Lady Gaga Was Always Gothic. Now the World Has Caught Up to Her.

Magazine|Lady Gaga Was Always Gothic. Now the World Has Caught Up to Her.

This column is adapted from Cannonball, a culture podcast hosted by Wesley Morris. This week, he spoke with The New York Times’s pop music editor Caryn Ganz.

Last month, I caught Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball at Madison Square Garden with my friend Caryn Ganz. To be honest, I didn’t want to go because I’m not crazy about “Mayhem” the album, and I didn’t love the previous one either. But Caryn, who had already seen the show, told me it was special for how revealing of its star it was. She was right.

Mayhem Ball is more than a big arena show. It’s a spectacle. It’s told theatrically in four acts and an epilogue, which is very loosely about two queens — one whose signature color is red, the other’s white — vying for chessboard dominance. Only one can win. The thrill of the show is that Gaga not only understands the absurdity and banality of the conceit; she also gives herself over to the nonsense until it reaches something richer than just Halloween. She achieves what I’m comfortable calling world-class devotion.

At the beginning of Act II, for instance, the crew wheels out a giant sandbox, canted at almost 45 degrees, in which Gaga is half-buried, alongside a full skeleton and some skulls. As she starts belting “Disease,” her legs dance and the red queen emerges so the two can fight. In spite of all the tussling and writhing, she didn’t miss a note. That’s how caught up this woman was in the selling of this number: She could die singing it.

It’s the kind of commitment that speaks to a deeper aspect of Gaga’s project. She made her debut back in 2008, in full cultural attack mode, during a moment when our relationship to fame was mutating. Camera phones had become increasingly ubiquitous appendages, with sites and apps that could bring us that much closer to celebrities, sites and apps that could manufacture celebrities. Now, here was this new person making fun of our bottomless appetite for famous people through this ornate persona — gauche, louche, lusty, lurid, theatrical, a puppet pulling the strings on her own ambition. In order to satirize the celebrity experience, she had to become, as the title of her first album put it, The Fame.

Gaga has always been someone who understands the power of the spectacle: Consider the dress made of raw meat she wore to the 2010 V.M.A.s, which seemed to say, “You vultures wanna eat me alive? Well here’s some carpaccio for ya!” I kind of admired the way the personas had become so layered that sincerity had been sucked into the satire (“One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me,” she snarls on “Applause.”)