DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY, it seems, to polarise opinion, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – that’s Lady Gaga to you, me and the world – brings her Born This Way Ball tour to Dublin this evening.
Lady Gaga has performed in Ireland before – firstly as a lowly support act to Pussycat Dolls in Dublin’s O2 arena in February 2009; at Oxegen, Co Kildare that summer; and then headline shows at the O2 later that year and in 2010 – but her appearance at the Aviva Stadium is her first major outdoor concert in the capital.
It’s not bad going for a performer with a mere two albums to her name, yet even Gaga’s drawing power has its limitations, as highlighted by the stream of radio ads for the concert, which is some way from selling out.
And despite a fervent fan base (teenagers have been camping out at the Aviva Stadium for the past few days in order to gain wristbands for the front-of-stage “pit” area), Gaga will also have to contend with something she’s particularly good at courting: controversy.
So far, the tour, which started in April in South Korea, has garnered protests from religious groups. While Gaga was raised a Roman Catholic in Manhattan, the groups deem her persona, her music and her occasionally muddled public statements as satanic and provocatively anti-religious.
Gaga will face another controversy later today when, at about 4pm, Irish-based anti-fur group Animal Rights Action Network (Aran), will stage a protest. The protest will include the screening of undercover fur-farm footage.
“Lady Gaga should be ashamed to be wearing the skin of the dead, tormented animals she paid someone to kill for a dumb look,” said Aran’s John Carmody.
All of this fuss and bother is, of course, grist to the mill for a multimedia artist who has swiftly risen through the ranks of pop music to become one of its most talked-about figures.
Gaga started her music career in her late teens, committed to success – she was signed to major record label Def Jam in September 2006, only to be dropped from it in early 2007.
She quickly veered from the commercial to the style for which she is now perhaps better known – a mixum-gatherum of conceptual art, outré fashion and, lest it be forgotten amid the column inches and online chatter, quite a few brilliant pop songs.
Lady Gaga, however, confuses people. Is she the real deal? A performance artist successfully masquerading as a singer? Or perhaps Gaga is just another pop star with just another money-making perfume to her name – in her case it’s called Fame, the smell of which she likens to that of “an expensive hooker”.
Cultural commentator and feminist Camille Paglia thinks it’s the latter: “Gaga is more an identity thief than an erotic taboo-breaker, a mainstream manufactured product who claims to be singing for the freaks, the rebellious and the dispossessed, when she is none of those.” Passionate fans, known to Gaga as her “little monsters”, will no doubt tell you otherwise by the day’s end.
