Of course, Gaga, like Manson, did at one point have parents and a civilian name. Stefani Germanotta was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Italian-American parents. Her father was an Internet entrepreneur. At the age of four, she started playing piano and by 13, she was writing songs. As a teenager, she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, the same prestigious high school that Caroline Kennedy and Nicky and Paris Hilton attended. And she was miserable. “When we had off-days where we didn’t have to wear uniforms, I used to wear my outfits and I would really get made fun of,” she told China Daily. “It lost me my self-confidence and I suppressed myself for a while.”
Soon she began performing in underground clubs in Manhattan. At 17, she devised a performance art show with her long-time collaborator DJ Lady Starlight. “I was lighting hairspray on fire and doing go-go dances to Iron Maiden records in Indian headdresses and a bikini,” she told British talk show host Jonathan Ross. She loved the effect of dry ice on stage, she said. There was never enough fog in these venues for her liking, so she used to carry her own fog machine in her purse.
In Lady Gaga’s world, mainstream success and artistic purity have never been incompatible. At 19, after dropping out of art school in New York, she moved to Los Angeles and signed a deal with Def Jam Records after music mogul L.A. Reid heard her singing down the hall from his office, but she was dropped three months later—she said they just didn’t get her. She began writing songs for other people (she has contributed songs to albums by the Pussycat Dolls, Fergie, the New Kids on the Block and Britney Spears), and eventually caught the attention of executives at Interscope Records, where she signed on in 2008. Her album was co-produced by the R & B artist Akon.
In her own mind, Lady Gaga’s success marks the triumph of the weirdo arty misfit in a world dominated by popular kids. She once described her audience as an “army of outsiders”—the artistic kids, the weird kids, the gay kids, the kids everyone laughs at. “And I love that,” she told MTV.com, “because that’s who I was. We’re all together and they get it. It’s our own little world.”
But despite all of her outcast pretensions, Lady Gaga’s path to success could not have been more conventional. Her songs are catchy and accessible, with colourful, silly, sexual euphemisms (among the most often repeated: “I want to take a ride on your disco stick” and “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin”). But there’s nothing particularly earth-shattering about the music itself. “Take out all the outward trappings of fashion and performance art,” says Max Valiquette, president of the Toronto youth marketing firm Youthography, “and her rise is not terribly different from Britney Spears’s: get discovered at a relatively young age because you’ve got some musical talent; have someone who’s got some credibility take an interest in you; work behind the scenes or with someone for a little while and then platform to your own album, hopping on the backs of other people’s success until finally you’re pushed to No. 1 on the charts. That describes 100 different pop stars. What’s different for her are only the outward trappings.” Of course, for Lady Gaga, outward trappings are the whole point. Her MO is pop star as illusionist. To see beyond the image is to kill the effect.
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