Would Lady Gaga be as successful as she is...
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...without her whole eccentric fashion sense and just being very different?
In terms of recent sales, she's arguably pretty much the biggest artist in the world atm, so would she have received the same success if she wasn't as unusual in her style?
Before anyone asks, I am a fan of her music but I'm just curious as to what other people think
In terms of recent sales, she's arguably pretty much the biggest artist in the world atm, so would she have received the same success if she wasn't as unusual in her style?
Before anyone asks, I am a fan of her music but I'm just curious as to what other people think
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This.
I bought Fame Monster because unlike the Fame, every track was a killer
It made her name on the club circuit. She just did it better than everyone else, including her mentor Lady Starlight.
And really, that type of electro was gaining popularity before GaGa appeared - Justin, Britney, Madonna & Rihanna had all done it by the time GaGa hit the mainstream.
I bet if she wore normal dresses like other female singers she wouldn't be as hyped up as now for being different, smh
The reason she's massive is good pop songs.
It's not exclusive to her though, albeit she takes it to extremes.
The same could be said for Madonna, Britney, MJ, Bowie etc. If you remove their visuals, then you'd be dramatically hindering their success because (on varying levels) it made them who they are. In pop, visuals are a vital component that you can't remove.
People love to use it as an excuse to say her music isn't all that. It's an easy way of avoiding or denying how good her music really is.
Many musicians have their own style. Look at the most successful ones. There's always something extra about them.
Undoubtedly people will buy her music because they like her music, but her stardom is heavily influenced by things she does outside of recording her albums.
But if she dressed like a freak, and her music sucked, would people still buy it, just because of her weird fashion sense? No.
Look at Paloma Faith - she dresses oddly, but it hasn't helped her sales! Because her music simply isn't as good.
Lady Gaga is practically a perfect popstar, she knows exactly what she is doing and forced the world to look at her by being different. Good on her, she really works hard & she deserves her success more than any other popstar out there right now!
This.
Meat dresses have been around before?!
She is different. Nobody else at the moment is wearing controversial and different outfits.
Her recent songs, I grant you, aren't terrible. Not the earlier stuff, of course: Love Game, Just Dance, Eh Eh – to love those is to love watered-down rehashes of those famous titans of the musical world, Whigfield and Ace of Bass. Bad Romance and Telephone are fine, although they are basically the musical equivalent of cocaine – initially fun but ultimately unsatisfying, leading one to listen to them again and again in search of something that seemed to be there once. This is a brilliant tactic for success in the short term but makes the songs about as ephemeral as, well, bad drugs.
Yet Stefani Germanotta's celebrity status (sorry – I just physically cannot make my fingers type the word "Gaga" in a sentence that is intended to have an actual point) has nothing to do with her music. It's to do with her persona, one that has been repeatedly described, with no discernible irony, as "original", "feminist" and "iconic", with the latter two qualities being dependent on the first, which is precisely where the whole argument falls apart. From her name (which she ripped from a Queen song) to her music to her every look, everything has been done before. Even the meat dress she wore this week was done by Elsa Schiaparelli more than 70 years ago. This is not making a knowing cultural reference, it's not having a single idea of one's own. Now, lack of originality isn't necessarily a bad thing – heaven knows Madonna copied plenty of people along the way. But it is a problem when originality is supposed to be one's greatest quality. The fact is, she is little more than a Grace Jones copyist with more gratuitous nudity and worse music.
I spent a day with Germanotta last year for a magazine article and, my God, I can tell you, I did not feel like I'd spent 24 hours basking in the light of a modern-day icon at the end of it. I felt like I'd been stuck with a particularly difficult girl from my old school days. Which was precisely the case.
Despite Germanotta's fondness for focusing on her time living on the Lower East Side and, as she is so fond of recounting in interviews, chuffing down cocaine (which might explain her music), she, like me, went to a stuffy school on New York's Upper East Side, which doesn't have quite the same cachet as hanging out on Avenue D. Naively, I told her about this connection between us, thinking she might enjoy the common ground. Her response was to flounce out of the room and not talk to me for an hour. It's hard to pretend you're someone else with somebody who knows how you used to look in your school PE kit.
She repeatedly told me how smart she is, which she proved by tapping her head every time she said the word "smart" and at the end of the day Madonna, whom Gaga was supposed to meet later (the meeting of icons!), bailed. I always liked Madonna.
the guardian
Regardless, yeah meat dresses (or at least, posing with meat as some sort of clothing) are nothing new. However, she was the first to actually wear meat in public though -outside of an installation, conceptual avant garde arena or photo shoot, but as wearable fashion - that is why it was so outlandish. I don't see why there is such emphasis put on it (or her in general) being original/unique? Wasn't like she pretended otherwise - hell, even she posed in a meat bikini weeks beforehand. It's been done, yes, but she made it iconic and the concept will forever be synonymous with Gaga in the same way that white socks and shoes are to MJ or coned bra's are to Madonna, and it doesn't matter that they didn't invent the looks.
Would she have a billion views on Youtube and a collossal tour behind her, possibly not.
What else do you expect from The Guardian? They are one of the most pretentious, highbrow, snobby music publications there is. 90% of it's website's users are exactly the same - you dare to like anything outside of their hipster tastes and you're an idiot who knows nothing about 'good' music.
Most of the time The Guardian panders to those people, and on the odd occasion when they happen to like some popular music they happen to dislike, the users moan about how they are 'losing it', in such a sneering and aggressive manner, as if the world has ended.
This