Poker Face
Authors: Maureen Callahan
Poker Face
THE RISE AND RISE OF LADY GAGA
MAUREEN CALLAHAN
TO BILLY
“Stop feeding me bullshit. Tell me the truth.”
—Lady Gaga, 2009
“I hate the truth. I hate the truth so much I prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day over the truth.”
—Lady Gaga, 2010
Everything is going wrong. This was supposed to be the big
night, the unveiling of her first arena tour as a headliner, and props, costumes, and chunks of the entire stage set, which cost $1.5 million, are missing, stuck in a town just thirty-seven miles away. This stadium, the Manchester Evening News Arena in England, holds 21,000 people and is the largest in the UK; more people come in and out of here every year than any other venue in the world. Her show is sold out, and even though she hates the idea of canceling, she’s so distraught over the chaos and lack of preparedness that she asks if it’s possible. She’s not just putting on a pop show; she’s staging an elaborate five-act rock opera with some twenty costume changes, pyrotechnics, and a hydraulic lift that will elevate her about twenty feet above the crowd. Among what’s missing: an enormous stone fountain that’s supposed to spout blood, topped with an angel and accompanied by gorgeously decrepit backdrop images, like the black-and-white footage that looks straight out of the 1902 Georges Méliès film
A Trip to the Moon.
Lady Gaga, unknown just eighteen months ago and now, at twenty-four, the biggest star in the world, is told no. Canceling is not an option; it’ll cost too much. She may be an exacting artist, but she is also a shrewd businesswoman. She relents, but insists on rehearsing up until the doors are about to open.
So here are the Gaga fans, ages four to fifty-five, lining up outside the Manchester Evening News Arena at six o’clock on this drizzly, chilly winter night, three hours before showtime, excitedly, politely snaking down and around the block. Nearly all the girls—who outnumber the boys by about three to one—are dressed like their heroine, in numbers and fervor not seen since little girls donned rubber bracelets and fishnet headbands in homage to Madonna circa 1984. They’re tottering and trembling on five-inch spike heels, dressed in Day-Glo colors, and have foregone pants in favor of long tops and tights; they’ve donned blond wigs and sunglasses and applied drag-queenish heavy makeup.
Also present are fifty-somethings on first dates; professors and other intellectuals; gay men in their twenties and thirties, many in Gaga-esque makeup; and prepubescent boys and girls with their parents, many in Gaga shirts. Dotting the entrance to the arena are the puzzled middle-aged men with makeshift stands hawking sub-par, unauthorized merch: If it has fur, or blinking lights, or better yet fur and blinking lights, they’re selling it. They have no earthly idea what’s going on—you can see it on their faces—but it’s a recession, and scalped tickets for this show are starting at $150.
While a Lady Gaga performance circa 2009–2010 pulls from hundreds of postmodern pop-art threads, as derivative as it—as
she
—is, it remains wholly original. Gaga is smart enough to know that the limited number of songs in her very young catalog cannot sustain a two-hour set, but the spectacle she’s created sure can. To Gaga and to her fans, “The Monster Ball,” as she calls it, is not just a show: It is, as her life has become, interactive performance art of the highest caliber.
So the explosion of color and sex and kookiness and maybe some good old-fashioned pyro that a Gaga show promises is a huge deal in Manchester, as it will be two nights from now in Dublin. Manchester is a town under a permanently slate gray sky into which six-story slate gray granite buildings disappear. Not much happens except football; the town is home to two Premier League teams, Manchester United and Manchester City. Its lone four-star hotel, where visiting footballers stay, is a four-floor redbrick Marriott at the end of a cul-de-sac. Near that is a Grenada TV station, and it’s a sliver of the size of the average American Costco.
That said, Manchester is known for producing some of the best bands in the world: Joy Division, Buzzcocks, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Oasis. It’s remarkable that swagger and solipsism, in equal measure, come from this painfully placid place. Like the Boston Red Sox or Canada, Manchester is perennially second best, forever dwarfed in size and status by London, yet always, somewhat poignantly, maintaining its competitiveness. It’s been best described by Smiths lead singer Morrissey in the song “Everyday Is Like Sunday”: “This is the coastal town / That they forgot to close down / Armageddon come Armageddon /Come Armageddon come.”
Gaga’s fans are happy to mill about the beer stands inside, taking a pass on opening act Semi Precious Weapons and waiting for her to take the stage. Her career may be in its infancy, but she’s cultivated such loyalty from her fans that they will overlook, the way all who are newly in love do, imperfections big and small. They feel she does the very same for them. They hope.
“My worst nightmare,” says a twenty-year-old college student named Gavin Dell, who is here with his best friend Carrie and who has used blue and gold glitter to create a fantastic lightning bolt over his right eye, “is that that’s an image.” Lady Gaga seems so sincere, he says, but it’s also how sincere she seems that makes him fearful she’s not. It’s a generational thing, the irony of living in a post-postironic age.
“I would
hate
for that to be an image,” he says. “Don’t worry about me; I have a very busy life. But if this is all a press thing—that she’s afraid of boys, of sex . . .” He’s slightly, sweetly embarrassed by how invested he is in her, but he also can’t help himself.
“It seems so genuine,” he continues. “I hope to God it’s true. Yes, she has stylists, but the perception is she’s done it herself.
My
impression is she’s done it herself. I might be wrong. But if I’m wrong, she’s been very well put to me.”
So: Just who is Lady Gaga, and how did she get to be that
way? It’s a question that’s been asked of her over and over, from Ellen to Oprah to Barbara Walters, and she always gives the same answer: She was and is a freak, a misfit, a lost soul in search of her fellow travelers.
That line itself explains why this still very young woman—who grew up in comfort and privilege on New York’s Upper West Side, whose musical heroes include Billy Joel, New Kids on the Block, and Britney Spears, who until two years ago considered American Apparel avant-garde fashion—is so endlessly fascinating. Because to watch her open her European tour in Manchester is to search fruitlessly for the cracks between the girl who wanted to be the next Fiona Apple, a serious, sensitive singer-songwriter, and the glorious, demented art-freak performer on the stage.
When crowds in Europe are sick of waiting, they start doing the wave. And on this first night in Manchester, well on our way to half-past nine, they’re doing the wave. Michael Jackson is playing on a loop, mainly everything off
Thriller,
and the message is none too subtle: This is the girl who has said she wants to be as big as Michael, a girl who, as he did, identifies herself as a freak show, whose own performances are, as his were, ghoulish in a childlike way, sexually provocative but never sensual, spectacles rife with pageantry but bolstered by state-of-the-art pop music delivered by an undeniably terrific, authentic voice.
There’s a white scrim billowing in front of the stage, and just as the crowd is on the verge, the lights go down and the crowd erupts (all great rock acts do this—play with just how taut the rubber band can go before the audience is lost to them for good). A blue grid is projected onto the scrim, and a nebulous blob on the left begins to emerge and move toward the crowd, floating and swirling and taking shape as Gaga. A clock to the right of the screen rapidly runs down the seconds to start time; it hits 00:00:00:00, the scrim drops, and there she is, standing on the top of a staircase to the left, bracketed on one side by a fake storefront advertising, in neon lights, “Liquor,” “Gold Teeth,” and her own paradoxical brand, “Sexy Ugly.” To the left is another industrial scaffolding, with the words “WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE” spelled out in big white bulbs. She’s opening with “Dance in the Dark,” but the first minute of the song is inaudible over the din of the crowd.
Among the people and things Gaga will reference, overtly and covertly, on this night and in Dublin:
The Wizard of Oz;
the late designer Alexander McQueen’s 2006 fashion show, in which Kate Moss appeared as a ghostly 3-D floating hologram; a famous image of McQueen binding a model—face painted white, streaks of red paint streaming from the eyes, mouth gagged with black ribbon—in swaths of white; the Broadway musical
Rent;
the archly art-directed interstitial clips MTV pioneered on its award shows; Elton John and Billy Joel; Rob Reiner’s classic 1984 rock ’n’ roll spoof,
This Is Spinal Tap;
the fashion-world satires
Brüno
and
Zoolander;
Cirque du Soleil; Japanese horror films of the 1950s; shock artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst; downtown New York provocateur Klaus Nomi and his London-based analogue Leigh Bowery, as well as New York City’s later electroclash pioneers Fischerspooner; David Bowie and Freddie Mercury; Tina Turner in
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome;
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Death & Co.”; Marilyn Manson; Walter Hill’s 1979 cult film
The Warriors;
Grace Jones; Dale Bozzio of the eighties new-wave band Missing Persons; Irish dance phenom Róisín Murphy; the rave scene of the mid-to-late nineties and the entire gay culture, sub- and mainstream, of the past three decades; Sally Field in
The Flying Nun;
Fay Wray in
King Kong;
the stark black-and-white aesthetic of the great rock photographer Anton Corbijn; Wim Wenders’s
Wings of Desire.
And, of course, Madonna.
The debt to Madonna is inarguably Gaga’s biggest. Not only does she share a very similar origin story—good Italian-Catholic girl gone bad, working her way through downtown New York City’s art and performance worlds with little money, possessed of a monomaniacal focus on becoming the biggest star in the world—but her career template and persona are also very much the same. Just as Madonna both stole from and helped mainstream gay culture through sexual provocation in her music, videos, and performances, her public playfulness with her own sexual orientation, and her early dedication to then-controversial causes like AIDS activism, Gaga, too, has done all of the above. Her live shows feature a lineup of shirtless male backup dancers, all shaved chests and oversized codpieces, that she calls “my gay boys.” She’s said that she’s had sexual relationships with both men and women, though she also talks about wanting to find a nice man to marry and have babies with. She’s an advocate for gay rights and, with Cyndi Lauper, part of M•A•C cosmetics’ safe sex/HIV prevention campaign.
And, like Madonna, she is constantly shape-shifting, treating her persona like a malleable object, claiming each incarnation to be her authentic self, and now speaking, as Madonna once so maddeningly did, in a clipped, vaguely British accent.
But on these nights, in Manchester and conservative Dublin, in these arenas that have been transformed into the biggest, sweatiest, most wholesomely lewd dance parties on the planet, which will win raves in tomorrow’s tabloids, Gaga’s Madonna reference is very specific. (That Gaga regurgitates and reappropriates so many of her pop-culture precursors is, in itself, a meta-reference to Madonna.) The Madonna represented tonight, though, is the 1990 “Blond Ambition” incarnation, when she sported her Jean-Paul Gaultier cone-shaped bra, thick, level eyebrows, red lipstick, and yellow hair. But it’s not Gaga who’s dressed like that; it’s one of the girls onstage.
In other words: Madonna is her backup dancer now.
