21st Century Girl

When Hot Press first encountered the then 22-year-old Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – better known as Lady Gaga – there was little to indicate that, within less than two years, the diminutive New York bottle blonde would have become the biggest female pop star and most influential style icon on the planet.

Sure, her presciently titled debut album The Fame had hit the No.1 spot in the UK, Canada, Austria, Germany and Ireland, but she was still considered an up-and-coming artist on her home turf in the US. Prior to the album’s release, Gaga was strictly an underground phenomenon. She had just a few thousand plays on her MySpace, a fairly generic website, and a short stint as the opening act for New Kids On The Block to her credit. And that was the extent of her exposure to large American audiences. Much like the similarly flamboyant Scissor Sisters, she was celebrated mostly outside of the States. Although things picked up when her album was released, The Fame still stalled at No 2 on the Billboard charts.
No mean achievement, to be sure, especially for a debut – but there’s no shortage of pretty young things cavorting around in trashy lingerie on the American pop scene. While undoubtedly hugely talented, Lady Gaga wasn’t quite as wholesomely pretty as early Britney, or as sexually alluring as Christina Aguilera. Or that, at least, was the consensus. Many a budding starlet has imploded in the heat of scoring a hit, so there was no guarantee she wouldn’t be forgotten as fast as she’d come, following an appropriately Warholian fifteen minutes of fame.
Of course that didn’t happen. Nowadays, all we hear is Radio Gaga...
The star’s stats are simply staggering. One of Time magazine’s most influential people of 2009, and the highest-ranked newcomer on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list, to date she has sold more than 15 million albums and 51 million singles across the counter (just think how many illegal downloads those figures equate to). Of 144 serious award nominations, she has won a mantelpiece-straining 95. She has more Facebook ‘friends’ than President Barack Obama. Six months ago, she made history by becoming the first artist to hit one billion views of her music videos on YouTube.
“We reached one billion views on YouTube, little monsters,” she tweeted to her seven million Twitter followers. “If we stick together we can do anything. I dub you Kings and Queens of YouTube! Unite!”
How has she managed what amounts to a virtual global takeover? It certainly helps that her music – which she mostly writes herself; lest anyone forget: she was signed to Interscope at the age of 20 – is extremely good, contemporary and in many respects challenging.
“She appeals on so many different levels,” legendary gender-bending Irish pop star Gavin Friday, with whom she played in Carnegie Hall last year, reflects. “From 13-year-old girls to gay kids to lovers of great pop music, she’s right across the market. A good song is a good song, and a good single is a good single. And ‘Paparazzi’, ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Bad Romance’ are just great pop songs. They’d work in any era, whether it’s now or 20 years ago. They’re just great fucking singles.”
Which is true. But it takes more than just great singles to dominate the zeitgeist so completely. Fact is this: while Gaga’s hedonistically giddy mix of dance, disco and electropop is lifted out of the ordinary by some gloriously catchy choruses, she’s much more than a mere musical artist, banging out hit tunes. Indeed, she’s a one-woman pop cultural leviathan who has hit a collective nerve while also taking risks the likes of which most marketing suits would be deeply afraid of.
A huge part of her mass appeal lies in the gloriously comical OTT presentation. She’s the most visually iconic artist of our age, a Dali-esque diva, though her ever-changing look – or looks – owes much to those who’ve come before. The giants whose sartorial shoulders she’s unashamedly standing on include David Bowie, Grace Jones, Madonna, Prince, Boy George, Debbie Harry and Freddy Mercury – all individuals who understood that how you looked could sometimes say as much, or even more, than what you sang. The counter-twist is that Gaga is not content to rely on image alone. She really does have things to say that are worth saying, attitudes that mark her out as a radical figure in contemporary pop.
She’s certainly got the image down, mind. Pretty much every time Gaga steps out in public, which of course is quite a lot these days, it has the potential to spawn international front page amusement, bemusement or outrage (PETA weren’t impressed by her notorious meat dress). Whether she’s wearing shades made from cigarettes or a telephone on her head, has a lobster stuck to her face or is covered in clear plastic bubbles, this is not a girl (we’ll say nothing about those bizarre hermaphrodite rumours) who throws her face on in 15 minutes before running out the door. Rather, it seems, an industrial team of stylists, hairdressers and make-up artists set to work creating yet another Gaga moment.
As Hole’s Courtney Love put it to this writer earlier this year: “It’s like she wakes up every morning and says, ‘Alright boys, do me – and make it cost the most’. God bless, I don’t want 25,000 purple pearls encrusted on me.”
Well, that’s the good thing. It takes all sorts…

As I said, Lady Gaga doesn’t make all of this happen alone. She has her Haus of Gaga team to help, headed up by creative director Matt Williams and stylist Nicola Formichetti. Her increasingly bizarre costumes undoubtedly cost a fortune, but it’s money well spent (her wealth was recently estimated at $62million). A former Tisch School of the Arts student, she understands that in this celebrity obsessed new millennium, image is at the heart of the whole deal. “What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth – and then there’s a lie,” she told New York magazine earlier this year. “The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.
“I can have hit records all day, but who fucking cares?” she continued. “A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, whatever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’ But how wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say, ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’ Because, for a minute, everybody in that room will forget every sad, painful thing in their lives, and they’ll just live in my bubble world.”
Not everyone’s a fan. For one, feminist academic Camille Paglia attacked her recently. “How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?” she asked in a recent Sunday Times magazine cover story. But what’s more important by far is that Gaga has the respect of many of her peers.
When she played Gavin Friday’s star-studded 50th birthday bash at Carnegie Hall last year, she blew the assembled celebrities away.
“Hal Wilner also does the music for Saturday Night Live, and she was doing that show, so he invited her to come along to Carnegie Hall,” Friday recalls. “And she turned up really spontaneously and walked on and performed. I was quite taken with her. She came on wearing just three band-aids over her three essential parts, and performed on an upright piano an acoustic version of ‘Poker Face’ with reinvented lyrics. And she could play and she could sing.
“I was watching her, thinking this is a real musician here – and a real craftswoman and a real singer. You don’t necessarily pick that up from her videos, but behind all of the glam and the glitz and the whatever, there’s a real musician there. The calibre of the musicians on the stage was just phenomenal, and she just stood up to it. Even Lou Reed was impressed. He was standing backstage going, ‘Fuck!’ It was a real eye-opener.”
She has some even more unlikely fans than Reed. Even the notoriously acerbic and difficult-to-impress PiL singer John Lydon gets her.
“I went to a Lady Gaga show and it was so much fun – totally over the top!” he enthused to Hot Press’s Stuart Clark earlier this year. “If you’re going to wear a bra on stage, make sure it explodes. That’s the problem with Madonna – she has no sense of humour. I’ve no problem with her being a tough businesswoman and demanding excellence from everyone around her – I’ve been known to do the same myself – but lighten up, love!
“Madonna said in an interview that she’d never heard of the Sex Pistols, yet a few weeks later there she was wearing a Sex Pistols belt. That doesn’t compute or, like most of the things that have been done in the Pistols’ name, earn me any money. I don’t want to be all stamp-collector-ish about it, but ladies, if you’re going to walk around in a Sex Pistols, MC5 or New York Dolls t-shirt, at least be able to name one of our songs!”
Shirley Manson of Garbage is another unlikely admirer, who rates her over Madge.
“I rarely appreciate pop stars,” she told Hot Press’s Peter Murphy this week. “I have always been drawn to the underground: the sewers, the dirt, but there is something in her that I find honest and endearing... Like she’d have my back in a bar fight, and I can’t help loving her for that. And for the scale of her ambitious vision, which, unlike say Madonna, seems to be inclusive and loving and not cold and distancing.”
Speaking of inclusive and loving, Gaga hints at bisexuality in her songs – she alludes to faking it with men in the ‘Poker Face’ lyric, “bluffin’ with my muffin” – but claims to have little time for bad romances nowadays. And why would she? “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina,” she confessed to Vanity Fair recently (one wag remarked that it’d probably take her half the night just to get undressed!). However, she strongly identifies with the gay community – to the point that Fox News has attacked her as “poison for the minds of our kids” – and this is undoubtedly a major part of her appeal. A significantly large proportion of her “little monsters” are gay teens. More than one commentator has described her as “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.”
According to Miss Panti, Irish gay scenester and landlady of PantiBar, she’s undoubtedly the gay icon of the Noughties: “The gay community is not a monolith and there are differing opinions of course but, in general, the gays love her. Obviously she’s been very vocal in her support of gay causes, and while some take a cynical view of that, I think most people would say that it’s pretty sincere. Most of what she’s done has been related to America, especially gays in the military, but over here she speaks to young gays in particular. Her show is obviously designed to appeal to a gay market – you know, the insane outfits, the emphasis on style, and all that stuff.
“The younger market have been starved of icons in recent years – so the under 25s just worship her. When I was a teenager there was Madonna, Bowie, and even Cyndi Lauper; there were artists who were creative and artistic and appealed to our gay sensibilities. But in the last 10 or 15 years there hasn’t been. Like Britney, they might have liked her because she was a pop act, but there was nothing gay about Britney – she was a children’s entertainer.
“So younger people have been starved for that sort of performer – someone to use video in that way, to be outrageous and to be creative. Whereas in my time we’d loads of it – from glam rock to Madonna to Bowie. That all disappeared in the last 10 years. So when Gaga came along, she was almost revolutionary.”
And is she poison for the minds of young kids? Might there be some truth in the argument that she is guilty of sexualising pre-teens?
“It isn’t an artist’s responsibility to look after the welfare of children,” says Hot Press editor Niall Stokes. “Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s up to parents – and where they’re relevant schools and others who are in the role of guardians. An artist’s first duty is to their work – and Lady Gaga has made sex and sexuality a central part of her subject matter because it is something with which she is genuinely engaged. In fact what she is saying, and her attitude to gay sexuality in particular, is both liberated and liberating. I admire her for the fearlessness she has shown in seeing that through – despite the hostility of the likes of Fox News. The fact that she also makes great hit records makes it all the sweeter.”

So where to next? Lady Gaga has built her international celebrity on the strength of one album proper (although critically acclaimed, 2009’s The Fame Monster was really more of a bonus disc), and extremely clever use of image, video, fashion, media and technology. Next year she will release the follow-up proper, Born This Way. She’s been playing some of the new songs on tour (“I’m beautiful in my way, because God makes no mistakes,” she sings on the title-track, “I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way”) and they’ve been rapturously received by her little monsters – but the Gaga phenomenon isn’t just about her music.
Only time will tell if she can sustain this level of media interest.
“I don’t know if she can keep it up,” admits Gavin Friday. “She’s the first real female superstar of the 21st century, really, and no-one knows what the sell-by dates are these days. Will her star burn out quicker or faster? I don’t know. The point is that she’s just making really exciting glam trash pop. Here’s a 24-year-old acting like a 24-year-old, being dramatic, exciting, risqué, and making great pop records. I think that’s the point.”
Of course, if the Gaga bubble does burst... she probably still has 50,000 more to spare.

The Fame Monster is out now on Interscope.