‘Always living for the applause’
Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP, TV gigs ‘all in the joy of entertainment and theatre’
“The purest and most wonderful experience that you can have with music or art,” offers Lady Gaga, waving a cigarette around an airy suite in Toronto’s starmagnet Hazelton Hotel, “is that you don’t think about it before you listen to it or look at it. You just breathe, and you feel.”
The singer, songwriter and obsessive fashionista is in the midst of a massive campaign for her new album ARTPOP, which has just gone platinum in Canada.
Not hearing about it isn’t an option, unless you live on an ice floe — and even then, she might buzz by in her newly designed flying dress. So would it be better for listeners to hear her music without all this promotion?
“I don’t know,” she admits. “It’s not realistic.” But one can pretend — or just filter out some of what she has to say.
“Just because I intellectualize some of the things that I do doesn’t mean that the audience has to.”
Gaga’s music, she implies, works on different levels, and she herself, more than any other pop artist, embraces contradictions.
Today, she’s kitted out in a sexy lumberjack outfit with a button-down red-and-black checked shirt over bare legs and shiny, black custommade stripper boots. (“I’m a very special stripper,” she grins.)
And yet later this month she’ll star in the family-TV special Lady Gaga and The Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular, alongside Kermit the Frog. (Since filming it, she says, “Things have been a little bit better” between her and Miss Piggy, “but it’s a challenge every year. Kermit and I have a very strong connection.”)
She’s constantly looking to push envelopes in fashion and technology, but early next year, she’ll be releasing a jazz album with Tony Bennett:
“It’s nice to be around somebody that sees where my old soul is,” she says.
And she comes across both as someone who cares deeply about her practice — having been mentored by theatre director Robert Wilson and performance artist Marina Abramovic — and a girl who just wants to have fun.
‘You never really know when I’m saying something that’s supposed to be profound or if I’ve just got a wig on my head, and it doesn’t matter.’
LADY GAGA
“I think part of the excitement and the challenge of it,” she says, her big green eyes gleaming under her peroxideblond 1950s ’do, “is you never really know when I’m saying something that’s supposed to be profound or if I’ve just got a wig on my head, and it doesn’t matter — it’s all in the joy of entertainment and theatre.”
ARTPOP is meant to represent a break in her work. Earlier videos such as 2009’s Telephone were rife with product placement. Her latest video, Applause, is packed with artistic allusion, from Botticelli to Fritz Lang.
“I’ve always been trying to put art in the front of everything,” she says, but while working on ARTPOP, she had an epiphany when looking at a Perrier bottle with an Andy Warhol label.
“I said” — she slaps her forehead dramatically — “‘Oh my gosh! Everything’s been reversed!’” She holds up her lighter. “It actually is not interesting anymore to draw or print a painting of a Bic and put it in a gallery. The Pop Art age is over. But now we can take that art and put it back onto the soup can, and explore the way that art is now controlling commercialism — how Andy Warhol now has won.”
She wants to put art back into the “soup can” of pop music, but is her work art or artifice? From its first track — Aura, which opens with a Spanish acoustic guitar with an electronic wobble — ARTPOP is self-consciously stylized.
“I believe that artifice has a soul,” she says. “Acknowledge that it’s there and make it your reality — that’s what sells the theatre. So when I’m onstage, the point of it is to completely transport you — that’s why I say in (ARTPOP fan favourite) Venus, ‘Let’s blast off to a new dimension.’”
ARTPOP offers a sense of escape for her, as well. There are darker elements embedded in the music. When I ask her about Swine, which comes across as a devilishly fun kissoff track, she says:
“Actually, that song is about rape. I know it may seem really fun ’cause I’m saying the word ‘ swine’ or it seems kind of ridiculous. And I’m not offended if you didn’t pick up on the rape reference” — she laughs — “but there’s a lot of things that I’m writing about that are deeply personal that are injected into the music. And it’s just my way of dealing with things in my own life and my own sadness and where I put my pain — my pain tends to explode in electronic cacophony.”
Although she has spoken briefly before about an abusive relationship in her late teens, she’s not looking to explore the subject in detail. She returns immediately to the concept of ARTPOP, saying “everything else doesn’t matter.”
But it’s clear there’s a difference between her approach and that of Warhol, who famously said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Earlier this month, Gaga starred in a Saturday Night Live sketch, set in 2063, that depicts Gaga living on her own in an apartment, desperate for the attention of a handyman who doesn’t recognize her.
“The point of that skit,” she says, “was to play with my mortality as an artist. Many people think that pop singers or pop figures don’t have a sense of ourselves or of being able to exist without any of it.”
But Gaga is at pains to show she’s self-aware. One of the promotional videos for ARTPOP tells us: “Lady Gaga is no longer relevant. Ever since (2011 album) Born This Way she’s a flop.”
The Saturday Night Live skit, she says, “had a little bit of that sadness — that the performer ages and the music ages and so do the things that we create. But at the end of the day, I still will always live for the applause, even when I’m an old lady and no one knows who I am anymore.”