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In the spring of 2011, 25-year-old Lady Gaga, on the cusp of releasing her second full-length album, Born This Way, did something unexpected—at least for a pop star on the rise. I’m not talking about her appearance at the Grammy Awards, when she entered the room in a giant Plexiglas egg, carried onstage on a rustic palanquin. Gaga was already known for her outrageous antics; her arrival in the egg—which she later claimed to have spent three days in before the show, like “creative, embryonic incubation”—wasn’t even her most shocking act at an awards show. (The year before, she had appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing an outfit made entirely of raw meat, a provocation that angered vegans and meat-eaters alike.) The unusual move I’m referring to is that Gaga had been writing a column for the magazine for nearly a year, reflecting on her creative process. She allegedly came up with the idea when she approached Stephen Gan, the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde fashion publication V, with the idea, and Gan noted to the Times that Gaga required very little editing.
Gaga’s six pieces for V—she called them the “Gaga memorandas”—are weird, entertaining, often hilarious pop oddities that feel like a cross between a Diana Vreeland-style stream of consciousness and an art-school thesis. With exaggerated self-assurance, Gaga insists that she ultimately doesn’t need to explain anything to anyone. She is her own greatest work of art, which emerged from her consciousness the moment she decided to leave behind Stefani Joanne Germanotta, the precocious Catholic schoolgirl with the piano on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and start performing shows on the Lower East Side with a stage name and nothing more. “Lady Gaga” was her work of art, she acknowledged, but she came to that conclusion honestly. “Art is a lie,” she wrote. “And every day I kill to make it true.” Her fascination with costumes and “natural inclination toward grandeur” made her seem like “a master of escapism,” she added, but “maybe I'm not escaping. Maybe I'm just being. Being me.”
There’s something delightful about Gaga’s arch, stilted style on these speakers. She flirted with an academic affectation that was rare in her early, mass-market singles. Gaga’s first album, 2008’s The Fame, was replete with loud, catchy choruses and often tacky lyrics that were easy to remember and impossible to forget. On the electro-pop hit “Just Dance,” she sings about losing her phone and “getting wet” in a club before shouting out, “Just dance, gonna be good, da-da-doo-doot.” On her second single, “Poker Face,” she uses explosive consonants to repeat the phrase “Ppp-poker face” over a hard-hitting, triumphant beat. On “LoveGame” and “Paparazzi,” she sang about “riding a disco stick” and being “garage glam,” lines that were just silly enough to be cleverly infectious. By the time “Bad Romance” came out in 2009, Gaga had proven she could create a hit out of pure bravura and nonsensical slogans. The complex refrain “Roma, roma-ma / Gaga, ooh-la-la” briefly freed us all from the pressures of logic. Gaga took the unstoppable environment of dance-pop as a jetpack to launch herself, like a curious astronaut, to the edge of fame. Since her teens, she’d been a student of celebrity, emulating pop stars (David Bowie, Prince, Madonna) who managed to stay in the aesthetic flow. She studied Warhol biographies and, during her Fame tour, showed a video of herself portraying a character called “Candy Warhol.” That she directly (and explicitly) wove all of her influences into her work was, she said, not just a pastiche, but rather a method of invention—or, as she put it in V, in characteristically grandiose terms, “The past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.”
Gaga, 38, is pop’s grande dame. No longer the record industry’s enfant terrible, she’s become one of its most enduring institutions. Still, I was reminded of her teenage speakers again while listening to her new album, Mayhem. Sonically and thematically, the album, her sixth solo project (or seventh, depending on whether you count her 2009 reissue of Fame, The Fame Monster, as a standalone effort), marks a return to what her fans call her “imperial era” — those inexhaustible early years when she was obsessed with becoming world famous and analyzing what that meant. Mayhem Is the First Major Album
Sourse: newyorker.com
