Victoria: Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga. The woman, the myth, the legend.
I love Lady Gaga so much I hardly know where to begin. Sometimes I talk to people about Lady Gaga (I love to put the emphasis on the second ga in Gaga for added drama) and I can tell they do not get it at all. They want to take her down a peg. They mention that someone they know knew her when she was younger and she was entitled or something. Famously when Gaga was a student at NYU some of her classmates who did not like her made a Facebook group called "Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous." Maybe that's not even true, but it sounds true. Gaga is a try hard. She is a theater kid. She is performing and she knows it. She is Rachel Berry from Glee but much cooler.
And I love her for that. I do not want to take Lady Gaga down a peg. I love that she is ridiculous. I love her The Fame-era over-the-top costumes she wore on every red carpet and city sidewalk. I loved her movie star cosplay for the A Star Is Born press tour. I loved every choice she made in House of Gucci (which I cannot say for the rest of the film). Original Gaga tried to portray herself as a sort of rude New York club kid who just happened to make it big, but now we know her true form — a dramatic theater kid who loves a costume and a transformation and just wants to be liked and to love things enthusiastically.
Hayley when I pitched this topic to you, you admitted you are not a huge Gaga lover. What is your relationship to her?
Hayley: For the record, when you texted me and suggested we do a convo on Lady Gaga I was extremely hungover. I love Lady Gaga! And people who don't can get lost, losers! I think she is insanely talented and deserves all good things.
"Just Dance" was released in 2008, during my freshman year of college. At any party or bar (jk what was I doing at a bar when I was 19 ha ha) as soon as you heard the opening of that song, you immediately had to, well, Just Dance. It was so fun and exciting, and although I know hindsight must be shaping some of my memories, there was a definite excitement in the air about Lady Gaga. She was a huge fucking deal when she burst onto the scene. Her music was so good, and her celebrity persona was endlessly exhilarating.
It is hard to articulate just how big of a deal "Bad Romance" was when it was released. It was a cultural reset. One of my absolute favorite college memories is one night sophomore year, my roommate and I learned the choreography to "Bad Romance" just from watching the music video approximately 100 times in a row. We put on a ton of makeup and did crazy hairstyles and put on heels and did the dance over and over again, laughing until we cried. On a separate occasion, I visited my friend at college and we actually made our own Bad Romance music video, using our own footage and a bunch of old-timey movie clips my friend had used for a recent film project. We stayed up all night editing it. This is what amateur video production was like in 2009.
I have so many distinct memories tied to so many Gaga songs. And she has so many good songs! My favorite Lady Gaga song is "You and I" and I literally never get sick of hearing it. I just stopped writing this to pull it up on Spotify. What are some of your ties to Lady Gaga as a musician? What are your favorite songs? I feel like we have so much to cover!!
Victoria: Hayley, "You & I" is also my favorite!!!!!! Do you remember that they released localized versions for the radio, so on Z100 instead of "Nebraska" she said "New York"? It was incredibly goofy and wonderful.
"Bad Romance" was a moment! It was such a moment that when Lea Michele and Idina Menzel performed it together on Glee that was also a moment! The image of you dancing to it in your room and making this video is so heartwarming. I'll never doubt your Gaga love again.
I, like everyone with a pulse, loved "Bad Romance" and the entire The Fame (Monster) era. But Gaga didn't really become mine until Born This Way, which came out my freshman year of college. I used to go to the gym and run on the treadmill (disgusting, truly) and blast "Edge of Glory" and "Hair" and "Highway Unicorn."
I love some songs from Artpop and many songs from Joanne ("Sinner's Prayer" one of the most underrated Gaga songs of all time!). But A Star Is Born Gaga is really the Gaga of my heart. I love that movie, I love that soundtrack, everyone reading this turn on "Always Remember Us This Way" and cry with me. (This is my personal Gaga playlist.)
I have never seen Gaga in concert, but in early March 2020 I got tickets to see the Chromatica tour. It has been postponed twice. I pray it will actually happen this summer/before the Omega variant comes and destroys us all. Theoretically I would love to see Gaga in Vegas but I have a mental block against it.
What are your favorite Lady Gaga celebrity moments? Mine is when she went to a Mets game in 2010 and flipped off the crowd and they put her in Jerry Seinfeld's empty box to get her away from everyone else, and then Seinfeld was pissed they dragged him into it so they let him commentate basically an entire game. Current Lady Gaga is so different from performatively rude Lady Gaga, but it's important to remember where we came from.
Hayley: YOU AND I IS SO GOOD! Wow, no wonder we're friends and creative partners! God, I would love to see Lady Gaga in concert. It would be amazing, and I'm so jealous that you will get to see her live.
While writing this convo I started thinking about how many of the YouTube videos that I watch when I need to cheer myself up are actually just all Lady Gaga videos. Firstly, we have her and Bradley Cooper singing "Shallow" at the 2019 Oscars, which is just such a good performance in general as well as a good original song performance at the Oscars, which is actually kind of hard to do right! This performance is everything that we love about what awards season at its best can feel like—a magical and glamorous moment where time seems to stop. I love it so much!
Another Gaga awards show moment is her incredible tribute to Julie Andrews at the 2015 Oscars. This video always gives me chills, it's so great to watch her sing her fucking ass off like you know she can. And I absolutely love her look here, hair down, her dress soft and romantic, as she belts out these songs. When I watched this live, one of my friends exclaimed, "Julie loves it!!!!" and now every time I watch this video I think, Julie loves it!!!
The other performance that I think about is her iconique Super Bowl Half Time show from 2017. My dad loves this so much that he has saved the recording on the DVR for 5 years, and I'm glad he did, because the sound mix on that one is better than the one on YouTube (sorry!) This is one of the most entertaining and impressive live performances I have ever seen, and showcases just how incredible she is, IN CASE YOU DID NOT ALREADY KNOW THAT. If you have not seen Gaga: Five Foot Two on Netflix, do yourself a favor and watch it. The documentary follows her as she prepares for the Super Bowl performance, and there is a part where she talks about how this is the biggest performance of her life, and she knows that she will never have a chance to perform at this specific level and scale again.
What is so striking to me about Gaga is that she is so self-aware of her place in the industry and in the world. She is both an incredibly talented artist and a shrewd businesswoman. She knows how to manipulate fame, power, and her image to her advantage, and it is fascinating to watch. I really look forward to this next phase of Actor Gaga, because A Star is Born was such a delight.
Victoria: The Bradley Cooper thing (gah I love that performance) brings me to something I wanted to talk about: Gaga's love life. During the promotion of A Star Is Born, Gaga and B. Coops were very demonstrative, because they are actors who act and they knew it would be good for the movie (which it was!). But in general, Gaga's love life is not part of the story, which is very different from basically every other woman singer of her caliber! She was engaged to Taylor Kinney (who my mom loves because he's on Chicago Fire, but he is not a household name), and she was engaged to her agent and that's....basically it. I think it helps her keep this superstar image, in a way — Gaga remains a performance. Stefani might have her heartbroken, might be upset about something not working out, but Gaga goes on. Gaga has also said she's bisexual but has let the media portray her as an "ally" more recently, which I don't love.
The video I love that we haven't mentioned is the one for "Paparazzi," which is just glorious. I also love the video for "Edge of Glory" because I miss Clarence Clemons very much. Sometimes I think I hallucinated Gaga's A Very Gaga Thanksgiving special, but I did not, and the piano performance of "Hair" with wigs is so special to me. This woman got on national television on Thanksgiving for all of America's families and performed a song while draping herself in fake hair and talking about gay kids. Your fav literally would never.
What do I want for Gaga going forward? I would like her to keep acting, because she is a fucking movie star AND an actress and I want her in front of my eyeballs. I do not want her to win the Oscar for House of Gucci, because I want her to win for a movie that I would want to watch again. I don't want her to pull a DiCaprio and go "gritty" to get the Oscar — I just want her to take fun roles in cool movies where she gets to be amazing and hot and perfect. And she should write a song for the credits for every single one. Is that too much to ask?
Things Victoria Loves:
I'm late to the party but I just started watching the What We Do In The Shadows series, which airs on FX and is streaming on YouTube. It's very funny and so different from all other sitcoms!
My wonderful friend A.C. made a playlist of every version of "Fire," the song written by Bruce Springsteen and made famous by the Pointer Sisters. If you enjoy this type of weird content, you might enjoy this playlist I made of 51 versions of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."
Down With Love, a deeply underrated 2003 romcom starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, is now streaming on HBOMax. You will not regret watching it.
Stuff Hayley Recommends:
The Golde Cacao Turmeric Latte Mix + Chocolate Almond Milk = an insanely good cup of hot cocoa that does not give me a ragin' stomachache
Because all I watch now is GBBO and foreign television: The Korean series Crash Landing on You, which is available on Netflix and is a swoony, immersive delight
Lays Flamin' Hot Kettle Cooked Potato Chips + Heluva Good French Onion Dip = a snack you will literally not be able to stop eating that my friend and I discovered this weekend
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