Going Gaga

Not many artistes have made the phenomenal rise of Lady Gaga who came to limelight in 2008 with her debut album, Fame. Since then she has sold 15 million albums and 51 million singles and currently, she is the only living artiste to have recorded a billion views on You Tube. This woman has become […]

Not many artistes have made the phenomenal rise of Lady Gaga who came to limelight in 2008 with her debut album, Fame. Since then she has sold 15 million albums and 51 million singles and currently, she is the only living artiste to have recorded a billion views on You Tube.

This woman has become ubiquitous; pictures of her appear everywhere, from magazine covers, to the internet – and most of them are rather interesting. She always manages to look outrageously different, wearing a different hairstyle each time. But her stand out feature has to be her unusual sense of dressing. She has turned out semi nude in a dress of plastic bubbles, in a costume of floppy Kermit the frog dolls and has appeared on stage with a spark-shooting bra; and like several other entertainment stars, she has managed severally to pose nude for magazine covers. Not to mention her weird head gears or glasses.

Yet, this woman was voted by Time Magazine among the 100 most influential persons in the world this year. She was also listed by Forbes Magazine as the fourth on its list of the 100 Most Powerful and Influential celebrities in the world and also the second most powerful musicians in the world.

Her achievements in the music industry is obvious with her recent tour de force at the MTV Awards where she had a record 13 nominations and went home on the night with eight awards – including the most prestigious for video of the year for her song ‘Bad Romance.’

Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germonatta in New York, March 28, 1986 to Italian America parents, Gaga demonstrated early a talent for music. She learned to play the piano from the age of four, went on to write her first piano ballad at 13 and began performing at open mike nights by age 14. At 17 she gained an early admission into the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts  and dropped out in her sophomore year to pursue her career.

Her father gave her a year to prove herself or return to school and she did not disappoint in that regard. He however turned his back on her when she started experimenting with drugs.

Her stage name came by mistake when her then producer sent her a text addressing her as Radio Ga Ga (after the song by Queen which he [her producer] sang for her each time she came into the studio) the text autocorrected itself to read “Lady Gaga” and the woman, who was then looking for a stage name fell in love with the glitch by which the world now knows her.

For now, Gaga is having her 15 minutes of fame and one hopes that her shooting into limelight like a comet will not cause her to self-destruct like so many before her. Hard work and attention to details have got her this far so far, like when she held up a Time Magazine photo shoot for hours to get the spark in her bra just right.