Maureen Callahan - Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga

TO BILLY

Stop feeding me bullshit. Tell me the truth.

Lady Gaga, 2009

I hate the truth. I hate the truth so much I prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day over the truth.

Lady Gaga, 2010

Everything is going wrong. This was supposed to be the big night, the unveiling of her first arena tour as a headliner, and props, costumes, and chunks of the entire stage set, which cost $1.5 million, are missing, stuck in a town just thirty-seven miles away. This stadium, the Manchester Evening News Arena in England, holds 21,000 people and is the largest in the UK; more people come in and out of here every year than any other venue in the world. Her show is sold out, and even though she hates the idea of canceling, shes so distraught over the chaos and lack of preparedness that she asks if its possible. Shes not just putting on a pop show; shes staging an elaborate five-act rock opera with some twenty costume changes, pyrotechnics, and a hydraulic lift that will elevate her about twenty feet above the crowd. Among whats missing: an enormous stone fountain thats supposed to spout blood, topped with an angel and accompanied by gorgeously decrepit backdrop images, like the black-and-white footage that looks straight out of the 1902 Georges Mlis film A Trip to the Moon.

Lady Gaga, unknown just eighteen months ago and now, at twenty-four, the biggest star in the world, is told no. Canceling is not an option; itll cost too much. She may be an exacting artist, but she is also a shrewd businesswoman. She relents, but insists on rehearsing up until the doors are about to open.

So here are the Gaga fans, ages four to fifty-five, lining up outside the Manchester Evening News Arena at six oclock on this drizzly, chilly winter night, three hours before showtime, excitedly, politely snaking down and around the block. Nearly all the girlswho outnumber the boys by about three to oneare dressed like their heroine, in numbers and fervor not seen since little girls donned rubber bracelets and fishnet headbands in homage to Madonna circa 1984. Theyre tottering and trembling on five-inch spike heels, dressed in Day-Glo colors, and have foregone pants in favor of long tops and tights; theyve donned blond wigs and sunglasses and applied drag-queenish heavy makeup.

Also present are fifty-somethings on first dates; professors and other intellectuals; gay men in their twenties and thirties, many in Gaga-esque makeup; and prepubescent boys and girls with their parents, many in Gaga shirts. Dotting the entrance to the arena are the puzzled middle-aged men with makeshift stands hawking sub-par, unauthorized merch: If it has fur, or blinking lights, or better yet fur and blinking lights, theyre selling it. They have no earthly idea whats going onyou can see it on their facesbut its a recession, and scalped tickets for this show are starting at $150.

While a Lady Gaga performance circa 20092010 pulls from hundreds of postmodern pop-art threads, as derivative as itas she is, it remains wholly original. Gaga is smart enough to know that the limited number of songs in her very young catalog cannot sustain a two-hour set, but the spectacle shes created sure can. To Gaga and to her fans, The Monster Ball, as she calls it, is not just a show: It is, as her life has become, interactive performance art of the highest caliber.

So the explosion of color and sex and kookiness and maybe some good old-fashioned pyro that a Gaga show promises is a huge deal in Manchester, as it will be two nights from now in Dublin. Manchester is a town under a permanently slate gray sky into which six-story slate gray granite buildings disappear. Not much happens except football; the town is home to two Premier League teams, Manchester United and Manchester City. Its lone four-star hotel, where visiting footballers stay, is a four-floor redbrick Marriott at the end of a cul-de-sac. Near that is a Grenada TV station, and its a sliver of the size of the average American Costco.

That said, Manchester is known for producing some of the best bands in the world: Joy Division, Buzzcocks, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Oasis. Its remarkable that swagger and solipsism, in equal measure, come from this painfully placid place. Like the Boston Red Sox or Canada, Manchester is perennially second best, forever dwarfed in size and status by London, yet always, somewhat poignantly, maintaining its competitiveness. Its been best described by Smiths lead singer Morrissey in the song Everyday Is Like Sunday: This is the coastal town / That they forgot to close down / Armageddon come Armageddon /Come Armageddon come.

Gagas fans are happy to mill about the beer stands inside, taking a pass on opening act Semi Precious Weapons and waiting for her to take the stage. Her career may be in its infancy, but shes cultivated such loyalty from her fans that they will overlook, the way all who are newly in love do, imperfections big and small. They feel she does the very same for them. They hope.

My worst nightmare, says a twenty-year-old college student named Gavin Dell, who is here with his best friend Carrie and who has used blue and gold glitter to create a fantastic lightning bolt over his right eye, is that thats an image. Lady Gaga seems so sincere, he says, but its also how sincere she seems that makes him fearful shes not. Its a generational thing, the irony of living in a post-postironic age.

I would hate for that to be an image, he says. Dont worry about me; I have a very busy life. But if this is all a press thingthat shes afraid of boys, of sex... Hes slightly, sweetly embarrassed by how invested he is in her, but he also cant help himself.

It seems so genuine, he continues. I hope to God its true. Yes, she has stylists, but the perception is shes done it herself. My impression is shes done it herself. I might be wrong. But if Im wrong, shes been very well put to me.

So: Just who is Lady Gaga, and how did she get to be that way? Its a question thats been asked of her over and over, from Ellen to Oprah to Barbara Walters, and she always gives the same answer: She was and is a freak, a misfit, a lost soul in search of her fellow travelers.

That line itself explains why this still very young womanwho grew up in comfort and privilege on New Yorks Upper West Side, whose musical heroes include Billy Joel, New Kids on the Block, and Britney Spears, who until two years ago considered American Apparel avant-garde fashionis so endlessly fascinating. Because to watch her open her European tour in Manchester is to search fruitlessly for the cracks between the girl who wanted to be the next Fiona Apple, a serious, sensitive singer-songwriter, and the glorious, demented art-freak performer on the stage.

When crowds in Europe are sick of waiting, they start doing the wave. And on this first night in Manchester, well on our way to half-past nine, theyre doing the wave. Michael Jackson is playing on a loop, mainly everything off Thriller, and the message is none too subtle: This is the girl who has said she wants to be as big as Michael, a girl who, as he did, identifies herself as a freak show, whose own performances are, as his were, ghoulish in a childlike way, sexually provocative but never sensual, spectacles rife with pageantry but bolstered by state-of-the-art pop music delivered by an undeniably terrific, authentic voice.

Theres a white scrim billowing in front of the stage, and just as the crowd is on the verge, the lights go down and the crowd erupts (all great rock acts do thisplay with just how taut the rubber band can go before the audience is lost to them for good). A blue grid is projected onto the scrim, and a nebulous blob on the left begins to emerge and move toward the crowd, floating and swirling and taking shape as Gaga. A clock to the right of the screen rapidly runs down the seconds to start time; it hits 00:00:00:00, the scrim drops, and there she is, standing on the top of a staircase to the left, bracketed on one side by a fake storefront advertising, in neon lights, Liquor, Gold Teeth, and her own paradoxical brand, Sexy Ugly. To the left is another industrial scaffolding, with the words WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE spelled out in big white bulbs. Shes opening with Dance in the Dark, but the first minute of the song is inaudible over the din of the crowd.