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been procrastinating for years on an essay exploring how lady gaga chose to be weird as a positioning strategy in order to get the attention (for her hard-won talent) that would make her a star. she knew she couldn't get to where she is by playing it straight
if she set out to be this classy, elegant, sophisticated artist from day 1, I don't think anybody would've taken her very seriously. she's attractive but not 99.9th percentile attractive in the land of perfect faces. so she competed for attention in an orthogonal way. it worked
she knew that, when she broke onto the scene around 2008-2010, the market was interested in electro-pop-ish dance music. so that's what she made – biding her time before she could eventually release her more intimate, personal songwriting (that nobody would've cared about then)
her latest project, A Star Is Born, is fascinating to me. It's a remake of a 1934 classic, and has playing this earnest, shy, straightforward singer. It's a work of fiction, but artist-art connotations are real (and Gaga knows this better than most). It has us *reimagining* her
I mean, just look at the hair. She uses a hair color that seems pretty close to what her natural color was. Significantly, I don't think she's ever used this hair color during her career as Lady Gaga. So the feel-good "authentic"-looking story is actually kiiinda dishonest ykwim
I don't fault Gaga for that. I love her. I think she's a real artist, a real talent, a real visionary, a real genius. She's in the business of giving people what they want while simultaneously finding a way to communicate her vision as an artist. Her 2009 VMA performance was whoa
anyway yeah I think Gaga is one of the greatest marketing / PR minds of our generation. incredibly talented artist. I hope she has a long, illustrious and successful life. People throw around words like "legend" & "genius" far too easily these days, but I think she's on the path
“Gaga is our pop laureate of the grand entrance, our patron saint of operatic ingress. She has never, in a decade of global fame, been content to simply appear in a room; she has to plummet into it, shimmying down a cable like a diamond-encrusted spider.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/magazine/lady-gaga-movie-star-is-born.html
One of my favorite Gaga performances of all time, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. IMO you could've titled this The Society Of The Spectacle https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1088035135226765313
Nice 9 minute overview of her career (how do you upload videos longer than 2mins 20secs on Twitter...?) https://twitter.com/itsgodgabitch/status/1099351800359145472?s=21
when I said "procrastinating for years", turns out I could've put a number on it: 8 years
