Brother, Gaga’s fame free-for-all is an irresistible message for those yearning for a fame monster of their own. And when it comes accompanied by more hooks than a fisherman’s tackle box, it’s a message few can resist. Is it true? Lady Gaga’s poker face is notoriously hard to read, but “This isn’t the Lady Gaga newscast,” she says. “Nobody gives a shit what is really going on -- everyone wants me to tell them a story. Art is a lie, and every day I kill to make it true.”
No one really knows what she'll do next. And that, of course, is how rumors get started. Go Google and read all the crazy speculation about how she's really a man, the elaborate story about how she's a Satan-worshipper brainwashing us with her songs, that she's a talentless puppet. The truth might be harder to believe than the conspiracy theories.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ladygagaofficial?blend=1&ob=4#p/f/3/qrO4YZeyl0I
At 23, she's already broken Billboard records and sold millions of albums. She writes all her own lyrics and music. She carefully curates her image along with a handpicked group of stylists and artists she's dubbed the Haus of Gaga. She's quite suddenly a very powerful woman in what's still a man's music industry. She's not just selling sex; she's selling art — which may be the most terrifying idea of all.
