Chapter Four
Art of the Steal
Gaga kept calling around town on her own behalf, trying to book herself into clubs and parties. Her success, as ever, was scattershot. “I remember she used to call around and ask people, because she did call us,” says New York City nightlife fixture Ladyfag, who at the time was, along with well-known club kid Kenny Kenny, behind a party called Sebastian. She has trouble recalling exactly when this was, but she says Gaga’s performances had been generating buzz, so she booked her.
“It was her and two other girls,” says Ladyfag, “and she was wearing a bra and high-waisted panties with mirrors all over them. And it was just a big joke. Everyone was kind of making fun: ‘Who does she think she is, coming in here?’ ”
That said, Ladyfag thought Gaga was great. “She did maybe three or four songs, and one of them was ‘Boys Boys Boys.’ She was fabulous. It was a great performance.” Contrary to her backstory, Ladyfag says Gaga was not a presence in gay clubs, either as a performer or a partier. (In New York City, gay clubs have long been places where trends and careers are launched.) Actively cultivating a gay following, as a performer, says two things: You are open-minded and nondiscriminatory, and you know that a gay fan base not only tends to be incredibly loyal but quite often ahead of the mainstream curve.
“I have nothing bad to say about her, but she is trying to create this whole myth,” says Ladyfag. “It’s not like she was some kid who ran away from home and was hanging out in all the gay clubs, ’cause that’s so not true.” She laughs. “It’s not true. She played a few gay parties, but that was after her album came out. Before she became really big.”
It’s hard to say how much the creation myth accounts for Gaga’s meteoric, global rise. But it’s clear that her music, so polished and accessible, is in no way avant-garde. As talented as she is, she never would have broken through without the wackiness. “Most likely it wasn’t the music, an electro-soul mélange that has made Lady Gaga famous despite its contentedly low aims,” wrote the New York Times’s Jon Caramanica in a review of her first big NYC gig, at Midtown venue Terminal 5, six months after The Fame had been released. He went on to call her music “an odorless, colorless, almost unnecessary additive to the Lady Gaga spectacle.”
In a review of The Fame in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, critic Alexis Petridis pilloried her for her claims of fantastical uniqueness, both musically and aesthetically. Her success, he wrote in his January 2009 piece, “seems to have led Lady Gaga to come to some pretty bullish conclusions about her own originality: ‘I’m defying all the preconceptions we have of pop artists,’ she recently told one journalist, seemingly confident of a place in the history books as the world’s first pretty female singer performing synthesizer-heavy R&B-influenced pop. ‘I’m very into fashion,’ she clarified, all previous pretty female singers having apparently performed their synthesizer-heavy R&B-influenced pop clad in stuff they grabbed at random from the George at Asda half-price sale.”
And yet, in an age of confessional culture, in which “reality” is routinely put on display in tabloids, on TV, on the Web, and we regularly see, as she put it, “legends taking out the trash,” Lady Gaga managed to explode on the pop-music scene as a fully formed entity. Aside from those few performance clips on the Web, there was no trace of the “guidette” Fusari met, very little documentation of Gaga’s development.
Actually, given the ready-made nature of her sound, it’s even more incredible that Gaga sold by-the-numbers dance tracks as mini-revolutions of the soul and a major revolution in the direction of pop music. It’s a true feat of performance art.
“She did a brilliant job of reinventing herself as a naked, visual spectacle that was backed up by really solid songwriting,” says Tony DiSanto, president of programming and development at MTV. He is sitting with Liz Gateley, the network’s VP of series development and the mastermind behind The Hills, in his office in Times Square. The space, like DiSanto himself, is welcoming and unpretentious: There are a few framed pictures and gold records, but these sit low on the windowsill; the medium-sized office is dominated by a huge flat-screen TV, which is situated between a black leather sofa and DiSanto’s desk. He is in blue jeans and a black shirt, ankle across his knee.
“When I started hearing the buzz, it was through people who were tweeting through Facebook. I’ll never forget her first big show here in New York”—on May 2, 2009, the Terminal 5 show. DiSanto—who is in his forties, yet whose shock of black hair and natural exuberance makes him seem much younger—wasn’t there, but he remembers getting “an explosion” of texts and tweets from people in the industry who were.
“It reminded me of when Guns ’N Roses did that show at the Ritz in 1988”—which was an MTV special taped in New York—“and all of a sudden it was like we’d just seen the second coming of rock. Her buzz explosion through social media was, for me, this generation’s version of the Guns ’N Roses Ritz show.”
There are only two other performers in recent memory who exploded globally via the Internet: Susan Boyle, the sensitive recluse exploited to brilliant effect by Simon Cowell & Co., and Justin Bieber, the teenage Canadian with an asymmetrical helmet of chestnut hair and dead eyes. Gaga, however, “created a buzz factor for herself before we ever saw an image of her,” says Liz Gateley. Gateley, like DiSanto, is in her forties, yet she, too, with her expensive blond hair, slim frame, and warm manner, comes across as an eternal teenager.
“A year and a half ago,” she continues, “my head of talent came to me and said, ‘You have to do something with this person.’ The buzz was so big, but her imagery had not reached the mainstream fifteen-year-old girl in Iowa yet.” Gateley and DiSanto say they knew it wasn’t a matter of if Gaga was going to break, but when; they began a series of talks with her people about doing a documentary that would use, fittingly, Madonna: Truth or Dare as a template. And then, says Gateley, she just “fired off”—went from no one knowing who she was to mainstream fame so fast that the network lost its window. “We couldn’t even get a time to sit down with her and talk about it,” Gateley says.
Gaga came across, immediately, as both a total original and a walking, derivative mash-up of the greatest pop androgynes of the twentieth century: the aforementioned Bowie, Madonna, Prince. For the urban sophisticate who consumes pop culture, there are deeper, more rewarding references, rivulets leading to tributaries: There’s the late visionary artist, promoter, and dandy Leigh Bowery and singer and performance artist Klaus Nomi, provocateurs and source material for the likes of Boy George (Bowery) and David Bowie (Nomi).
Bowery especially—with his Kabuki-white face, super-exaggerated black lips, and plump body aggressively distorted by painful clothes—made it purposefully difficult to look at him. At times, he didn’t even seem human; as Bowery and Nomi had before, Gaga can make it hard to look at her. She spent the first year of her celebrity wrapping up her face, and still sometimes does; it can be such a visual assault that you have to strain to work through whatever thicket is obscuring her head. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, for example, she wore a red lace minidress, the material snaked up and around her neck and face like some out-of-control haute-couture network of vines—a direct reference to the same look in the late designer Alexander McQueen’s 1998–1999 fall/winter show. (McQueen wound up dressing her and giving her access to his archives, and she wore a head-to-toe look from one of his last collections, made famous for its outsized, sequined “armadillo” shoes, in the “Bad Romance” video.)
Gaga would borrow something deeper from both Bowery and Nomi: the tragic image of the artist as married to the art, forever a loser in love, intermittently sated by random sex but relying on the adulation of the audience to live, devoted to them above all. She currently claims to be single and celibate, but as of this writing, she is actually involved with her stylist, Matt Williams, and has been for some time. “When you’re lonely,” she says to her audience in the short film that runs at the end of her current
show, her face repeatedly contorted and distorted, “I’ll be lonely, too.” It’s a poignant message in this age of false intimacy, of five hundred Facebook friends one never actually sees and thousands of Twitter followers one’s never met.
The current list of Gaga influences is vast and interdisciplinary, and though she claims they’re all personal favorites, those who know her well say they’ve never really heard her discuss the more esoteric ones. The people and things she’s always cited, they say, are hardly obscure: Andy Warhol, Chanel, Donatella Versace. In much the same way her high school and college friends attest that she was a normal, well-adjusted teenager with mainstream interests, those who’d later ask Gaga about her avant-garde reference points would find themselves talking to a flummoxed girl.
“She’d been talking about Warhol and Bowie and Grace Jones—those were her talking points,” says journalist Jonah Weiner, who interviewed Lady Gaga for a Blender magazine cover story in late February 2009 (it never ran; the magazine folded). He says, though, that when he’d ask her a follow-up question, “You’d see she didn’t have an answer prepared, and she’d get cagier. You could see her discomfort level rise. I’d ask her about Warhol and she’d say, ‘He believed that pop culture could be high art, and I believe the same thing.’ And if I asked her to [expound], she couldn’t do it.”
When she brought up the controversial 1974 film The Night Porter, starring Charlotte Rampling as a concentration camp survivor who embarks upon a sadomasochistic affair with the Nazi who tortured her—fashion people love this movie, maybe because it’s so transgressive, but probably for the scene in which Rampling wears tailored pants with suspenders and no shirt and looks utterly chic—Weiner says Gaga was out of her depth. He asked her about the film’s theme, about the notion, he says, “of the victim falling in love with the tormenter. [For her], it was more about how sexy Charlotte Rampling was.” (One question Weiner, who found himself liking her despite having a low opinion of her music, regrets omitting: “I don’t know why I didn’t ask her why she was into this Eurotrash house,” he says, laughing.)
It’s in this way, too, that Lady Gaga is so obviously a product of the Internet age. No longer does familiarizing oneself with the obscure require tenacity and legwork and fruitless trips to vintage vinyl or magazine shops (which hardly exist anymore). Now you just Google it or Wiki it or download it to your iPod and go down the electronic rabbit hole of references—and that’s not a bad thing. But it does tend to result in a facile working knowledge of once-obscure people and art and movements, and that kind of surface knowledge, when masquerading as deep immersion, can be an affront. An underprepared Lady Gaga claiming a deep affinity with decades-old countercultural figures does not go down well with music journalists, critics, and obsessives, whose outsider interests tend to reflect inner alienaton.
She was not as knowledgable as you’d expect during a 2009 interview on the Fuse music network; when the journalist Touré asked, “Do you know what ‘Strong J’ means?” Gaga was taken aback. “Strong J?” she asked. “I’m talking about Grace Jones,” Touré said, and Gaga quickly recovered: “Yeah, yeah, Grace is a huge inspiration to me.” Jones is not impressed: “Well, you know, I’ve seen some things she’s worn that I’ve worn,” she recently told the Guardian, “and that does kind of piss me off.” (Jones’s second album, by the way, was called Fame.)
From German singer Nina Hagen and Missing Persons’ Dale Bozzio, Gaga stole a rough, aggressive sexuality that never read as actually sexy. (There are pictures of Bozzio that, placed side by side with Lady Gaga, look indistinguishable.) From early Peter Gabriel, Leigh Bowery, and Boy George she stole the Kabuki-like face paint. From Icelandic pop star Björk—who lives with art star Matthew Barney, and who had a then unknown McQueen design her 1997 album cover for Homogenic—she stole the aesthetic futurism and the impression that she, too, routinely receives transmissions from another planet. (Back in 1995, when Björk was reaching the heights of her creativity, Madonna stole directly from her—the kimonos, the space-age techno beats—filming a hallucinatory video for “Bedtime Story,” a single that Madonna commissioned from Björk, who, according to industry legend, at first wrote lyrics criticizing Madonna’s unoriginality.)
Moving on: From Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper, Gaga stole the scary makeup, the androgyny, and the construct that she is Lady Gaga 24/7, that this alter-ego long ago subsumed her former identity, that she is never off-duty. (The latter notion is also borrowed from Prince.) She borrowed Gwen Stefani’s sound, and has cited her as a huge inspiration: “[Gwen]’s lined her lips with red since we saw her and she’s never stopped,” Gaga said. “It’s so powerful to me. Her fame was in her mouth. I don’t know where mine is yet . . . my vagina or my hair.”
From Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland, she’s stolen a propensity for overwrought ballads and the tragedy of the overly made-up, romantically unfulfilled chanteuse loved primarily by gay men. From Bette Midler, she stole the outrageous stagecraft and costumes, the unspoken triumph of the unconventional-looking underdog-cum-diva who’d be nowhere without the gays. From the late British fashion muse Isabella Blow—who discovered McQueen—she has stolen many indelible looks almost wholesale. Gaga, as it turns out, was not the first woman to wear a lobster hat. Blow was. (McQueen and Blow were likely inspired by the 1937 collaboration between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí that resulted in their famed Lobster Dress.)
It’s unclear who turned her on to the likes of Bowery and Nomi, obscure pop culture figures who never attained the fame they so desired, but whose art, aesthetics, and attitudes were ripped off, to greater and greater effect, by successive generations. Nomi, who died of AIDS three years before Gaga was born, was a German ex-pat in New York, a trained opera singer who also covered pop songs. He’d perform at the Mudd Club, Max’s Kansas City, and Danceteria, and worked the same kind of exaggerated silhouette—the aerodynamic shoulder pads that created the effect of an inverted triangle over the torso—that Lady Gaga would eventually adopt.
Weiner says that, during his interview with her for Blender, Nomi was one of her references, though she only spoke of him in generalities. She didn’t give Nomi specific credit for her look: “She said, ‘A lot of triangles pop up in my outfits,’ ” Weiner recalls. “ ‘I like the phallic presentation.’ She really enjoys talking about the semiotics of her outfits; she was very studious about how she dressed as this pop/sex symbol to be devoured. But she didn’t want to go down smooth; she wanted to be pointy, to get stuck in your throat.”
Another concept she took from Nomi: the presentation of the artist as a fake. In the 2005 documentary The Nomi Song, one admirer explained that Nomi’s appeal had to do with “the cult of pure artifice and alienation in a culture that has become obsessed with authenticity.”
Madonna, of course, mastered that years ago. And it’s from Madonna that Gaga has stolen just about everything: the sexual and cultural provocations that made her generic pop music that much more interesting; the constant, very serious invocation of “my art”; the cultivation of the gay audience and vocal activism for their cause; the incessant reinvention and reincarnations. At the end of 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare, she’s onstage performing one of her more lackluster numbers—a bland track about family called “Keep It Together”—but she’s throwing in anachronistic, countercultural references and self-help platitudes.
Both Madonna and Gaga source dialogue and costumes from the hyper-stylized film version of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial take on violent, stylish youth run wild in London. In this performance, Madonna’s wearing a black bowler hat identical to the one Malcolm McDowell wears in the movie, and quotes his character’s euphemism for sex: “A little of the ol’ ‘in-out, in-out.’ ” Gaga played the famous score to the film before her show for two years, but claimed she stole that from Bowie, not Madonna.
Both enjoy dispensing motivational advice.
“Most importantly, never doubt yourselves,” Madonna tell
s the crowd.
“You have to love yourself to succeed,” Gaga told the crowd in April 2010, in Japan. “That’s what I did.”
“She took direction from Madonna,” says MTV’s Gateley, “but she’s done it even more brilliantly. Madonna would change images every year, every two years. Lady Gaga changes her image every week.”
One of the constant criticisms about Lady Gaga is that she is far too shrewd and calculating to be as crazy as she presents. “Gaga is not odd,” wrote Sasha Frere-Jones in an April 27, 2009, piece in the New Yorker. He praised her talent and smarts and rightly predicted that The Fame would dominate 2009, but dismissed her invocation of influences like Communist red and Rilke as preposterous: “You can’t find Marx or Rilke anywhere in the music,” he wrote.
Frere-Jones had a point about the Communist red: It sounds cool, but it’s not a motif in her work. He wasn’t wrong about the Rilke stuff, either, though Gaga has expressed a personal affinity for Rilke. She’s said that his “philosophy of solitude” resonates with her, and in August 2009, while on tour in Japan, she tattooed a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet on the inside of her upper left arm: “In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?’ ” She was shot displaying the fresh ink while walking down the street in a long blond wig streaked with purple and pink.
Her aggressive weirdness spawned an amusing post called “Why Do We Find It So Hard to Like Lady Gaga?” on New York magazine’s website, which elicited hilariously polarized reactions:
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