How the singer has rocketed to pop stardom and become a global phenomenon

By Javy Rodriguez

To be famous, Lady Gaga is willing to go whatever extremes are necessary, including a staged death on live television. Her performance of “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards starts with the standard: a beautiful pop star singing a catchy song. After a manic piano segment, however, she started bleeding from her torso, lurching across the stage. Finally, she was hung via her wrist, lifelessly staring at the audience as a golden halo projected behind her. The brash performance was fitting of its star.

As New York City drag queen Mimi Imfurst said: “If you’re not over the top, you’ll never see the other side.”

If the “other side” is fame, Lady Gaga has seen it tenfold. With showmanship that mixes Madonna’s sexuality with Liza Minnelli’s charm, she has become a global phenomenon in just two years. Fusing performance art, eccentric costumes, and masterful viral marketing, Lady Gaga embodies the millennial pop star.

Her debut album, “The Fame” has been certified Diamond, with over 10 million sales worldwide. Her follow-up disc, “The Fame Monster,” was the best-selling album of 2010 globally, selling 5.9 million copies, according to Media Traffic’s Worldwide Top 40 Albums Chart. She also graced the cover of Time magazine last year as one of its most influential people. She dominates digital platforms such as YouTube, where her “Bad Romance” video, with over 341 million views, is the second-most streamed clip ever.

Her back-story has been well documented by the media. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born in 1986 in New York City to Italian-American Catholic parents. At age four, she learned how to play the piano.

Craving the spotlight from age 14, Germanotta performed on open-mic nights at New York jazz clubs aided by her mother under the condition that she kept good grades. And her marks were good enough to get her into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied music until she dropped out in her sophomore year.

Without parental financial support, she performed in obscurity at bars in the Lower East Side, until a mutual friend introduced her to producer Rob Fusari, who took her under his wing. Her transformation from grungy rocker chick into a cleverly marketed pop star came, according to New York Magazine, when she reinvented herself after studying Andy Warhol’s approach to fame as an art. Fame became her new muse, and her subsequent songs explored the concept blatantly with titles such as “Paparazzi” and “Starstruck.”  She dyed her black hair blonde after she was compared to Amy Winehouse. She adopted the name Lady Gaga, after Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” a song Fusari teasingly sang to her, referring to her flamboyant vocals. She became aloof and assumed Warhol’s penchant for dark sunglasses.

In 2008, she topped the charts with her first hit, “Just Dance,” followed by “Poker Face.” Lady Gaga emerged at the right place and time, when the position of Madonna’s successor was up for grabs.

“Just about nothing truly exciting was going on in pop music around 2008-2009,” says Dr. Mathieu Deflem, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina who teaches the course “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame.” “The stars from the teen pop wave of the late 1990s were either in trouble-Britney Spears or changed musical direction-Christina Aguilera.”

Meanwhile, those starlets vying for the spot as the new Queen of Pop didn’t quite fit the bill. In “Growing Up Gaga,” contributing editor for New York Magazine Vanessa Grigoriadis writes that despite the existence of popular female artists, mega-sellers such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift were crossovers from other genres, and other candidates were either too young (Miley Cyrus) or too old (Gwen Stefani and Fergie), and all lacked Madonna’s quintessential appeal.

“A lot of them were very specific and niche,” says Grigoriadis. “The fascinating thing about Lady Gaga is that everybody can understand it and everybody gets something out of it, whether you’re a student, a feminist or a male chauvinist pig.”

A flair for theatrics set her apart. “There are plenty of people who can sing, write songs, look good and who could dance,” says Brian Hiatt, senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine. “She did all these things and on top of it she had this phenomenal vision, [which] was avant-garde and yet accessible.”

This vision included outrageous outfits, a route that Amy Odell, fashion blogger for New York Magazine’s The Cut, said captivated audiences the most.

“She’s not traditionally pretty and has a quirky look,” said Odell in an interview last spring. “If she wasn’t doing this, she wouldn’t be nearly as famous.”

For Gaga, who has never been photographed without stage wear, the performance never ends. She realizes that in this Internet age, a paparazzi picture quickly circulates to millions.
On“60 Minutes,” Gaga explains that her carefully crafted outfits have kept the public focused on her work instead of her personal life.

While Dr. Deflem’s course focuses on many social issues related to her fame, one point strikes him as the essential ingredient in her success story.

“Lady Gaga’s rise to fame has been connected to the rise of Internet technology and has enabled more direct communications with the fans via social networking sites,” says Dr. Deflem.
Along with 27 million “likes” on Facebook, Gaga is the most popular person on Twitter with over 8 million followers, beating Barack Obama (#7) and Oprah Winfrey (#10), according to Twitaholic.

While she’s not the first pop star to use viral marketing, Gaga’s merger of a fan connection with self-promotion is unrivaled. On New Year’s Eve, a few moments after midnight, she “surprised” her followers by revealing the release date of her next album.

Some have no doubt that Lady Gaga will stay. “She is going to continue to be one of the biggest stars in the world for the foreseeable future,” says Hiatt. “Every decade needs its star.”

Others wonder whether Gaga has peaked. “She really set a high bar because she was changing her costumes so frequently,” says Grigoriadis. Stay tuned.