Long Live Lady Gaga

By Michael Hardy

“The duty of an artist is to continually astonish” — Oscar Wilde

I know Lady Gaga. That is, I used to know her, before the wig and the spandex and the Ziggy Stardust shoulder pads, back when she was a brunette and wore halter-tops and went by the name Joanne. I’ve seen her throwing back Patron in Nolita, pouring Grey Goose in the East Village, and emptying a PBR on the LES. I’ve seen her passed out on subway cars and I’ve seen her nursing a hangover the next morning in the freshman writing seminar I teach. Yeah, I know Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. But who is Lady Gaga, and what the devil did she do to that poor girl?

Of course, I have no better answer to that question than any other starstruck fan. If I were interviewing Gaga on some red carpet, I’d probably stick my microphone in her face and, in the time-honored fashion of celebrity journalism, ask who she was wearing. In other words, don’t look to me for explanations. Like Madonna or John Wayne, Germanotta just seems to have woken up one afternoon and decided to be someone else. A little glitter here, a little tinsel there, a little make-up — okay, maybe a whole lot of makeup — and presto: instant celebrity. It’s as if she were born, fully-formed, from the head of David Bowie.

We know a few things about Gaga. We know that she likes to sing and dance and design costumes and pretend to be Andy Warhol. We know she likes to please people with her music and startle them with her épater-le-bourgeois videos. We know that was fake blood when Gaga attempted to one-up Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” moment at the VMA; at least, we hope so. And we know that her first album, The Fame, is maybe the best pop album of this generation.

Like all great musicians, Gaga has lashed herself tight to her time and place. Her sound, attitude, and aesthetic can be pinpointed to an approximately ten-block radius of the Lower East Side. The Fame marks the apotheosis and, ultimately, the exhaustion of the LES’s long-standing obsession with 1980s pop culture; after Gaga’s coup de main, New York’s hipsters will simply have to resurrect another decade — the ‘20s, anyone? Gaga is so New York, so exquisitely LES, that you sometimes wonder how her music ever made it out of that nylon ghetto to the wider world. Of course, it has made it out, spectacularly so. Gaga’s first two singles each summitted the international charts, and her third is making its ascent. I recently watched fans dancing to Poker Face at a cricket match between Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

The Hegelian irony here is that by burrowing deep inside the highly parochial LES sensibility, with its arcane semiotics and inscrutable fashions, Gaga has emerged with an album of authentically global appeal. Naturally, most Sri Lankans don’t care what the woman is singing — they know a great beat when they feel it. And The Fame is sufficiently cosmopolitan to pass muster with the folks in Ibiza; it was produced by a Moroccan-Swede, for god’s sake. But in conception and sensibility, the album is instantly recognisable as a mélange of trendy influences, from Freddie Mercury to Blondie to Cyndi Lauper.

Not that that’s a bad thing. At a time when Madonna seemed to have no more skin to shed and her many imitators were scrambling to fill her place, Gaga snuck up overnight and usurped the throne. Will absolute power corrupt absolutely? Nobody knows, and nobody cares, because the radio is playing Just Dance for the billionth time, and for the billionth time you’re feeling everything that the best pop music can make you feel. Long live the queen.