the fame and a life of material (gaga series: part one)
The Fame changed pop culture and introduced the world to Lady Gaga, the soon-to-be chameleon artist who would redefine pop music on just her debut
Every decade seems to have a breakout pop star who goes on to define the time by their emergence in pop culture. Diana Ross in the ‘60s, Cher in the ‘70s, Madonna in the ‘80s, and Britney in the ‘90s had major impacts on their decade, both in music trends, fashion that would become signature, and the overall cultural impact. However, by the middle of the aughts, a large pop musician's debut to shake the industry had not happened yet. Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, and Fergie were all immensely successful solo female acts, but all came from successful bands. Disney acts like Miley Cyrus, Hillary Duff, and Lindsay Lohan were backed by the mega-cooperation so their success was almost promised. American Idol launched Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood to major success, yet it was unclear how these singers, presented as regular people with a golden ticket-esque success story, would fare in the pop realm. All was calm until the debut of one Lady Gaga.
It is difficult to imagine the world of pop music and culture without Lady Gaga nowadays. The impact of her debut came almost immediately. Pop stars became more of a spectacle, fashion became more couture and peculiar, and music accelerated and exploded into electropop. In the late years of the 2000s, Gaga stomped in with towering platform heels and a perfectly tied hair bow and single-handedly changed the game.
Of course, this may be a biased statement as a Gaga fan and historian who followed her since 2008. However, she has exemplified what it means to be a pop star, an artist, a pop culture figure, and a celebrity all in one, and it is quite rare to inhabit all these together. The way Gaga operates in these spheres is integral to understanding her vision and seeing her maneuver and evolve in all four ways has been nothing short of compelling. Through this series or collection or whatever I decide to call these, I hope to uncover Gaga’s artistic vision, her persona, and her intentions as an artist through each era, with a deep analysis of her words, actions, music, controversy, and performances. With her seventh studio album on the horizon, Max’s Chromatica Ball film still fresh in my mind, and after listening to Eating For Free’s in-depth look at Ariana Grande’s career and public persona in a similar vein, I figured now was the perfect time to dive into Stefani Gemanotta’s life as Lady Gaga. And where better to start than the beginning with Gaga’s inception and her debut, The Fame?
The Artist
When speaking about her debut solo album — aptly titled Debut — Björk said this on her podcast Sonic Symbolism: “It was the [album] that probably captured the most time. So, it sort of maybe was my life up to that point.” A sentiment shared by several artists regarding their debut, Lady Gaga occupies a bizarre middle ground of this belief.
Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, she took an early interest in music. By the time she reached high school, she was performing original songs and acting in local plays. A native New Yorker, she went to Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan, the same borough she grew up in. After attending Tisch School for the Arts, she dropped out in her second year to pursue music.
Before The Fame and the fame, Lady Gaga performed her original music in dive bars with a band she led. Eventually, she gathered some original demos for a CD-only release called Red and Blue in 2005, five songs that were far more rock-centric and jazzy than what would become characteristic of her music only three years later. It was enough to catch the eyes of producer Rob Fusari, who allegedly bestowed the name Lady Gaga to her from the Queen song. The two would date and team up to begin producing new music.
During this time, Gaga moved out of dive bars and into club performances. During this time, she began cultivating the Lady Gaga persona based on the glamor of the ‘70s and Studio 54 era. Experimenting with drugs and clubbing, she became enamored with Andy Warhol and his dedication to multimedia art and experimentation. The manifestation of Gaga is integral to understanding her beginnings as someone who wanted to revolutionize pop music at the time. This was a time of crafting artists from a business mind, either taking established acts and having them crossover or creating narratives through reality television. For her, it made sense to immerse herself in a world of debauchery to mirror the age of art and pop culture uniting without caution. She said, “It's just the way my brain and my heart and my obsession for love and art were functioning at the time."
The music became far more electronic and pop-influenced, as seen in her early unreleased demos. The demos during this time would eventually make their way to Def Jam Records. They were quick to sign Gaga and were equally quick to drop her after the demos did not meet expectations at the label. Def Jam’s hasty resignation seemed to have a major impact on Gaga, as she wrote a song and music video treatment based on this self-appointed failure. She also harshly learned about the industry, a way she would adamantly begin to avoid. It is like it made her realize she had one shot at making the dreams of her star-rising happen.
She soon found a new home at Interscope Records, who would have her team with Akon and begin writing songs for other pop artists, like Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls. Here, she began to learn the inner workings of the music industry and the pop culture beast. She saw both sides of the industry up to this point: the corporatization of art and unbridled explosions of creativity. It makes sense she would use both to form the thesis for her debut album, which soon went into production after signing with Interscope.
In the time of recording and producing The Fame, celebrities have achieved god-like status never before seen. Since the beginning of time, laypeople have been fascinated by those above us in class; idolization is nothing new. Yet, in the 2000s, it reached a perfect boiling point with technology and culture. The internet, still budding, gave people and fans access to the personal lives of their favorite celebrities in ways that were being developed and used concurrently. Paparazzi had access to better and smaller cameras, making their stalking and harassment far easier than ever before. While the internet would eventually lead to a far more divided sense of self between people in our current times, an American monoculture and mass dissemination still existed en mass; more people were watching the same programs at the same time and listening to the same music, but now had chat boards and forums to keep the discussion alive for weeks to come.
Lady Gaga became enraptured by these celebrity icons. As someone who slowly worked to become a pop star, she thirsted after these lifestyles. She said about The Fame, which acts as a thesis to the album, “I think there's 'fame', which is plastic and you can buy it on the street, and paparazzi and money and being rich, and then there's 'the fame', which is when no one knows who you are but everybody wants to know who you are. That's what this whole record's about. This record beckons for everybody on the planet to stop being either jealous or obsessive about what they don't have and start acting like they do … You gotta make people care, you gotta know and believe how important you are. You gotta have conviction in your ideas.”
Gaga, a poster child for conviction in herself, began work on The Fame. Thoughts of artifice and desire, club euphoria, and corporate cunning swirling in her head, she released her debut single “Just Dance” in the spring of 2008, a year after images of Britney plastered magazines and the year of one of the USA’s many financial crises. Positing her image as equal parts Warhol and rock star, she soon released what would become one of the most influential debut albums of all time.
The Art
The Fame’s use of club-ready music about fortune and hedonism spoke deeply to a world ravaged by celebrity culture and economic hardships. With so many people losing massive amounts of money in 2008 from the housing crisis, people turned to instant relief to feel better. Pop music, mass-produced with huge profits, accompanied clubs and bars, where one could drink and dance, just like the celebrities on television; people sought comfort in living like the people they admired, critiqued, and obsessed over. The Fame and its singles are often regarded as hallmarks of recession pop because it calls people to be present while also providing a more positive way of looking at the socio-political situations.
“Just Dance” is the best example of this from the album; funnily enough, it is the opener as well as the lead single. The song is buoyant and infectious. Lyrically, it’s a very straightforward call to the dancefloor as Gaga drunkenly tries to get her ducks in a row in the verses. The music video sees Gaga entering a dead house party and reviving it. Gaga traveling with her crew and bringing new energy to places is a common theme among visuals for the entire era; The Fame Part One short film shows Gaga with a similar crew causing mischief and jumping those they deemed “a traitorous bigot.”
With Gaga, who considered herself an artist who did far more than just pop music, her music videos instantly became attached to her image. The only odd one from The Fame is “Eh Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say),” which is also an oddball on the tracklist. The video is hazy, glossy, and highly stylized, depicting Gaga as a domestic girlfriend for her masculine Italian New York boyfriend. It is somehow unlike Gaga in every way yet quintessential to her image.
The other singles featured more stereotypical Gaga visuals for the time. “Beautiful Dirty Rich” features Gaga in a mansion with her crew as they dance around, burn money, and live lavishly. An eeriness surrounds Gaga as the only light shines on the subject while everything else is shadowed. Another mansion with salacious living is seen in “Poker Face.” She prances and struts around statues and mannequins while hosting a poolside poker game. She is clearly in control of the men and women surrounding her. An iconic shot starts the video and features Gaga, like an Aphrodite figure (a motif she would later revisit, but that’s another era), emerging from the water with a full black latex bodysuit and a disco ball face mask. Besides being a striking image, she symbolically is becoming reborn as this new figure of beauty and desire.
This explicit desire is a key theme of the album, often intertwining with the desire for fame. “LoveGame,” in its visuals and lyrics, questions the want for either sex or fame. “Money Honey” later expands on this idea by equating materialism and affection, an idea often saved for the rich. However, she ends up landing on the fact that materialism, however enticing, will never make her truly happy, but rather love and admiration will. The mansions and boats are certainly a plus. though
Gaga uses satire throughout the album by poking holes in the fabric of pop music and culture, allowing a grittier side to be revealed. “The Fame” sees Gaga yearn for mountains of champagne and pornographic girls as much as she wants to realize her teenage dreams of being adored. On “Paparazzi,” the album’s darkest song and video, Gaga sings about the chase that comes with love, both in fame and desire. It’s a dark chorus off the heels of Britney Spears’s harassment the year prior, yet made darker by the video and a certain live performance that would cap this debut era off. Gaga, being spied on in her private life, is almost murdered by her boyfriend. She turns into a spectacle, beautifully killing the women he presumably had affairs with before eventually killing him. The video ends with an explicit equivalence between the paparazzi camera flashes and that of a mugshot as Gaga, crying black tears, poses playfully erotic for hers.
Gaga also uses camp and its absence in powerful ways. “Starstruck” is an ode to Gaga’s thesis: act famous and pull those in around you. She playfully begs to be number one and uses DJ analogies to draw those into her persona as much as her music. “Boys Boys Boys,” a dancey pop song about, well, boys and their enticement, heavily satirizes rock imagery by flipping it and objectifying men. Yet, the next songs on the album are straightforward. “Paper Gangsta” sees her reject anybody who can abuse her and use her to make money. It also overtly recounts her feelings after being dropped from Def Jam; she feels used, drained, and abandoned but still fights for herself and her vision. “Brown Eyes,” the only ballad on the standard edition, is a torch song dedicated to her lost love. It also harkens back to Gaga’s older music stylings from before her club days with a strong piano and emotional vocal performance; after all the satire and praise for the fame and money, she isn’t just this persona crafted for the limelight but rather still an artist.
With these two views of fame, one artificial and one personal, Gaga explores different aspects of desire and lust. Materialism and sex abound, hedonism is both holy and dangerous, and she spins on the dancefloor aware of the faults of being so famous and so glamorous. The Fame’s intriguing nature comes down to this timeless struggle between desire and reception, ideals and reality, but most importantly, we can never escape the lights once they blind us.
The Aftermath
Despite this dense cultural text (said half-ironically), contemporary critics seemed not to understand it. One particularly scathing review from Slant called it “nonsensical drivel” and failed “to live up to all the glittery hype.” Some noted its pretentiousness with the subject matter and others called it “meh” in more retrospective reviews. Despite the reception, Lady Gaga became an instant undeniable pop culture icon. Throughout extravagant live shows which Gaga said were a cabaret of sorts, she became immediately sought after. Of course, some basic and trite commentary followed her: she was too sexual, she was a flash in the pan, and she didn’t make sense in the cultural zeitgeist. It was same vapid misogynistic ideas pervading nearly every female and femme pop star even today.
It is incredibly Faustian to see Gaga write a debut album about wanting to be in the fame machine with all its glamor and flaws, only to become one of the biggest cogs in said machine with glamor and flaws. With all this attention, she, similar to the icons she was enamored by, became tabloid fodder. One of the biggest, and honestly most peculiar controversies for any celebrity, came early into her career when rumors began circulating that Gaga was Assigned Male At Birth. By 2024 standards, this conversation is incredibly dated and by no means justifies the discussion on anyone’s genitalia, but seeing this conversation happen was puzzling at the time and still is to this day. When rumors and alleged pictures of Gaga’s penis began circulating, journalists at the time were comfortable enough to ask directly about her body in a variety of disgusting ways. As Anderson Cooper said in a 2011 interview with Gaga (where he did the same thing), many pop stars would have taken it seriously and released a statement regarding the rumors. Gaga, on the other hand, had a range of responses for the excessive times she was asked, from dismissive (“it’s too lowbrow for me to discuss”) to playful (“my wonderful vagina is very insulted by this question”). Through these responses and never taking it to heart, Gaga showed that she did not take rumors or accusations seriously and aligned herself more as an outsider in the industry who would rather play into rumors than expel them.
By the time these rumors began to circulate, Gaga became a body in the collective consciousness, ready to dissect through all means possible. With such a tour-de-force debut, it was hard to place her in a box as many pop stars are, but comparisons still ran rampant. Two names swarmed nearly every piece I pulled for research: Madonna and Warhol. The Madonna comparisons follow Gaga even today; it does not feel like a Lady Gaga album cycle without claims of plagiarism from one Madonna song or look. Throughout The Fame’s press cycle, the two were endlessly compared for having similar backgrounds, a similar aesthetic, and an overall passion for changing the face of pop music. With both being Italian women with a penchant for pop music and striking visuals, it seemed easy enough to compare and ignite the simmering feud that would enrapture both for the next decade.
More interestingly, Andy Warhol was mentioned by both Gaga and the journalists covering her. Gaga, inspired by his art, rarely failed to mention his fingerprints in her work. Both spoke explicitly of the fame, art, and the separation and convergence of these two inconceivable ideas. The New York Times highlights this in an essay from 2009 about her influences up until that point, saying, “he wrote in “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again),” [celebrities and Warhol’s idea of ‘new people’] would be made up of parts. And their fans, freed from the obligation to idolize a “whole person,” could choose which dimension of a star they wanted to love. Lady Gaga is rigged for that stardom: her persona is an amalgam of surfaces, faceted though not truly 3-D, addictive in the way video games are.”
This was the Gaga the world was introduced to in the late aughts. It is difficult to imagine how shocking it was unless one experienced it because she was so unlike almost every other pop star of the time. It instantly brought stardom and interest. Combining chart-topping pop songs with a visual flair ranging from French New Wave to German expressionism and fashion that was equally costuming and couture, Gaga’s star exploded and nearly pulled all of pop culture into its gravity. She became the very thing she sought to critique on The Fame, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Gaga essentially was two agents at this time. The commercialized pop star and the artist breaking out, a Madonna and a Warhol battling across everything she did. However, it is hard to be an artist critiquing the opulence and extravagance of celebrity culture while maintaining a celebrity of yourself. One critic noted, “[Gaga] totally buying into [the vapidity of wealth and fame], perhaps in the same way that her idol Andy Warhol bought into it. There’s not really a commentary. She wants to be famous. She wants to be rich.” Perhaps this is correct. She certainly has and she certainly uses her platform and art in ways that are extremely commercial and lacking any sense of artistry. It’s her capitalistic tendencies that still manage some decisions and her professionalism in her career. Yet, when art and capitalism are at such opposite ends on the spectrum of humanness and fulfillment, can there ever be a marriage of them, despite Gaga’s own belief it can?
Gaga’s own belief in fame, on the other hand, seemed to crumble within the year. Visuals became darker and darker and performances more of a spectacle. I believe the end of The Fame era to be her 2009 VMA performance. Beginning the chorus of “Poker Face” across a string section, she quickly pivots and sings “Amidst all of these flashing lights, I pray the fame won’t take my life.” What followed was “Paparazzi,” Gaga and dancers donned in white danced across a more dramatic composition of the song. During the final chorus, she begins to bleed from her stomach and the dancers swarm as she screams. Hoisted in the air and covered in fake blood, she hangs limp, dropping the mic while flashing lights go off behind her. The fame as a concept is no longer about the opulence and money. It is about the horrors, the way it kills, and the pain it can bring.
One Slant writer who analyzed Gaga’s early career works noted in The Fame: Part One how the dancers slowly became stagnant as the short went on, writing, “This hints at one of the potentially more alienating themes embedded in Gaga’s work: pop culture is a monstrous assimilating force, and for people to have any permanence in the face of it, they must become empty vehicles for its transmission. Lady Gaga may be sacrificing her identity on her own terms; but like every other pop star, she is still sacrificing her identity.” Similar to Warhol, Gaga had to sacrifice her image, her avatar, her art, and her personal life to pursue fame and to appeal to mass culture. It was what all her inspirations had to do or had done to them by the blinding lights of fame. Lady Gaga, in her chase for the fame, came face to face with its dark underbelly and its monstrous hands, which has its mark all over her next album, The Fame Monster.