Joanne // Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga: Joanne (2016)

At the start of the decade, Lady Gaga worked hard to reposition pop as a high art or vice-versa—both absorbing and extending a lineage that included oddball visionaries like Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Prince, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Elton John, Madonna, and Missy Elliott. Most of her avant-garde gestures were extra-musical, a string of cheeky, absurdist visions realized entirely outside of the studio and only tangentially in conversation with her bloodless dance jams (Gaga herself has referred to that early work as “soulless electronic pop”). It’s not hard, now, to recall these stunts from memory: she was sewn into a dress fashioned from slabs of flank steak for the VMAs. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. She hired a self-described “vomit artist” to puke a steady stream of syrupy green liquid onto her bosom during an SXSW performance. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was (and remains) plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and re-establish a hierarchy. Only Gaga could turn “monster” into a term of endearment.

And regardless of whether you find those moves electrifying or tedious, it's hard to overstate the value of that work as a public service—every generation’s freaks elect a champion, and Gaga was tireless, proud, and wholly devoted to the job. Her commercial success also meant that her chart peers were, for better or worse, free to get stranger, artier, and less predictable; Gaga helped usher in an era of pop in which hardly anything is too far-out (or pretentious) to play. Visual provocations of one sort or another are expected now: Sia performed “Chandelier” at the Grammys with her back to the audience, wearing a bobbed, platinum wig, while Kristen Wiig and the then-twelve-year-old dancer Maddie Ziegler frolicked around her in nude bodysuits. Miley Cyrus gyrates among furries as a matter of routine.