Baby Talk with Lady Gaga

"I'm a bit of a con artist," says Lady Gaga.

Con artist: it's not the title most would claim with pride. In fact, it's the kind of title most would wear with an orange jumpsuit and a court-appointed lawyer. And once upon a time, artists - especially recording artists, those singers of songs who are expected to caress our collective ears with only the most authentically inspired personal poetry - were supposed to reject any insinuation that portrayed their fame as a calculated career move rather than embrace it. But when you hail from a generation raised on paparazzi, Paris and Perez, fame isn't an accident. It's a performance.

"I tricked people for years into believing I was famous," says Gaga, the performance-artist-cum-club-diva who dropped her debut album The Fame last week, following a protracted series of kitschy performances (during the swimsuit competition of the 2008 Miss Universe Pageant, for one) and slew of music videos ("Just Dance," "Poker Face," "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich") that have competed for air time on the Logo network and airplay in the clubs, earning her an early, solid fan base in the LGBT community.

"I tricked people for years," she says. "Walking down the street, going to nightclubs, and waiting in line. It's con art."

Indeed, despite the fact that she's been singing, playing piano and writing songs since childhood (not to mention earning herself early admission to NYU's prestigious Tisch School for the Arts), Gaga says that her greatest strengths have been her attitude, perseverance, and the aforementioned manipulation of the media and masses.

"You don't need to have the background that I do," says Gaga of acquiring her seat on the road to stardom. The Fame, she says - in all of its electro-pop, disco-frenzied, synth-cyclone giddiness - is her personal tribute to the sense of "inner fame" that is inherent in everyone, lying latent, and just waiting for the right moment of self-empowerment and self-entitlement to burst out.

"It's a basic human right to feel good about yourself," says Gaga. Speaking by phone, her voice has the husky sleepiness of a hot chick with bed head; but it's also filled with the same kind of assertive, petulant self-assuredness as a certain other good old Italian-American gal who, once upon a time (and before the Kabbalah got hold of her) similarly declared herself heir apparent to the universal spotlight and the throne of dance-pop stardom.

"Anybody can do it," says Gaga of acquiring fame, the batting of her (presumably) fake eyelashes nearly audible over the phone. "It's about valuing your own thoughts more than you would ever believe. It's not about being arrogant, but it's about being sure and opinionated ... and knowing who you are down to the sneakers you wear."

It's that kind of bravado that Gaga believes has endeared herself in a unique way to the LGBT community, so soon out of the proverbial box.

"I'm a risk taking, provocative female," she says. "They [the gay community] love fashion, they live and breathe music... the gay community is a free-spirited culture that loves art."

Not to mention, Gaga is not exactly the kind of gal who blends in to the crowd, after all: the fashionista designs her own stage clothes, which usually involve the sensibility of a drag queen, the retro-rock theatricality of Ziggy Stardust, and copious amounts of skin, eyeliner and sequins (is that all redundant?).

But hold up.

"I'm sure you want me to say it's all about the sequined panties and disco balls," she adds of her queer appeal. "But I think it's greater than that. I think the gay community is going to relate to good work that's entertaining; I'm trying to contribute something ... and be the greatest rock and roller that ever lived."

She's doing her best to make good on that dream, beginning with an early name for herself doing "shock art" performances on the Lower East Side club scene; singing while lighting cans of hairspray on fire, things like that.
For Gaga, the synthesis of music, fashion and performance is the intersection where she differentiates herself from the rest of pop music's increasingly banal traffic.

"Everything I do, the music and the stage performance... all those things are conceived through one another," says Gaga. "I'm always thinking about the fashion on stage... the performance art... the music bursts out of a vision in my head of what the song would look like, how I would perform it and how I would move. What it really means."

"It's pop performance art," she adds. "Super theatrical."

That theatre is staffed in part by Haus of Gaga, the entourage and creative team who are responsible for conceptualizing, implementing, and executing the diva's ultimate creative vision. Much of it is inspired by the Vogue houses of NYC's '80s, another stylization that harks back to the pioneering trail blazed by earlier dance-pop acts like Madonna.

"It's luminosity," says Gaga of that aura she hopes to cast with her music. "I want people to shine. I want people to feel... I want people to love, and to be passionate about something. I don't care if you wear LL Bean and Polo every day. It's not about judging somebody's fashion sense, it's about judging somebody's opinions. I'm saying to the world, 'Please, be passionate about something.'"

But for what, exactly, does Gaga hope to inspire passion? If it wasn't for her surprisingly generous opinion of media-whoring celebutards like Paris Hilton ("She does that gawky, coked out thing with her arm... I love her dearly," says Gaga), the media con job upon which she prides her rise to fame might be considered a form of performance art irony in itself: a flippant middle finger to an easily duped media.

And if it wasn't for her talent, her career itself might seem like a novelty act. But the fact remains that, when the couture fashion goes back on wire hangers and the shock rock posturing loses its allure, there's something that remains undeniably surprising about Gaga: her music is really, really good. And she knows it. And she's glad.

"I'm not trying to make something that only twelve people think is great," says Gaga, who cites a favorite artist like Andy Warhol as evidence that pop art need not be dismissed as lowbrow. "I want to make something that the whole world thinks is great and inspiring."

"I want to make a contribution," she says. "This isn't about me jacking off to my own record."

And yet, if it was, there's reason to believe that Gaga would get over it pretty quick.

"I don't really give a fuck at the end of the day," she says of the haters.

Ah, from the mouths of babes.