Poker Face (16 page)

Perhaps most tellingly, Gaga has evoked incredibly nasty and public comments from her peers. In addition to the negative commentary from Christina Aguilera (whom Gaga shrewdly and publicly thanked for elevating her profile, and who has since backpedaled) and Grace Jones, rapper M.I.A. recently shared her thoughts on Lady Gaga.

“She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic,” M.I.A. said. “She sounds more like me than I fucking do! . . . She’s the industry’s last stab at making itself important—saying, ‘You need our money behind you, the endorsements, the stadiums.’ Respect to her, she’s keeping a hundred thousand people in work, but my belief is: Do It Yourself.” (M.I.A. has a child with the son of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., C.E.O. of Warner Music Group.)

In May 2010, niche folk performer Joanna Newsom got a lot of press for offering her take on Lady Gaga: “I’m mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there’s a high level of intelligence in the songwriting. Her approach to image is really interesting, but you listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks. Smart outlets for musical journalism give her all this credit, like she’s the new Madonna . . . I’m like, fair enough: She is the new Madonna, but Madonna’s a dumb-ass!”

By early 2010, Lady Gaga had brought her threat to her ex to fruition: “You won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without seeing or hearing me.” She was omnipresent. In January, she did a four-night, sold-out run at Radio City Music Hall. Among the celebrities in attendance: her idol Yoko Ono, Sting, Donald Trump, and Barbara Walters. The New York
Post
ran a fashion spread of fans at the show dressed like Gaga. The
New York Times,
which had run a negative review of her hometown show at Terminal 5 just eight months before, gave her a rave:

“Her voice is strong enough to expose in a cappella singing, and she backed herself up with her own piano playing, sounding like a female Elton John when she belted out ‘Speechless,’ wearing a huge black-feather shawl,” Jon Pareles wrote. As for her showmanship: “No one in pop is more audacious about headwear.”

“This pulverizing visual feast overshadows but never entirely overpowers the songs themselves, lurid and luxurious arena-disco anthems,” wrote the
Village Voice
’s Rob Harvilla, “delivered by Gaga in a surprisingly lithe, confident, booming voice.”

In February, she opened the Grammys, dueting with Elton John. (In a pretelecast ceremony, “Poker Face” won for Best Dance Recording and
The Fame
won for Best Electronic/Dance Album.) Giorgio Armani dressed her; she wore, at different points, a lilac spherical gown with Swarovski-encrusted platforms, a green sequined space-alien bodysuit, and an architectural, Ice Capades–inspired minidress that flared in the back to expose her behind. The outfit was topped off with a silver hat that looked like a cross between a lightning bolt and a glacier. The telecast had its highest ratings in six years, and the conventional wisdom in the industry held that she was largely the reason. Then she headed off to England to launch her first arena tour, the Monster Ball.

By the end of April, Lady Gaga was on
Time
magazine’s list
of the one hundred most influential people of 2010. “An artist’s job is to take a snapshot—be it through words or sound, lyrics or song—that explains what it’s like to be alive at that time,” Cyndi Lauper wrote. “Lady Gaga’s art captures the period we’re in right now.”

True as that may be—she is a kook, an extravagant, shiny distraction during a seemingly endless recession and two seemingly endless wars, who just wants to make you dance—she is also moving the culture ahead. Her 2010 arena tour, which she conceived as “a post-apocalyptic house party,” doubles as the gayest nongay nightclub on the planet, the crowd waving glow sticks, sweaty, shaved male backup dancers wildly humping the air, the stage, whatever, and it’s selling out around the world, attracting crowds of all ages. The whimsical pansexuality of her show feels both of and slightly ahead of the curve in an era where gay marriage has become a polarizing issue but the president still says he will repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The April 2010 viral phenomenon that was U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan remaking the “Telephone” video spoke to that: a fully choreographed production, on a U.S. Army base, with male soldiers flipping each other, falling into each other’s arms and line dancing half-naked in patched-together costumes, one soldier with a huge “LG” logo hanging from a rope around his neck, nearly obscuring his torso. All of this is underlined by the seriousness of purpose on display for a song that’s about a girl telling her boyfriend to
stop calling her because she’s in a nightclub.

“She’s tapping into the curiousness of the moment, in that we’re fascinated by extremes,” says Ann Powers, chief pop critic at the
L.A. Times
. “Ideas that once seemed on the edge are now in the center. The most popular film in America [was]
Avatar,
we’re seeing hoarders on television, plastic surgery advertised everywhere in Middle America. We’re really having a moment in which the freak is the central figure.”

What may be most freakish and original about Lady Gaga: She is a famous person who actually seems to enjoy being famous. She takes care never to be photographed out of character, and really, it speaks to her work ethic. At a time when talentless civilians thrust themselves in front of TV cameras and then complain about blogs and gossip and paparazzi, here is a performer—ironically and perfectly, a former classmate of Paris Hilton’s—who writes a song about wanting to be both pursuer of the paparazzi and pursued by them. Unlike Hilton and her ilk, she has rarely been photographed looking buzzed, does not play out her private life in the press, is never caught doing or saying anything she doesn’t want to be. She is unashamed about having wanted fame and almost never appears to be burdened by it. She allows the public to believe that fame is as wonderful as they might imagine it to be. It’s refreshing.

“The way she carries herself as a famous person is very cool,” says MTV’s Tony DiSanto. “She’s the ultimate aspirational diva, and she plays that part to a T.”

That said, she often talks about fame—or, to be exact “the fame”—as her overarching narrative, about having always been famous even when she wasn’t famous, about her own fame being a meta-commentary on fame itself. But it doesn’t quite work; it all ultimately comes off as an attempt to elevate the desire to be famous into some kind of art. And if you say it’s art, who’s to say it’s not, right? As she once said, she’s “a fame con artist.”

The only other person currently playing with the themes of art and celebrity and hucksterism and the willingness of the consumer to be hustled is the elusive British artist Banksy, who gained international notoriety in late 2006, when, in a collaboration with producer-performer Danger Mouse, he swapped out five hundred copies of Paris Hilton’s debut CD with original music (sample tracks: “Why Am I Famous?” “What Am I For?”) and cover art. He, too, made the 2010 list of
Time
magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, described by his fellow street artist Shepard Fairey as epitomizing the art world: “the authentic intertwined with the absurd.” Banksy, unlike Gaga, does not grant interviews (except for the 2010 documentary
Exit through the Gift Shop
) and has never shown his face.

One high-level music industry source—who thinks Lady Gaga’s “fucking music is great”—points to her accessibility as her only misstep. “The one thing she’s done horribly wrong—she shouldn’t be doing interviews,” he says. “That really lets the gas out of the balloon. If you could picture David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust garb going on
Oprah
. . . you just go, ‘Eww! No! You’re kinda scary!’ I remember kids getting beat up in high school for having hair like that, [getting called] ‘freak’ and ‘fag.’ If I were managing her, I would say, ‘We don’t talk. You’re bigger than life. You’ve created such a big reservoir for people’s imagination—let people do that, don’t deconstruct it for them.’ Everything else, I think she’s executed to perfection.”

“She’s an audiovisual artist the likes we haven’t seen since the Madonna/Michael Jackson era in the early days of MTV,” says another industry source. “Others have tried. Janet [Jackson] was interesting, but no one has been as successful at making her video premieres ‘events.’ ” When images from her video for “Alejandro,” directed by frequent Madonna collaborator Steven Klein, leaked online, with one of her legs seeming to be missing, the blogosphere whipped itself into hysterics over whether she’d actually amputated a limb.

“The other thing about Gaga,” says this same industry source, “is that the twelve-year-old kid gets it and the eighty-year-old grandmother gets it.”

“I like her, and I’m nearly sixty years old,” wrote Toto Kubwa on the
Daily Mail
’s website, in response to an article about the “Telephone” video. Gaga has been the subject of a
New Yorker
cartoon and of a new comic book from Bluewater, the inaugural subject in their “Fame” series. There were rumors that Gaga fan and Olympic ice skater Johnny Weir would skate to her music during the competition; he didn’t, but he hung a portrait of her in his room at the Olympic Village, telling the press, “She needs to be there watching over us, protecting us.” A clip of Weir skating to “Poker Face” at an ice show in Japan in early 2010 has, as of this writing, generated nearly one million hits on YouTube.

In April 2010, the
New York Times
reported that teenagers in China stopped saying “Oh my God,” in favor of “Oh my Lady Gaga.” The opening title sequence of the HBO hipster-striver show
How to Make It in America
includes a picture of a twenty-something girl, LastNightsParty-style, making a “little monster” hand gesture—the crescent claw that’s a universal sign for “I am a Lady Gaga fan.” The champion Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao hired a Lady Gaga impersonator for his last birthday party, which, in the Phillipines, is practically a national holiday. When Tamra Barney of Bravo TV’s
Real Housewives of Orange County
announced this spring, on the air, that she was getting a divorce, she invoked Lady Gaga’s mantra, exclaiming, “I’m a free bitch!” In April, the Philadelphia Phillies’ mascot, dressed in a bastardized version of Gaga’s red lace McQueen ensemble, danced to “Bad Romance” as the crowd hollered and laughed. After Madonna, Lady Gaga was the second artist to be the subject of a tribute episode of the Fox network’s breakout hit
Glee.
She is a constant topic of conversation in high-fashion magazines and downmarket tabloids. She is a lead story somewhere at least once a day. She is a universal subject of fascination.

She is also, according to conventional wisdom in the industry, on track for a decades-long career. “If she didn’t have the God-given talent, the whole shtick wouldn’t have any legs,” says this source, who adds that she needs, like her idols Madonna and Bowie, to reincarnate herself. “I don’t want to make any comparisons, but there are certain artists—Ke$ha—who you look at, like, ‘What do you do for an encore?’ I think that’s why you’re seeing her standing next to people like Madonna, Elton John, Cyndi Lauper, who are all coming out to see her and [endorse] her. It’s kind of the reverse of the Lil Wayne approach, where it’s all current guys endorsing him. Here you’re having the leaders of the old school, established superstars like Beyoncé, saying, ‘I want to work with Lady Gaga.’ That shows you where she’s going to go next.”

During the last week of January 2010, Gaga shot the video
for “Telephone” with Beyoncé; Jonas Åkerlund, who’d done the “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” videos, also directed this one. The vision: a high-fashion mash-up of American film genres, from women-in-prison-sexploitation to grindhouse to whimsically homicidal set pieces lifted from Quentin Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 1
(Tarantino loaned her the “Pussy Wagon” from that film), and a denouement swiped from
Thelma and Louise.
The plot: Gaga’s thrown in jail; she gets a call from Beyoncé, who gets her out; the two take off on the open road, making lots of double entendres; they pull into a diner, where Gaga pretends to be a waitress and poisons everyone in the place, except Beyoncé. Then there’s a dance number. She and Beyoncé, wanted by the police, engage in a high-speed chase before probably driving off a cliff.

With that video, Gaga made Beyoncé seem cooler than even marriage to Jay-Z could; here’s one of the most wholesome, clean-living R&B superstars on the planet playing lover to Gaga’s jailbird and a homicidal maniac herself. As importantly, Gaga is seen wearing a pair of sunglasses built out of smoking cigarettes. The glasses now have their own Facebook page.

Gaga also continued to make fun of the hermaphrodite rumors that had never quite died down, having one prison guard say to another, after stripping Gaga down and throwing her in a cell, “I told you she didn’t have a dick.”

“It’s her vision, pretty much,” says a “Telephone” extra named Alektra Blue, who works as a porn star; Åkerlund put out a casting call through the adult-entertainment company Wicked Pictures. “She was basically co-directing it. She makes her own rules; she’s very fierce. She was saying, ‘OK, I want to do this, and I want to get this shot, and can we do it over again? Because I don’t feel like I nailed it.’ She was very adamant [about] getting the right shots.”

“The way people were talking,” says porn star Jessica Drake, another prison-scene extra, “[the concept] was largely hers, but Jonas was structuring it for her.” Like Blue, Drake was struck by Gaga’s attention to detail, staying on-set to monitor every shot, every setup, to make her opinions heard.

She has always been about control: During a 2008 interview with a journalist who wishes to remain unnamed, she gave direction, too: “I don’t want to [come across] as too quirky or smart,” Gaga said. It was OK to mention that “I’ve done a lot, [but] I don’t want, ‘prodigy at [age] seven.’ ”