Music’s almost-accidental icon
A proud idol to the deviants, misfits and outcasts (well, mostly), Lady Gaga aims to bring glam electro-pop to a whole new level. Whether she’ll be usurping Madonna’s throne remains to be seen – because that’s where the test of time will come in.
By Chee Hui Ming
Interview courtesy of Universal Music Publishing
(Picture from Lady Gaga: Official Site)
Assuming her outfits were any indication of her personality, then we’ve almost got Lady Gaga down pat – or so we thought.
Skinny, tall, blonde and heavily made-up, she’s definitely hard to miss as she saunters into the press room at Mandarin Oriental, donning a full-body newsprint leotard paired with a dramatic origami brooch made out of actual newspaper pages, and, of course, oversized shades. In town for the SingTel AMPed private showcase, she’s speaking to an endless, tiresome trail of media fractions at the roundtable interviews.
And in a mere 20 minutes that was over in a blink of a heavily lined and shadowed eye, Lady Gaga reinforces her feisty image, and proves that she has never been, and will never be, a pushover or manufactured pop star. Amazingly still sustaining that young, unbridled ambition, she speaks of her success and future as though she has had a long, arduous thought process behind every minute of her life.
That is, once she’s finally done handling the media frenzy and her assistants quickly usher her away to face another slew of questions.
Having drawn frequent comparisons to (the one and only) Madonna, Lady Gaga quickly remarks that considering oneself a future music icon isn’t very “ladylike”. Still, she’s rather flattered, but declares, “I’m more concerned with doing this the rest of my life, because it makes me happy. But if my second album fails, I would still be playing music in bars, I wouldn’t give up and become a… librarian or something.”
But if we dare say, she’s the modern-day diva – leader of the anti-MTV generation and pop music’s almost-accidental, but definitely present day, icon. Her racy tracks, “Just Dance”, “Poker Face”, “Love Game” and “Paparazzi”, are now staples on radio stations and clubs worldwide.
She once described her style as very “New York” – tough on the outside, and well, even tougher on the inside. But now, as she’s riding the wave of electro-pop hits with that touch of rebellion, some fans are starting to get bored of what they take to be just another product of a marketing gimmick from the music industry. If it were true, Lady Gaga’s selling point would definitely then be that eccentric, Andy Warhol-esque style and attitude towards life.
Except, she’d probably throw daggers at you with her eyes if you even dare suggest that she’s anything but genuine.
For fans looking for her to change things up, be excited for her sophomore album, because from the tongue-in-cheek lyrics of her debut album, Lady Gaga hopes to take just a slight step out of her crystal-studded box with her next release. “If you listen to “The Fame“, there is some painful sentiment that is always kind of masked with something humorous. Even “Brown Eyes“, which is a very sad kind of glam, 70’s record. It’s kind of… funny,” she muses.
Similarly, one of the hardest things to do as a celebrity would be to break from a certain image, especially if you have been commercially viable because of it all along.
Meanwhile, Lady Gaga’s ever ready to challenge herself to stop hiding behind humour and start telling people how she really feels through music. “I actually find most of my piano-based song writing to be very emotional. I always end up crying and there’s eyeliner all over the keys.”
On the other hand, she’d gladly continue her stint as the acerbic yet peculiar “pop cultural Mary Poppins”, while acknowledging what people want and need to see. Perhaps that’s Lady Gaga’s formula for success: just the right mix of sugar and spice – we’re not so sure about ‘everything nice’.
In a good way, she’s also a control freak – on making the “Paparazzi” music video, she talks of her own exhausting perfectionism, and how her involvement in her career isn’t “just about getting dressed and singing in front of the camera while rubbing her tits”.
She adds stubbornly, “I don’t make videos to be played on MTV. I make videos for my fans. If they don’t want to play my video, well, I don’t care. I have YouTube, I have Yahoo!, I have whatever Internet engine I can get my hands on that will play it for me. I have Perez Hilton.”
Appreciate Lady Gaga’s fierce honesty, because that’s definitely one endangered trait in the entertainment industry. She’s far from even considering mincing her words during interviews, and certainly wouldn’t ever get a child-friendly rating.
Still, as this unlikely role model, out and proud for the unpopular, she brandishes that feisty attitude like she owns it. Though she may come off cold and pretentious initially, listen to her speak, and you will be hit by her passion for her “art”, as she calls it.
Criticise her success, laugh at her fame, or even her apparent refusal to wear pants, but don’t expect her to be who you want her to be. In all 23 years of her life, she’s gone from rat holes to royalty, but it hasn’t been easy.
“I stopped trying to change who I was, and just accepted who I am. I like to wear avant-garde clothing. I prefer sequins to sneakers. I much prefer to sit at home by myself all day to write music than to party with a bunch of celebrities and then doing coke in the bathroom.”
Perhaps that’s why living like a queen would not be at the top of her list.
“So the person that you’re talking to in this room, today, is a 100 percent the real me. And the girl that I was until all of this – was dead. She was a lie.”
Without a doubt, Lady Gaga is tomorrow’s Princess of Pop, and a worthy successor to the coveted throne. Madonna is still Queen until she finally decides to give it a rest and Britney Spears is now the Grand Duchess. But let us put our hands, and dancing feet, together to welcome music royalty’s newest addition. Let us give credit where credit is due, because frankly, today’s overcrowded music market is teeming with overstated “artistes” whose only claim to fame is either a sex tape or a heavily-processed pop track.
The race to the top of the pops is long and contentious. Starlets can rise through the ranks in a matter of months and fall from grace in a matter of minutes. But for those whose artistry is the real deal, the reward is legions of fans and a place in music’s history books. Perhaps one day, 10 or 20 years from now, we’ll see Lady Gaga take her prize and her place.
Until then, we can expect her to be ever dancing, ever singing and ever shocking, and doing what she does best – the kind of stuff legends are made of.
