Story by Jacob O’Gara
Photos as noted
At first blush, Lady Gaga seemed to be merely another derivative pop star. Though it was more Eurovision than American Idol, “Just Dance” was still yet another track about getting wasted and dancing in “the club,” and even though she wore outfits that distorted—deformed, even—rather than showed off her figure, Lady Gaga looked rather like all those blonde, post-Britney pop singers who conquered the charts in the early 2000s.
That was 2008, millions of blog and newspaper and magazine words ago. We’re wiser now. We know exactly what Lady Gaga is: an extraordinarily derivative pop star. But, see, that’s part of her charm; it’s her thing. She’s like Quentin Tarantino, who’s made a career out of other filmmakers’ work and these days doesn’t even try to come up with his own movie titles, or William Burroughs, who literally cut up poems or book passages and rearranged the fragments to form new texts.
Unlike your average pop sensation, who steals because she has no ideas of her own, Lady Gaga is a creative genius because she so shamelessly and ruthlessly steals from her pop-music forefathers (and foremothers). Glam rock, punk rock, Queen, Andy Warhol, Europop, Blondie, Michael Jackson, and, most importantly, Madonna—all were chopped up and stitched together in the recording studio to create Lady Gaga, or as she’s taken to calling herself, Mother Monster. As is often the case when confronted by monsters, it’s hard to look closely and even harder to look away.
This new album, Born This Way, with its if-not-infamous-then-should-be Gagacycle cover, must be Mother Monster’s doing. The Fame, Lady Gaga’s first album, was a smirking parade through the sordid underbelly of celebrity and the pursuit of it, and its eight-track postscript, The Fame Monster, contains some of the most harrowing storytelling set to synthesizers (“Monster” is the most club-friendly song about date rape ever recorded). Born This Way has neither the cool wit of the former nor the dark flair of the latter. It’s not a bad album; it’s just overwrought, humorless, and boring.
The maddening thing about that, though, is that Lady Gaga is clearly very talented. Born This Way has its moments; on a technical level, it’s expertly constructed, and it flaunts a wider palette of sonic influences than its predecessors: “Government Hooker” has a fantastically glitchy and Dark Wave sound; “Bad Kids” sounds like a lost Cyndi Lauper song; and “Born This Way” is so disco it hurts. Gaga’s voice here is also less dull than it was on The Fame. She actually sings on this album, instead of doing that affectless sing-talk she does on tracks like “Poker Face.” Artful production and dynamic vocals should be a powerhouse combination that makes Born This Way soar. Instead, the album is dragged down by Mother Monster’s dead weight, and slogging through its hour-long running time is an exhausting task.
The problem of Born This Way the album is the problem of “Born This Way” the song. It sounds great, just as long as you don’t really listen to it. “Born This Way” is Lady Gaga at her absolute Mother Monster worst—the pop star as motivational speaker. If Gaga wants to go on a speaking tour and tell the bullied of America to “rejoice and love yourself today” then she should. It’d be a great and noble gig. But don’t kid yourself and think that such inspiration-porn makes for a great song. And certainly don’t go around and commit moral blackmail by saying smug shit like “I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.”
Lady Gaga was born Stefani Germanotta, in New York City. Starting when she was eleven years old, she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls school where some of her fellow alumnae include Paris Hilton and Caroline Kennedy. Here, things start sounding less like a pop star’s biography and more like an “Obama was born in Kenya” conspiracy yarn. “Who was Stefani Germanotta really?” If Lady Gaga is to be believed, the pre-Gaga Germanotta “felt like a freak,” and was “made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric.” However, in a New York Post article a “former dorm-mate” said that Germanotta was “a very suburban, preppy, friendly, social party girl.”
Of course, this is probably a case of “perception is reality.” Just because you’re part of the in-crowd doesn’t mean you can’t feel like an outcast (some of those Laguna Beach kids come to mind). However, the period of time when Lady Gaga “felt like a freak” was when she was in high school, when she was a teenager. For Madonna’s sake, every teenager feels like a freak to some degree. It’s all a matter of growing up and moving on. Maybe Lady Gaga’s just a big ol’ drama queen. Or maybe she’s one of those ex-teenagers rapacious enough to look at those normal anxieties and see dollar signs.
Lady Gaga doesn’t have a fan base. She has a cult, a cult of “wounded” outcasts “like her,” people she sort of creepily calls her “little monsters.” And, as her nickname would suggest, she loves them like a mother, apparently, “more than any artist who has ever lived.” But really what does she do for them, besides graciously allowing them to purchase her music and tickets to her shows? Is an artist supposed to love his or her fans anyway? It doesn’t make much sense; if the point of art is self-expression, then why should an artist love the people who admire his or her work? The said artist might appreciate his fans, but it seems odd and even a little repulsive to expect a more profound affection. Lady Gaga—the act of being her—is a business, and a very lucrative one at that. Do businesses love their customers?
Until I get up on stage wearing a Kermit-pelt suit and declare my love for my readers, I’m fortunately just a guy askin’ questions. They are, however, some things for Lady Gaga to think about. Or Mother Monster, or Stefani Germanotta. Whoever she is.
