PROFILE LADY GAGA:Lady GaGa's mission is to change the world 'one sequin at a time'. But is she the new heir to Madonna's queen of pop, or a mere flash in the musical pan, asks KEVIN COURTNEY.
UP FOR GRABS: the queen of pop crown, slightly tarnished from overexposure, one tenacious owner who has held tightly to it for 25 years, despite several attempts by various wannabes to wrest it from her grasp. Going for a song (and a dance, and a raunchy outfit).
Ever since Madonna got into the groove and compared herself to a virgin, pop has seen a never-ending parade of princess charmings, all trying vainly to step into La Ciccone’s diamond-encrusted stilettos.
They bump and grind their way through ever-more-elaborate dance routines, and coo breathily into the microphone, in a desperate bid to seduce record buyers and get them to swear their undying devotion. Few have stayed the assault course that is the cut-throat world of girlie pop. The ones that did stick it out have had to jump through their fair share of hoops and garters just to keep the public’s attention from wandering off towards another writhing wannabe.
As 2009 gathers pace, however, a new candidate for queen of pop has declared herself – with a stinger missile aimed straight at the dancefloor.
Lady GaGa may not trip off the tongue like Kylie or Britney, but it could be the name tickling everyone’s tonsils over the next 12 months.
And the world has, it seems, gone gaga for this glam-slaming 22-year-old from New York. Her debut single, Just Dance, has stormed to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, knocking X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke off the No 1 slot in the UK, and bumping Beyoncé off pole position in the US. For what it's worth, the tune has also hit No 1 in Ireland, demonstrating that even we are not immune to this global outbreak of Gagamania.
Perhaps this time Madonna Louise Ciccone should be concerned for the safety of her crown jewels. If Madge consults her magic mirror, she might just see a younger version of herself glistening under the glitterball. Joanne Stefani Germanotta was born into a strict Catholic family in Yonkers, New York, and grew up on the city’s Upper East Side. She was, she says, a born entertainer and exhibitionist, singing the hits of Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson into her hairbrush as a child, teaching herself to write songs on the piano, and shocking her parents as a teenager by making her own skimpy costumes to perform at open-mic nights in local clubs.
Germanotta attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart private school in Manhattan, the same school as Paris Hilton. But while high society beckoned for Hilton, Germanotta was drawn to the seedy side of Manhattan, performing in discos and dives around the Lower East Side, following her DIY aesthetic wherever it would take her.
“I did it the way it was supposed to be done,” she says. “I played every club in New York City and I bombed in every club and then killed it in every club and I found myself as an artist. I learned how to survive as an artist, get real, and how to fail and then figure out who I was as singer and performer. And, I worked hard.” The effort won her a place in the prestigious Tisch school of arts at New York University at the age of 17; three years later, she was signed to the Interscope label and was writing songs for the likes of Akon, Pussycat Dolls, New Kids on the Block and Britney Spears. Writing for other artists, she says, helped her to hone her songwriting skills;she has co-written all the songs on her debut album, most of them potential top-10 hits.
She also shares with Madonna the annoying tendency to describe her work in terms of “art”. She refers to her dance routines as “performance art” and claims she’s making “pop music that’s meant for the Louvre”.
“It’s not just about the music. It’s about the performance, the attitude, the look; it’s everything. And, that is where I live as an artist and that is what I want to accomplish.”
SO WHAT SETS GaGa apart from the posse of Barbie dolls and glorified pole dancers currently cluttering up stage and screen? For her growing group of fans, Lady GaGa is Maddy, Kylie, Shakira, Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé and Peaches all rolled into one supercharged ball of peroxide energy. Her debut album, The Fame, is an unashamed celebration of stardom in all its hedonistic, solipsistic glory, and is filled with provocative pop tunes such as Starstruck, Boys Boys Boys, Beautiful, Dirty, Richand I Like it Rough. The sound is an insistent mix of electro-disco and grimy RB, delivered with an attention-seeking urgency, and spiced up with raps, techno beats and highly charged sexual energy.
Nothing new there, then. Madonna did all that in the 1980s, and it somehow seemed more shocking back then. These days, with artists such as Peaches and Li’l Kim pushing the boundaries of good taste, the sight of a sex siren in satin lingerie singing such lines as “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick” shouldn’t even raise eyebrows, let alone temperatures. But January is traditionally a quiet month in pop, so when someone new and exciting comes along to heat up the winter chill with a sexed-up attitude and sizzling tunes, the music press tends to get a bit more steamed up about it.
The UK tabloids in particular have got very hot under the collar about her. When she strutted out in public in her PVC hot pants, a bout of verbing broke out, with headlines screaming: “Lady GaGa soars London temperature with body-baring attire.”
But though there’s little here that hasn’t already been done and dusted with glitter many times before, GaGa carries it off with just enough panache and chutzpah to make you think, maybe, just maybe, she might have the legs to go the distance.
Not everyone, though, has gone gaga over this new pretender to the pop throne. The Guardian’s Jude Rogers reckons she’s a “cheap imitation” of Madonna and her album a “howling vortex of nothingness”.
But with The Famegoing into the top 10 in several countries around the world, and Just Dancetopping the Billboard Hot 100 for the third consecutive week with 192,000 downloads, it seems that this cheap imitation carries a lot of currency with the pop punters.
Irish audiences will soon get to critique the art of Lady GaGa when she performs at Dublin’s O2 on February 1st as the tour support act for Pussycat Dolls. She has spent the past couple of weeks in London rehearsing for the tour, and has professed a love of all things English to the local press. When she dons jodhpurs and marries a gormless English film director, you’ll know the Madge metamorphosis is complete.
GERMANOTTA ALSO draws on iconography from further back in the past in her quest to forge a distinct identity. Her stage name was picked up from Queen's hit Radio Ga Ga, and the lightning bolt that often adorns her face is a flashback to David Bowie circa Aladdin Sane. And she once wanted to be Edie Sedgwick, the doomed Warhol Factory girl who epitomised the basement chic and back-alley art of that era. Germanotta took it all a little too far, getting involved in drugs and almost going off the rails.
But her “blonde ambition” won out and she channelled her obsessions into creating her own girlie show, building up her name through non-stop performing and a seemingly inexhaustible work rate.
These days, she’d prefer to be the “female Warhol”, subverting the art world with her own mashed-up media pop-art creations. Her lofty ambition, she asserts, is to “change the world one sequin at a time”.
Lady GaGa has grabbed 2009 by the short and curlies and injected some old-fashioned glamour, decadence and attitude into a pop world overrun with simpering talent-show contestants and airbrushed RB clones. If she can make it to Christmas, she’ll have only 24 more years to go to equal Madonna’s reign.
But it won’t take that long to find out if Lady GaGa is truly Queen GaGa, or just another lightning flash that quickly went down the pan after just one hit.
- Lady GaGa supports the Pussycat Dolls at the O2, Dublin on Feb 1
CV
Who is she?Joanne Stefani Germanotta, aka pop sensation Lady GaGa
Why is she in the news?The 22-year-old New Yorker has taken the pop world by storm, prompting pundits to breathlessly declare her the new Madonna
Most appealing characteristic:She's got it going on
Least appealing characteristic:She's standing on the shoulder pads of giants
Most likely to say:"But the simulated sex is integral to my art"
Least likely to say:"Let's tone it down a bit"