How I Went Gaga

I’ve been trying to write a post about Lady Gaga since August. I noticed the date when I looked for this title among my drafted, but not published, blog posts. I have 160 drafts dating back to the start of this blog in July 2007, when I thought I wasn’t going to write that much and that $732 an ounce was a mind-blowing price for gold. Now I have more unpublished drafts than other people have published blog posts in the same amount of time, and gold is trading at over $1,100 an ounce. None of this has anything to do with Lady Gaga. I’m just trying to continue procrastinating my Gaga post, even for a paragraph longer. I have suffered from Gaga block in part because I am overwhelmed by love for her. Don’t get me wrong. She is no Coco. But if Coco didn’t exist, Lady G would be my idol. By the way, you can follow Coco on Twitter. This week, Coco tweeted a photo. I laughed, I cried, I looked at it again and again, I thought about putting it on my holiday card this year.

The one and only Coco. Sorry, Chanel!

Elegant! Anyway, the other part of the Gaga block is that people make comments about her style that irritate me, and I figured some kind of rant would be required. Even short rants take energy! I barely have enough energy to drag myself through my daily workouts at the gym, which happens to be the only place I seriously watch music videos. While working out last year, I started seeing Lady Gaga’s Just Dance video. I liked the song, but I was more interested in the singer with the sharp style.

I kept wondering why, in the video, this stylish chick was surrounded by the raggedy-looking hipsters who apparently had never left the house party thrown by Kelly Clarkson in her 2003 Miss Independent video. DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE HOMES TO GO TO?! Leave already! Jebus! Basically, I couldn’t get totally into Lady Gaga because she was hanging out with a bad crowd. Then a couple of things happened. She wore a hair bow made out of hair, and I like bows. Admittedly, I prefer bows to be placed on the boobs or butt, but if you wear one in your hair and it’s made OF hair, you get my seal of approval.

A hair bow made of hair is a good thing.

Speaking of hair, it was the elephant-shaped hair hat that Lady Gaga wore for a performance in Japan in August that inspired me to start writing this post.

A lot of people reacted with knee-jerk outrage to the headpiece, but I knew that the hair hat was an artwork created by the late Japanese artist Nagi Noda. I thought Gaga’s wearing it in Noda’s homeland was a lovely tribute to one artist from another. But after this, I noticed a lot of people asking, “Why can’t Lady Gaga just dress normally?” Is that a serious question? I’ll answer it, just in case: Because then she wouldn’t be Lady Gaga. She’d be a schmuck like us, sitting at home dribbling Cheeto dust (or, in my case, Cadbury crumbs) onto our keyboards while posting poorly spelled fashion critiques about more adventurous people who have launched themselves into superstardom. Or, at best, she’d be this adorable, anonymous girl: Lady Gaga before she went Gaga.

Speaking of costume-y tributes, this copy of a Hussein Chalayan bubble outfit didn’t bother me at all. It’s just a fucking stage costume. She couldn’t buy the original in a store, nor was she planning to sell a knockoff with a Gaga label on it. There’s a lot worse stealing than that in fashion, children. Anyone who has shopped at Steve Madden for Louboutin knockoffs should hold her peace.

Courtesy of the New York Times

Of course, if Lady G rips off any of my jewelry, that’s another story. I will send out a thousand press releases and do a dozen blog posts that are bursting with outrage. I will simultaneously be sending Gaga classy thank-you bouquets — balloons and teddy bears included — from 1-800-Flowers in return for the great publicity. There might be a cease-and-desist letter tucked in the bouquet too, but whatevs! Gaga remains the epitome of my Wear What You Want philosophy, musical performer edition. As RuPaul used to say back in the day of real supermodels:A  “You better work!” and Gaga works. (Click here for mash-up of RuPaul’s Supermodel video with Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.) And working the RuPaul way does not include a boring black dress and a fresh-scrubbed face.

While the hair hat made me want to write about Gaga, long before that, I was thrilled by the video for Poker Face. When I saw Lady Gaga rising up from a pool, wearing latex and a disco-ball mask and showing just the right amount of side-boob, I knew that I would never have to endure a Kelly Clarkson-style house party again. I could design an entire jewelry collection around that video! I liked the Helmut Newton-esque, epic Paparazzi video better, if possible. And this week Gaga outdid herself, sporting Alexander McQueen’s armadillo shoes (the genuine article!) in her new Bad Romance video.

There are lots of tributes to Lady Gaga floating around: acoustic versions of her songs, mashed-up versions of her songs, Christopher Walken versions of her songs. It brings to mind the title of artist Pauline Boty‘s painting of Marilyn Monroe: “The Only Blonde in the World.” But this parody of Paparazzi is my favorite one so far. While you’re watching this, I’ll slip away to work on the book club post that I’ve been putting off since March. Enjoy!

UPDATED TO ADD: How did I miss gorgeous blogger Annie’s Gaga post? Obviously I agree with every word.