Love / Hate Lady Gaga | Inspiring Interviews With The Preeminent Princess of Pop
Lady Gaga is capable of being both immensely likeable and a total twat within the same sentence. That's talent, baby. Her music is powerful, but even more powerful are the blonding / blinding flashes of insight which pop out during relatively candid interviews.
Although she has spent the past ten years or so polishing an image and persona capable of shocking pop (but not too much), there's still a gritty New York realism which underpins it all. As she says in an interview with Billboard magazine 'when an artist sings a song, you can feel their past'.
Lady Gaga has a doctorate in 'keeping it real' as a rapper might say, and from the dive bars where she began her career, to the glittering pop stage she now finds herself on, that realism is what is drawing fans from all walks of life. She's been compared to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Madonna, the former two most likely because she's a small blonde pop star, the latter because she's a self driven musical dynamo who never gave up, even when dropped from a record label after just three months of being signed at age 19.
Art is beauty, beauty is truth.
She's been criticized for a less than entirely voluptuous figure, and for an imperfect face which falls short of Hollywood's typical plastic fantastic version of beauty that we've all evidently come to accept over the past two decades, but instead of letting these theoretical handicaps hold her back, she has used them to her advantage, creating outlandish and quirky outfits which compliment her figure and accentuate the positive.
'I was always famous, now people are finding that out.' (This is the twatty bit. Of course it's not really that twatty, it's just her earlier philosophy distilled down into a sound bite, which taken out of context makes her sound utterly delusional.)
So where is the inspiration in all of this? Seeing someone who set a goal before age 10 and who has relentlessly pursued it. Lady Gaga is the Susan Boyle that didn't wait thirty years to pursue a musical career, and it's fairly certain that she won't be a flash in the pan, a two hit wonder, or any such phenomenon. Why? Because unlike those who are blow mold manufactured to overnight success, Gaga was chiseled by life's sculptors one tiny chip at a time. She's got structural integrity which provides the sort of resilience needed for longevity in the music business.