What's your Lady Gaga Moment?

SOME POP CULTURE HISTORY

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I love pop music! I mean from Gwen Stefani to Dua Lipa, I’ll blast those tunes till the neighbours bang on my door and tell me to turn it down. There’s just something about it that gets me going.

Now that you know that, you should also know that my favourite pop artist of all time is Lady Gaga. I remember first hearing Just Dance and being intrigued, then Poker Face dropped and it was over for me. I was one of her Little Monsters from the jump.

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I don’t listen to Gaga much now, at least nothing new, but it shouldn’t surprise you that at one point, I bumped all her albums and watched all of her interviews. Gaga is someone who literally studied fame. She came into the industry eyes wide open and understood what it meant to present and perform her music and how to bring attention to herself.

In one of those interviews, Gaga talks about how she first got people to pay attention. She was playing in a club somewhere in New York City. Not many people were there but that never stopped Gaga from giving a performance her all. But when she realized the sparse crowd wasn’t paying any attention to her, she did what pop stars do.

Gaga stopped performing, took off her shirt, and stood looking at the crowd. Now she had everyone’s attention.

What’s your Gaga moment?

I’m telling you right now that there is no world in which I see myself being brave enough to pull that one off. That said, there’s something we as writers can learn from Gaga: art isn’t art if no one is paying attention.

Gaga was a student of fame. She knew early in her journey that no matter how great her music sounded, if no one was listening, then it wouldn’t matter. She gave just as much effort to get people to pay attention to her music as she did in making it.

For writers, I know that can be a hard pill to swallow, but it shouldn’t be. Get used to me saying this: we’re in the entertainment industry. I don’t care if you’re writing essays, you’re competing for the same eyeballs as writers creating Netflix series. That’s the reality.

Rick Rubin, who is a legendary music producer, has a productive way of looking at this situation. He says that there should be no thought of monetizing your art while you’re making it. Your only job is to make it beautiful and to make something you genuinely love. But once the art is completed, your next job is to find ways to get as many people to pay attention to what you’ve created.

Lady Gaga is an extreme example of someone who took her character to the extreme. The outfits, the performances; she really made a splash during her run. I don’t expect you to be wearing meat dresses at award shows. What I do expect is that you’ll allow yourself to be open-minded enough to experiment.

When I say experiment, I mean try things. Anything. You put a lot of yourself into your writing and it should be seen and read by as many people as possible. Don’t feel guilty about that, feel motivated to use your creativity in different ways.