There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold . . . Next week Stefani Germanotta will rock Dublin for three sold-out nights at the O2, wowing her little monsters with her exploding breasts and strange piano technique. LEAGUES O'TOOLEclimbs the stairway to Gaga heaven
A CONSTELLATION of diamond-cut planets drifts behind her. Her piano is encased in what looks like a jagged chrome- plated ice sculpture. She descends the shimmery silver steps, fists clenched, summoning the power of Freddie. We are the champions, no time for losers. On closer inspection she wears what looks like a tinfoil rain mac with healthy shoulder pads and a headpiece made of cheap plastic lampshades, almost Devo-esque in shape.
She is Katie Something-or-other, X Factorcontestant. Tonight Matthew, she is Freddie Mercury, or should we say Lady Gaga as Freddie Mercury, which makes sense because we all know without Freddie there would be no Gaga. Katie knows that. Katie is smart. Although she won't win, Katie is doing well enough in this competition with limited talent and blazing ambition. Katie, though, is merely a molecule of the bigger picture: the Cult of Gaga.
In real life, Gaga wouldn’t dream of entering a degrading (albeit brilliantly orchestrated) TV pop contest. Nah, she’s the type to wait until she becomes very famous, then make a well-paid guest appearance. In a giant bath tub, if you don’t mind. Gaga likes to make a splash.
In fact, Gaga likes to make a splash every time she makes a public appearance, whether it’s one of her fantastically grotesque live shows or picking up yet another Grammy, MTV, NME, Brit or Ascap figurine. At the time of writing she has scooped 95 awards from 144 nominations – a serious strike rate. Not too shabby for a lady with just one proper album and a clutch of singles. That’s a lot of awards, a lot of shiny mantelpiece ornaments, a lot of speeches. More importantly, that’s a lot of costumes.
When we talk about Gaga being on a level with the kings and queens of pop – the Freddies, Jackos, Princes, Bowies, Madonnas of this world – we’re not just talking about pop songs. With Gaga we’re talking about the theatre of pop and the work that goes into it. We’re talking about the team of people behind it, the costumes and set designs, the character creations, the concepts, the references and the commentary, the choreography, the performance, the directors. We’re talking about the crazed adoration it inspires and the analytical examination it requires. We’re talking about the very dreams that gave birth to it, and the vision and determination to see it through.
But all this inspiration and perspiration has to orbit around someone or something. And in this case the chosen one is 24-year-old Stefani Germanotta, an Italian-American Catholic New Yorker.
Germanotta’s ascent has been marked by a series of trial-and-error experiments from the moment she dived headfirst into the New York artistic community. Spells at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, the Lower East Side dive circuit, the burlesque scene, the electronic music scene, experimenting with drugs, short-lived recording and publishing deals, developing shows with downtown performance artist Lady Starlight, writing pop songs for Britney, NKOTB and Pussycat Dolls, and being immersed in the avant-garde fashion scene all seem to have contributed in some way. By projecting all these experiences on to the blank canvas that is Stefani Germanotta she was able to create the monster that is Gaga.
Having reached this point, though, how does one maintain the Cult of Gaga without just becoming another irritating in-your-face pop star?
Perhaps Gaga’s most valuable lesson from the underground arts scene was to embrace the ridiculous. And, wow, does she embrace it fearlessly. When admirers compile lists of their favourite Gaga moments, more often than not they refer to her wardrobe rather than her discography. Because when it comes to fashion, Gaga does it all – from the burlesque- and dominatrix-inspired sexual imagery and artistic hair sculptures to flat-out madness: the raw meat outfit donned at the VMAs, the bubble costume and (my personal favourite) a coat made entirely out of Kermit the Frog cuddly toys.
The fearlessness isn’t just about dressing up in mental clothes. It’s about having a sense of humour, being an entertainer, creating a fantasy and never losing sight of it.
“I’m still latching on to the fact that people think I’m sexy. This is like a new thing for me, because for the first year of my career everyone called me a tranny robot and thought I had a little penis. Now these things, my aesthetic, my way of dressing, my performances, the way I speak and carry myself are now transitioning from this sort of weird place to a mainstream place,” commented Gaga last year.
But she is also keen to stress that “the conception that Gaga is kooky for the sake of being kooky is so wrong. We think it’s beautiful. We love avant-garde, but we don’t do it for the sake of avant-garde.”
Sure, there’s been a few songs too: the coldly commercial European-styled disco anthems Just Dance and Poker Face, the bizarre Bad Romance, which almost re- imagines Boney M’s Serbian folk-disco classic Rasputin into a demonic thumping industrial-pop monstrosity complete with a parody of Madonna’s Vogue breakdown. And let’s not forget Gaga and Beyoncé’s wonderful road trip in Telephone, a sprawling storyboard pop video created with director-collaborator Jonas Åkerlund that manages to cram in references to Kill Bill, Thelma Louise and dozens of women-in-prison sexploitation flicks, Gaga’s own bisexuality, mass homicide, the poisoning of Tyrese Gibson, a pair of shades made of smoking cigarettes, and more fashion statements than the Pet Shop Boys’ entire videography, all of which is set to some lovely chopped up Auto-Tune, killer Honey B verses and a fancy piano interlude housed in another pumping Euro-club smash.
That said, in terms of songs, Gaga has a long, long way to go to reach the pantheon of icons. What suggests that she might have what it takes though is her sense of the bigger picture – the consummate 21st- century pop star: smart, artistic, versatile, provocative and absolutely sure of who she is and where she’s going.
“Fame is both the birth and the death of the artist,” she says. “The minute you become famous the very thing that tells the whole world about you is also the thing that shoots your art right in the face. I think when I get my photo taken falling out of a limousine, it does nothing but amplify my celebrity and not my artistry – and I’m not a celebrity. I’m going to do everything I can to protect my work. I want to be around for a long time.
“I’m not interested in being a celebrity. I’m interested in a being an artist. I don’t think there’s a very fine line. I think it’s very clear who is a celebrity and who is an artist. The catch is that when you make pop music you meet people in certain scenarios, people show up, there’s cameras everywhere. Of course I get my picture snapped with lots of different people. I’m a nice person, I never say no.”
The idea of Gaga not wanting to be a celebrity might seem a little weird given how successful, famous and ubiquitous she already is, but when you examine the tawdry DNA of the average contemporary pop star, the wannabe talent-show lapdogs reliant on red tops, lad mags and gossip glossy inches to leap-frog real stars in that redundant indicator they call the charts, someone like Gaga, steadfast in her beliefs and vision cuts an impressive figure.
Even with a huge lobster stuck to her face.
Lady Gaga plays the O2, Dublin, on October 26, 27 and 29. All shows sold out
