How I Came To Further Appreciate Humanity Through Lady Gaga



 Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it! I may have fallen for Lady Gaga. There, I said it. She is supposed to represent all the things I dislike about modern pop music; manufactured, auto-tuned, processed, over-produced. Oddly, she is ALL those things, times ten. So I shouldn’t like her, right?


But then, BUT THEN! She shows up on Howard Stern. And she’s talking. She talks about drugs and how lonely they made her feel – then demurs on the subject because she “has so many young fans” and she doesn’t want them to think it is at all worth it. She talks about how she felt she “made it” not when she became the behemoth machine that is Lady Gaga, but when she was living in New York, on her own, and finally felt free to be herself – really herself. She talks about writing songs with her dad, and expressing his feelings in a way he could never do on his own.

“Okay,” I thought, “all good stuff. But she still wore a meat suit! Jack Bruce would have never worn a meat suit!”

Then she slides over to the piano, and she plays “The Edge Of Glory.”  And she can sing, I mean really sing. She has passion and poise and grace.



And I am pissed. I don’t want to like her. I want to mock her. But I can’t. Behind all the costumes and the eccentric behavior is an artist. An artist who I am sure hears the rants of people like me, and then promptly ignores all of it to follow her path – the one she is so sure of. (How many of us can say that? How many of us have the guts to do that?)

I won’t be buying Lady Gaga tickets anytime soon, or downloading any of her songs. But I will remember this: we have to get over ourselves sometimes. We probably don’t know as much as we think we do- especially about other people. I thought Lady Gaga was a cartoon. She’s not, and it sucks that I didn’t take the time to find out.