Originally Posted by Sullen Girl
(Post 9924061)
It is late in the evening when Lady GaGa arrives, wearied by tour rehearsals, television shows, radio appearances. She yawns theatrically, her fluffy false eyelashes droop, and she slumps into her chair, a little awkwardly, in her PVC corset and knickers.
Lady GaGa is the 22-year-old New York recording artist currently enjoying the No 1 spot in the UK singles chart with Just Dance, an homage to overindulgence and the restorative effects of dancing. The song is her opening gambit from her debut album, Fame, a ceaselessly hedonistic, sexually charged rumination on modern pop culture which sounds at some intervals like Ace of Base and at others like the soundtrack to a weekend in Vegas, but mostly bears something of a close resemblance to the music of Pink and Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani - a blur of pop and dance and pelvic thrusting that simultaneously makes a grope in the direction of female empowerment.
Having successfully subdued the charts, GaGa is now touring with the Pussycat Dolls, delivering shows that combine pop music with risque costuming, choreography and home-made video. "I just shot these art films called 'crevettes'," she says huskily. "That's what I call them. It means shrimps, in French," she adds helpfully. "And shrimps are small, but decadent and tasty, which is how I think my films should be." The crucial thing about Lady GaGa is that she sees herself as not just another pop muppet, but as a living, breathing work of art. As well as writing songs for herself and for others (including Britney Spears and the aforementioned Pussycat Dolls) and producing her crevettes, she has her own fashion house and an entourage she likens to Warhol's Factory, and insists that not only are her songs inextricably linked to their performance and to her life in general, but also that she is doing something tangibly different from anything ever done before. "It's got a real, genuine, like, soul of innovation," is how she defines her music.
Born Joanne Stefani Germanotta, she was raised in Manhattan, and even in childhood she was a performer and a proponent of a DIY aesthetic. "I was in the Three Billy Goats Gruff when I was in kindergarten," she recalls in her lazy Italian-American drawl. "I was the big billy goat. I decided to make my billy-goat horns out of tinfoil and a hanger." She attended the same school as Paris Hilton, the Covent of the Sacred Heart. "I went to a lovely school and I got an incredible education," she says. "And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, 'cos I'm very smart." She taps her head. "I don't know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think." She searches for an example. "If I decide to make a coat red in the show, it's not just red," she explains. "I think: is it communist red? Is it cherry cordial? Is it ruby red? Or is it apple red? Or the big red balloon red? I mean there's like so many ****ing different kinds of red. And so you have to say, well, what are we trying to say in this scene? Is it a happy red? Or a sad red? Is it a lace red? Or a leather red? Or a wool red? It's like there are so many components to making a show and making art, and my school taught me how to think that way."
The success of Just Dance has been a long time coming. "We've been trying to get it played in the US since March," she says. Many of the American radio stations recoiled, concerned both by the song's content and, she insists, by its musical innovation. "I mean it just doesn't sound like Katie Perry's I Kissed a Girl - which is a beautiful, lovely, amazing hit record and it sounds like a radio hit," she says. "My song doesn't sound like a radio hit. I mean it does, but it doesn't. Now here in the UK it might, because electro-pop is not this stinky underground thing, it's a real genre. But in America electro-pop is dirty underground music." There are other mainstream artists, she concedes, who have brought dance music into the records, "But I am taking it to another level. I mean my records are borderline dance records. They've got a real electro-rock heart and soul, and the vibe of the sentiment is pop, but there's a lot of people that were like, 'This is a dance record.'"
To convince the American public of the brilliance of her music, Lady GaGa's tactic was simple: "I played show after show after show and murdered every single one of them," she recalls. "In the arena I'd look at everybody and go: 'Some of you know this song and me, and some of you don't.'" She says the words in a tone that hovers somewhere between seductive and threatening. "'But you're sure as hell gonna know who the hell I am before I leave this arena tonight.' And then I would sing my record. And it's just relentless and fearless and I'm gonna ****ing make my mark this year, right now. I just really, really have been the kind of person's that unstoppable, and I've never let anything get in my way."
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