Outlandish dresser, performer and politicised pop icon for the Twitter generation
By:
Kira Cochrane The Guardian
Lady Gaga may have sold millions of records, and been named among the top-selling artists of 2010, but her buzzy, trashy, disco-derived dance stomps aren't the source of her greatest influence. They're just the engine of the ramped-up rise to superstardom that has brought her 8.5 million Twitter followers, the creative directorship of Polaroid, and political sway that can't easily be dismissed – even when submerged under skirts made of Muppets.
Gaga, 24, has been compared to Madonna, but, while they share a gift for metamorphosis and a lust for the spotlight, their sensibilities are very different. Madonna's image has tended towards glamorous, sexy, cool, while Lady Gaga's tends towards the grotesque, surreal and unsettling.
She has appeared on stage dripping blood, or perched on a toilet; at the close of her Bad Romance video she lies, smoking, beside a corpse, sparks phut-phutting from her bra. "I want your ugly, I want your disease," she sings in that song, in a style as far from submissive, simpering sexuality as you can get.
She sees herself as the voice of outsiders and of the gay community; bisexual herself, she has spoken out against the US military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which bars openly gay people from the armed forces. Last year, she delivered that message at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she also appeared in her most notorious outfit – a dress made of meat. It was a look that toyed with notions of female sexuality and challenged the limits of the body: the dress made of large latex bubbles or the enormous gyroscope.
Her costumes have become increasingly cocoon-like – at this year's Grammys she arrived in a large, clouded egg. She emerged to sing her gay rights anthem, Born This Way, with its pulsing lyric, "don't be a drag, just be a queen". It's a tenet Lady Gaga clearly lives by.
