Lady Gaga: The pop icon – and film star – who is the architect of her own fame
With the Oscar buzz building over the singer’s turn in Ridley Scott’s ‘House of Gucci’, Roisin O’Connor charts the rise of a pop icon
A viral clip from the House of Gucci trailer shows Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani, sipping an espresso while out on the ski slopes. “I don’t consider myself a particularly ethical person,” she says. “But I am fair.” She taps her spoon against the cup – one, two, three times – in a truly menacing manner.
The artist born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was destined for drama in every sense of the word. Raised in Manhattan, New York, she’s been going the extra mile since she was in kindergarten where, for a school play, she made her own billy-goat horns out of tinfoil and a coat-hanger. Her idols were Madonna (of course), Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and David Bowie. “I strive to be a female Warhol,” she told The Guardian in 2009. “I want to make films and music, do photography and paint, one day, maybe. Make big, museum, art installations.”
She studied at the Collaborative Arts Project 21 in New York, via the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, before dropping out to pursue her music career. After working as a songwriter for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, she signed a deal in 2007 with Interscope and Akon’s label, KonLive Distribution. Later, reports would emerge that a Facebook page had been created by some of her Tisch classmates, titled: “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.”
She called her debut album The Fame. It was a sizzling, electro-pop dance sensation, luxuriating in themes of celebrity, lust, obsession, hedonism and money, honey. Her lyrics were sharp, funny and succinct: “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”, she sings on “LoveGame”. Then, on “Boys Boys Boys”: “I like you a lot, lot / Think you’re really hot, hot”.
Not everyone adored it. “Cheap, nonsensical drivel,” one critic declared. “Lacking in originality,” said another. One review painfully underestimated her, remarking sarcastically that she was “seemingly confident of a place in the history books as the world’s first pretty female singer performing synthesiser-heavy R&B-influenced pop”.
“She is made of amazingness,” went The Independent’s review of her reissue, The Fame Monster. “If this is her idea of a stopgap release, we’re looking here at a major talent indeed.” The Fame Monster added eight “yin” tracks to The Fame’s “yang”, including “Bad Romance”, “Alejandro”, and “Telephone”, a collaboration with Beyoncé. Both works received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year. Today, she stands as one of the most successful artists of all time. She’s sold more than 27 million albums and won multiple Grammys.
Not content to rely on industry tastemakers to promote her the right way, Gaga sought out her own audiences, the future fans she knew would connect with her. One early TV appearance came in the form of reality show The Hills, in 2008. It’s quite astonishing to watch now: cast members Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port are preparing for an event for record label Interscope, where they’re told about “some girl named Lady Gaga who apparently is their new big signing”.
The news barely elicits a shrug from the two girls, caught up as they are in their own drama. But there she is, Gaga, resplendent in her peroxide-blonde wig with a silver lightning bolt across her face. A year later, she promoted her single “Bad Romance” in the US drama series Gossip Girl, about an elite group of wealthy students, one of whom (character Blair Waldorf) has her stepfather arrange a private concert.
Already an LGBT+ icon by this point, Gaga, who is bisexual, cemented that status with her second album, 2011’s Born This Way. Its themes pivoted away from wealth and towards messages of self-acceptance, most memorably in the title track (“Don’t be a drag, just be a queen”). While singing of inclusivity, however, Gaga’s sound was as excessive as it had ever been.
She paid tribute to her Italian-American heritage with “Americano”, adding little flicks of Latin guitar, a pulsating Europop beat, and a little nod to Renato Carosone’s “Tu Vuò Fà L’Americano”. A retrospective review in Pitchfork noted: “With the exception of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, mainstream pop hasn’t sounded this big since.”
Artpop, released in 2013, was her most blatantly Warholian album to date, but was marred by an ill-advised collaboration with the now-incarcerated R&B singer, R Kelly. Gaga, a sexual assault survivor herself, apologised in 2019 both for her “poor judgement” and “for not speaking out sooner”. She later issued a new version featuring fellow pop singer Christina Aguilera. Her next project, Cheek to Cheek, involved a much better collaboration, with legendary crooner Tony Bennett. There, Gaga proved she still had surprises up her couture sleeves, as critics found her to be a credible jazz singer.
In 2016, Gaga released what was arguably her first artistic misfire: her fifth album, Joanne. Reviews of the singer’s newly stripped-down sound were lukewarm; she was praised for experimenting but, ultimately, it paled in comparison to her extrovert pop antics. Despite this, Joanne was still a commercial success, debuting at No 1 and making Gaga the first woman to have four US No 1 albums in the 2010s.
She returned to form in 2020 with Chromatica, which included fist-pumping dance-pop anthems like “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” ft Ariana Grande. “Rejecting the sparse, passive-aggressive thumps that have proliferated pop’s mainstream while Gaga’s been away from it, the album has beats that wallop you round the head,” The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard wrote in her review. “For 16 tracks, it barely takes a breath.”
As her music began blowing up the charts, Gaga was blowing up the red carpet. Her famous meat dress, designed by Franc Fernandez and styled by Nicola Formichetti, dominated conversation at the MTV awards in 2010. Fans and fashion houses crane to see what she wears to the annual Met Gala. She’s as much a fan of helping to propel new designers into the spotlight – simply by wearing their clothes outside – as she is of those in the big leagues: Alexandra McQueen, Versace, Dior, Gucci.
“Gaga has brought many designer names to a wider audience than would ever have been possible before,” Alexander Fury, fashion features director of AnOther magazine told The Guardian this month. “It’s a bit like the Madonna-Gaultier effect – only Gaga, fabulously, has no loyalty and wears all kinds of different designers.”
Gaga was nominated for Best Original Song at the 88th Academy Awards in 2016 for “Til it Happens to You” – co-written with Diane Warren for the 2015 documentary film The Hunting Ground. She later won in the same category for “Shallow”, from A Star is Born, at the 91st awards – a film that also garnered Gaga a nomination for Best Actress. In his review for The Independent, Geoffrey Macnab said that Gaga gives a “soulful, heartfelt” performance and that she and Bradley Cooper “bring an impressive intimacy and tenderness to their scenes together”.
Gaga is the architect of her own fame. She has an uncanny sense for the things that drive her fans, and the rest of the world, wild. She makes outrageous comments during press tours – who can forget the “100 people in a room” statement about her A Star is Born co-star, Cooper? And these remarks are always delivered completely deadpan, so assured is she of her own greatness. Reports of her commitment to method acting have been fuelled by Gaga herself, including that she imagined herself as a panther for her House of Gucci role.
She claims to have stayed in character for 18 months, inhabiting the mannerisms she had taken on as Patrizia Reggiani. “I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her,” she told Vogue. “I remember I went out into Italy one day with a hat on to take a walk. I hadn’t taken a walk in about two months and I panicked. I thought I was on a movie set.”
In a recent junket, she recalled driving past the site of Maurizio Gucci’s death in Italy and feeling a “pin drop” in her stomach. She asked herself, “What have I done?”, because she was so in character.
Clearly, this hasn’t helped Gaga in every aspect of her performance. It’s widely agreed that her accent in House of Gucci, which is supposed to be Italian, comes out more Russian. Even her dialect coach thinks so. But that hasn’t stopped the intense speculation that, come the 2022 Oscar nominations, Gaga’s name will be back on the Best Actress list.
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