Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous
- an eponymous Facebook group created to bully the young woman
As a songwriter, it can be uncomfortable putting your feelings and emotions out into something on display for others to dissect, misinterpret, and analyze - especially those closest to you who may have an insider’s view into the experiences shaping your songs.
It’s also uncomfortable to try on styles and perspectives outside of the perception you imagine others have for you or the way you view yourself. I think back to the first time I wrote a “bluesy” song, given that I’d only written pop rock music.
It gave me a feeling reminiscent of being a teenager awkwardly finding my “identity” among the prefab options of “jock,” “goth,” “preppie,” or “freak.” Although I was academic, squeeky clean, sensitive, and artsy, donning the garb of a “prep” or “goth” would have felt disingenuous. The risk of ridicule of being labeled a “poser” forced me back into my “true” identity, “skater” (ironic, as I couldn't skate for shit and didn't own a board for the majority of my skater days).
In fact, all of these identities are fictions. Neat labels with prepackaged identities. An identikit for fitting into or pushing away social tribes. A fabric, hair, and makeup sorting hat (If you couldn't guess, I'm a Ravenclaw). While these fake ids are useful scaffolding for finding one’s identity and expressing one’s “individuality,” they also come with socially imposed restrictions based on their inherent stereotypes:
Jocks can’t show sensitivity, goths would rather die than be cheerleaders, and freaks hide their booksmarts from their peers for fear of being outcast (as I write this, my mind races through countless teen movie tropes).
Yet there is also a freedom to be more oneself by donning such costumes. As the oft-quoted Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay, The Critic as Artist, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Lady Gaga Becomes Herself
In fact, this is precisely the case with Stefanie Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga.
Gaga is the canvas upon which Germanotta fashioned a larger than life pop celebrity with all the confidence and capability she wanted, rather than simply being "a pretty Norah Jones-esque young 18-year-old ... who sang and played piano at local bars."
In a live on-stage interview with Oprah, Gaga revealed:
“[Lady Gaga] has become me also, I mean I don’t know what happened..but that’s what happens….You have a vision for yourself you can be here and then you have your vision and then all of a sudden-
Oprah: The two merge-
LG: -they come together
O: they become aligned
LG: Gaga has given me the wings to fly
And so, Gaga has become more herself, while also being nearly impossible to pin down. I say nearly impossible, since one could argue that she’s actually donning a Bowie/Ziggy Stardust costume. She unashamedly admits to borrowing liberally from and being inspired by the chamelonic Bowie, yet there is a distinct difference in how Bowie and Gaga used their personas.
Bowie VS Gaga
Bowie had an eye and ear on the subcultures of the art world and would frequently cherry-pick from burgeoning movements in each and put his spin on it. Bowie didn’t create glam rock any more than he did the crooner style of the Thin White Duke, but he elevated Marc Bolan’s glam style movement to the level of art through the theatrics of the alter-ego Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie would abandon personas and their accompanying musical styles throughout his career, shapeshifting his way to relevance over the decades, occasionally revisiting characters in his songs and albums as a throughline across time.
Bowie would live with his chameleonic identity adaptations for long periods of time, whereas Gaga’s variety of visual aesthetics within a single album is intended to avoid being defined and pigeonholed. The way she mixes multiple costume design and visual art elements to avoid a single definable style calls to mind the Scramble Suits in Phillip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly” in which the identity of the suit-wearer cannot be defined by age, gender, or ethnicity.
In an interview with Women's Wear Daily, discussing her album ARTPOP (in which, like Bowie before her, she appears on her album cover embodying the clown figure, Pierrot.) Gaga explains:
“It’s interesting how you view things, and you look at it like, I’m a pop icon, and [you wonder] ‘Is this the image of the album? Is this the direction? Who came up with it?’
I think that’s so interesting because it’s exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to destroy…[I’m not] defined by the same designer or defined by the same hair cut or defined by the same icon. The statement is that I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.”
The Deconstruction of Annie Clark
I watched a similar shift happen to fellow Berklee College of Music dropout, Annie Clark. I had both a physical crush and a talent crush on her after she arrived during my second semester at Berklee College of Music (resulting in some embarassing campus run-ins for me - a story for another time). Her otherworldly acoustic and vocal performance at one of our Caf Shows (a student-run musical show n’ tell in our campus cafeteria) left my jaw on the floor.
I was gobsmacked - but far from surprised - when Annie burst onto the scene a few years later under the moniker St. Vincent, turning out electrifying, award-winning albums. What did surprise me was the manner in which she had reinvented herself, doing away with the bright-eyed baroque-pop virtuosa in favor of a more powerful, dark, and alien dominatrix. It was as if Dylan went electric sporting a B.C. Rich.
Another musical, artistic, and shape-shifting disciple of Bowie (she even employed the talents Mike Garrison, Bowie’s renowned pianist on her debut album), St. Vincent’s initial reinventions stemmed, like Germanotta’s, from a pragmatic need to avoid being seen as a cute acoustic singer/songwriter, relegated to coffee shops.
More importantly, her alter ego helped her most past fear.
“When I think about the things that used to hold me back when I first started out, more than anything it was fear, and it was shame, or it was this inner voice that was not very helpful. At the time, I felt like the options afforded women in music who went under their own name were kind of narrow roads. If I went by my name, which is Annie Clark, it would sound to people like I made acoustic music only for coffee shops.”
She claimed the moniker to allow her the flexibility to do whatever she wanted with it. Each of St. Vincent's successive albums introduced a new persona, allowing her to disassociate with, deconstruct, try on, and subvert aspects of herself and of womanhood, such as gender roles, sexuality, and power. Like Wilde’s mask, St. Vincent's personas provide a safe space to bring to light areas of Clark that she might otherwise keep hidden.
Lana Del Rey, (Re)Born to Die
Some reinventions are more of a rebirth, as is the case in Elizabeth Woolridge Grant’s Lana Del Rey. Grant spent years performing and writing music as Lizzy Grant, but when she emerged as Del Rey, she effectively killed off Grant, removing her previous music from the web.
Whereas the previously mentioned shape-shifters chose a name that lacked any preconceived notions, Lana Del Rey’s . The name evokes both the glamor of a golden era Hollywood actress and an urban California vibe. This was a conscious choice for Grant, enabling her to create a cohesive blend of music that blends sweeping, romantic strings of a classic film, sultry sex-kitten cabaret songstress vocals, and thug and drug culture beats.
Watching and listening to Lizzy Grant, you get a sense of the emerging elements of Rey’s sound and throwback vibe, yet the name “Lizzy” coupled with her blonde hair and girl next door looks lacked the cohesion of the fully realized “gangster Nancy Sinatra” persona that she has become famous for.
In fact, Grant had been shaping and honing her musical craft and persona for several years before the birth of Lana Del Rey. Prior to releasing music as Lizzie Grant, she recorded an unreleased (and now leaked) demo as May Jailer. This acoustic folk iteration of Grant and her experimentation with her real name brings to mind the Bowie’s the exploratory path to Ziggy Stardust.
David Bowie Fails Forward
Bowie's Ziggy Stardust seemed to emerge fully formed, as if out of nowhere. Yet Bowie had struggled for years to find the right combination of artistic identity, image, and musical style. He started out in R&B bands, released a novelty children’s record, performed as a theatrical mime, and released acoustic folk music under his birth name, David Jones.
To avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, David temporarily changed his name to Tom Jones, and to avoid further confusion with the Welsh singer of “What's New Pussycat” fame, he had to change his name one last time.
Eventually, Bowie had a breakout hit with Space Oddity, which should have propelled Bowie to stardom, yet similar to Lizzy Grant, Bowie’s overall identity and musical output lacked the artistic cohesion that would come later. Before giving rise to Ziggy Stardust (pun intended), Bowie had one last experimental misstep in casting a fake frontman, Freddie Burretti, to lead Bowie’s new band, Arnold Corns.
You mean you’ve never heard of Arnold Corns? Gasp. I’m shocked.
Perhaps you know this band by a different name: The Spiders From Mars.