Poker Face

by Maureen Callahan

  “The VMA performance was the big, total platter offering of Lady Gaga to the industry audience who might not have known her then,” says MTV’s Liz Gateley, who adds that it “confirmed” Gaga’s star power. “Hers was the most memorable performance of the evening.” She won Best New Artist. She’d designed herself to be the next day’s headline, but she was thwarted: Kanye West’s onstage bullying of Taylor Swift was the main topic of conversation in the media and the blogosphere.

  After that performance, though, Lady Gaga was a mainstream celebrity in the United States. In October, she received Billboard magazine’s “Rising Star of 2009” Award. On October 4, she performed on Saturday Night Live and took part in an unfortunate skit involving a catfight with Madonna. Her musical performances on the show fared far better: “Gaga looked free and unrehearsed, and tossed off a rare medley worth watching,” wrote Todd Martins on the L.A. Times music blog. “For once, it was nice to see a pop star stretching herself by doing something more than showing some skin and spinning around a pole.”

  “The thing I was most surprised by was her intelligence,” says dancer Christina Grady, who worked with Gaga on SNL and other TV appearances. She recalls Gaga as being very in control and in command, and was there when she began playing around with the radically different version of “Bad Romance” she played on SNL, reimagined as a balladlike intro to a medley that included “Poker Face” but was mainly an ode to New York City.

  “I watched her compose that in front of us, in a room of people with her band,” Grady says. “She did it herself, off the top of her head. She instructed each band member which note to play on each part. She did it in about twenty minutes, max.”

  Days after her SNL appearance, she was a keynote speaker at the National Equality March in D.C. and performed at the Human Rights Campaign National Equality Dinner, where President Obama poked fun: “It’s a privilege to be here tonight,” he said, “to open for Lady Gaga.” Also that month, she performed at the thirtieth anniversary bash at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist Francesco Vezzoli created a portrait of Gaga in his trademark petit-point embroidery. Her dress was designed by Miuccia Prada, as were her dancers’ costumes. Damien Hirst designed her piano; Frank Gehry, her hat. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there.

  On November 23, she released The Fame Monster, which was basically a rerelease of The Fame with eight new tracks. The cover was shot by famed French designer Hedi Slimane, who has also designed album covers for Daft Punk and Phoenix but is most famous for his work at Dior from 2000 to 2007. The Fame Monster debuted at number five on the Billboard Hot 200 and went to number one in eight countries. “This becomes essential for anyone who even remotely likes pop,” said Britain’s NME, adding that “it’s the moment Gaga cements herself as a star.” Spin magazine’s Josh Modell wrote that “Bad Romance” “plays like the best Madonna song in ages.” Rolling Stone was a bit more restrained, calling the album “largely on point.”

  By now she was such a cultural force that even the self-righteously discriminating music site Pitchfork—which specializes in indie rock and alternative music—felt compelled to review the album. They gave it a rave, calling the first single, “Bad Romance,” “arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009” and “template-breaking,” comparing her to an artist working at the caliber of Madonna and Prince at their best and calling her “the only real pop star around.”

  She’d also exhumed the music video as narrative epic. The Åkerlund-directed video for “Bad Romance” was notable not just for its unabashed extravagance and dark humor but for the coda: There she is, propped up on a charred mattress next to a skeleton, staring into space and smoking a cigarette—which, in real life, she’ll do once in a while—wearing a bra that’s shooting sparks, the same one she deployed at Glastonbury. It’s since become a staple of her live show.

  For a girl who’d been accused by critics and peers of being little more than a cultural thief, she was suddenly the one being imitated. Fellow pop stars began copying the Gaga look, shamelessly and all at once: Fergie, Rihanna, future collaborator Beyoncé, Ke$ha, and, most notably, Christina Aguilera, who once cattily said of Lady Gaga, “I’m not sure if it is a man or a woman,” and whose new look and sound and videos are, to put it politely, heavily influenced by Lady Gaga.

  The girl who some stylists deemed tacky, unattractive, too short, unimaginative, and an otherwise blank creation of stylists became, suddenly, a gravitational force in fashion. At the shows in New York, Paris, London, and Milan in fall 2009, the aura of Lady Gaga was everywhere. (Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci was influenced as early as January 2009, when he sent a slew of bodysuits down the runway.) Derek Lam, a great American designer of reserve and quiet elegance, sent pants-less models down the runway. Michael Kors, he of the aspirational-yet-watered-down-Hyannisport look, used her music as the soundtrack to his show. Marc Jacobs’s Fall 2009 after-party—the high point of New York Fashion Week—featured Gaga as a performer and guest of honor. In Paris, Gaultier referenced the no-pants look and sent a sculptural metallic bodysuit down the runway; there were the bows-of-hair at Chanel (Lagerfeld had previously referenced her rival Amy Winehouse in 2008, and uses her other rival, Lily Allen, in ads). McQueen’s show—otherworldy even by his standards—was a Gaga-esque riot of cartoonish beauty, models tottering in the now-famous sequined “armadillo” shoes. (This was one of the head-to-toe McQueen looks she wore in the “Bad Romance” video.)

  She modeled in a Grimm’s Fairy Tales–themed spread in American Vogue’s December 2009 issue and appeared on the cover of the January 2010 edition of American Elle. The fashion trade publication Women’s Wear Daily reported that, in the last quarter of 2009, expensive lingerie, especially corsets, was spiking in sales, a trend the industry credited to Lady Gaga. She told People magazine that one of her goals was to be the subject of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

  In December, she performed for the Queen of England, suspended at least twenty feet above the stage, playing an elevated piano, gothic in its outsized splendor. She was wearing an Elizabethean-inspired red latex dress, eye sockets rimmed with red glitter. This, too, was how she presented herself to the queen. She was one of Barbara Walters’s 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009, and dressed, for the broadcast, like her eighty-year-old interlocutor, who did not seem to get the joke. By January, she was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, performing on a prefab set hilariously meant to evoke a filthy East Village street, eliciting unrestrained glee in the gay men and middle-aged housewives in the audience. (She’d canceled a show the night before, claiming exhaustion; her fans, now known the world over as “little monsters,” didn’t care.)

  Perhaps most tellingly, Gaga has evoked incredibly nasty and public comments from her peers. In addition to the negative commentary from Christina Aguilera (whom Gaga shrewdly and publicly thanked for elevating her profile, and who has since backpedaled) and Grace Jones, rapper M.I.A. recently shared her thoughts on Lady Gaga.

  “She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic,” M.I.A. said. “She sounds more like me than I fucking do! . . . She’s the industry’s last stab at making itself important—saying, ‘You need our money behind you, the endorsements, the stadiums.’ Respect to her, she’s keeping a hundred thousand people in work, but my belief is: Do It Yourself.” (M.I.A. has a child with the son of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., C.E.O. of Warner Music Group.)

  In May 2010, niche folk performer Joanna Newsom got a lot of press for offering her take on Lady Gaga: “I’m mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there’s a high level of intelligence in the songwriting. Her approach to image is really interesting, but you listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks. Smart outlets for musical journalism give her all this credit, like she’s the new Madonna . . . I’m like, fair enough: She is the new Madonna, but Madonna’s a dumb-ass!”

  By early 2010, Lady Gaga had brought
her threat to her ex to fruition: “You won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without seeing or hearing me.” She was omnipresent. In January, she did a four-night, sold-out run at Radio City Music Hall. Among the celebrities in attendance: her idol Yoko Ono, Sting, Donald Trump, and Barbara Walters. The New York Post ran a fashion spread of fans at the show dressed like Gaga. The New York Times, which had run a negative review of her hometown show at Terminal 5 just eight months before, gave her a rave:

  “Her voice is strong enough to expose in a cappella singing, and she backed herself up with her own piano playing, sounding like a female Elton John when she belted out ‘Speechless,’ wearing a huge black-feather shawl,” Jon Pareles wrote. As for her showmanship: “No one in pop is more audacious about headwear.”

  “This pulverizing visual feast overshadows but never entirely overpowers the songs themselves, lurid and luxurious arena-disco anthems,” wrote the Village Voice’s Rob Harvilla, “delivered by Gaga in a surprisingly lithe, confident, booming voice.”

  In February, she opened the Grammys, dueting with Elton John. (In a pretelecast ceremony, “Poker Face” won for Best Dance Recording and The Fame won for Best Electronic/Dance Album.) Giorgio Armani dressed her; she wore, at different points, a lilac spherical gown with Swarovski-encrusted platforms, a green sequined space-alien bodysuit, and an architectural, Ice Capades–inspired minidress that flared in the back to expose her behind. The outfit was topped off with a silver hat that looked like a cross between a lightning bolt and a glacier. The telecast had its highest ratings in six years, and the conventional wisdom in the industry held that she was largely the reason. Then she headed off to England to launch her first arena tour, the Monster Ball.

  By the end of April, Lady Gaga was on Time magazine’s list of the one hundred most influential people of 2010. “An artist’s job is to take a snapshot—be it through words or sound, lyrics or song—that explains what it’s like to be alive at that time,” Cyndi Lauper wrote. “Lady Gaga’s art captures the period we’re in right now.”

  True as that may be—she is a kook, an extravagant, shiny distraction during a seemingly endless recession and two seemingly endless wars, who just wants to make you dance—she is also moving the culture ahead. Her 2010 arena tour, which she conceived as “a post-apocalyptic house party,” doubles as the gayest nongay nightclub on the planet, the crowd waving glow sticks, sweaty, shaved male backup dancers wildly humping the air, the stage, whatever, and it’s selling out around the world, attracting crowds of all ages. The whimsical pansexuality of her show feels both of and slightly ahead of the curve in an era where gay marriage has become a polarizing issue but the president still says he will repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

  The April 2010 viral phenomenon that was U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan remaking the “Telephone” video spoke to that: a fully choreographed production, on a U.S. Army base, with male soldiers flipping each other, falling into each other’s arms and line dancing half-naked in patched-together costumes, one soldier with a huge “LG” logo hanging from a rope around his neck, nearly obscuring his torso. All of this is underlined by the seriousness of purpose on display for a song that’s about a girl telling her boyfriend to stop calling her because she’s in a nightclub.

  “She’s tapping into the curiousness of the moment, in that we’re fascinated by extremes,” says Ann Powers, chief pop critic at the L.A. Times. “Ideas that once seemed on the edge are now in the center. The most popular film in America [was] Avatar, we’re seeing hoarders on television, plastic surgery advertised everywhere in Middle America. We’re really having a moment in which the freak is the central figure.”

  What may be most freakish and original about Lady Gaga: She is a famous person who actually seems to enjoy being famous. She takes care never to be photographed out of character, and really, it speaks to her work ethic. At a time when talentless civilians thrust themselves in front of TV cameras and then complain about blogs and gossip and paparazzi, here is a performer—ironically and perfectly, a former classmate of Paris Hilton’s—who writes a song about wanting to be both pursuer of the paparazzi and pursued by them. Unlike Hilton and her ilk, she has rarely been photographed looking buzzed, does not play out her private life in the press, is never caught doing or saying anything she doesn’t want to be. She is unashamed about having wanted fame and almost never appears to be burdened by it. She allows the public to believe that fame is as wonderful as they might imagine it to be. It’s refreshing.

  “The way she carries herself as a famous person is very cool,” says MTV’s Tony DiSanto. “She’s the ultimate aspirational diva, and she plays that part to a T.”

  That said, she often talks about fame—or, to be exact “the fame”—as her overarching narrative, about having always been famous even when she wasn’t famous, about her own fame being a meta-commentary on fame itself. But it doesn’t quite work; it all ultimately comes off as an attempt to elevate the desire to be famous into some kind of art. And if you say it’s art, who’s to say it’s not, right? As she once said, she’s “a fame con artist.”

  The only other person currently playing with the themes of art and celebrity and hucksterism and the willingness of the consumer to be hustled is the elusive British artist Banksy, who gained international notoriety in late 2006, when, in a collaboration with producer-performer Danger Mouse, he swapped out five hundred copies of Paris Hilton’s debut CD with original music (sample tracks: “Why Am I Famous?” “What Am I For?”) and cover art. He, too, made the 2010 list of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, described by his fellow street artist Shepard Fairey as epitomizing the art world: “the authentic intertwined with the absurd.” Banksy, unlike Gaga, does not grant interviews (except for the 2010 documentary Exit through the Gift Shop) and has never shown his face.

  One high-level music industry source—who thinks Lady Gaga’s “fucking music is great”—points to her accessibility as her only misstep. “The one thing she’s done horribly wrong—she shouldn’t be doing interviews,” he says. “That really lets the gas out of the balloon. If you could picture David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust garb going on Oprah . . . you just go, ‘Eww! No! You’re kinda scary!’ I remember kids getting beat up in high school for having hair like that, [getting called] ‘freak’ and ‘fag.’ If I were managing her, I would say, ‘We don’t talk. You’re bigger than life. You’ve created such a big reservoir for people’s imagination—let people do that, don’t deconstruct it for them.’ Everything else, I think she’s executed to perfection.”

  “She’s an audiovisual artist the likes we haven’t seen since the Madonna/Michael Jackson era in the early days of MTV,” says another industry source. “Others have tried. Janet [Jackson] was interesting, but no one has been as successful at making her video premieres ‘events.’ ” When images from her video for “Alejandro,” directed by frequent Madonna collaborator Steven Klein, leaked online, with one of her legs seeming to be missing, the blogosphere whipped itself into hysterics over whether she’d actually amputated a limb.

  “The other thing about Gaga,” says this same industry source, “is that the twelve-year-old kid gets it and the eighty-year-old grandmother gets it.”

  “I like her, and I’m nearly sixty years old,” wrote Toto Kubwa on the Daily Mail’s website, in response to an article about the “Telephone” video. Gaga has been the subject of a New Yorker cartoon and of a new comic book from Bluewater, the inaugural subject in their “Fame” series. There were rumors that Gaga fan and Olympic ice skater Johnny Weir would skate to her music during the competition; he didn’t, but he hung a portrait of her in his room at the Olympic Village, telling the press, “She needs to be there watching over us, protecting us.” A clip of Weir skating to “Poker Face” at an ice show in Japan in early 2010 has, as of this writing, generated nearly one million hits on YouTube.

  In April 2010, the New York Times reported that teenagers in China stopped saying “Oh my God,�
� in favor of “Oh my Lady Gaga.” The opening title sequence of the HBO hipster-striver show How to Make It in America includes a picture of a twenty-something girl, LastNightsParty-style, making a “little monster” hand gesture—the crescent claw that’s a universal sign for “I am a Lady Gaga fan.” The champion Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao hired a Lady Gaga impersonator for his last birthday party, which, in the Phillipines, is practically a national holiday. When Tamra Barney of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives of Orange County announced this spring, on the air, that she was getting a divorce, she invoked Lady Gaga’s mantra, exclaiming, “I’m a free bitch!” In April, the Philadelphia Phillies’ mascot, dressed in a bastardized version of Gaga’s red lace McQueen ensemble, danced to “Bad Romance” as the crowd hollered and laughed. After Madonna, Lady Gaga was the second artist to be the subject of a tribute episode of the Fox network’s breakout hit Glee. She is a constant topic of conversation in high-fashion magazines and downmarket tabloids. She is a lead story somewhere at least once a day. She is a universal subject of fascination.

  She is also, according to conventional wisdom in the industry, on track for a decades-long career. “If she didn’t have the God-given talent, the whole shtick wouldn’t have any legs,” says this source, who adds that she needs, like her idols Madonna and Bowie, to reincarnate herself. “I don’t want to make any comparisons, but there are certain artists—Ke$ha—who you look at, like, ‘What do you do for an encore?’ I think that’s why you’re seeing her standing next to people like Madonna, Elton John, Cyndi Lauper, who are all coming out to see her and [endorse] her. It’s kind of the reverse of the Lil Wayne approach, where it’s all current guys endorsing him. Here you’re having the leaders of the old school, established superstars like Beyoncé, saying, ‘I want to work with Lady Gaga.’ That shows you where she’s going to go next.”