The New Yorker:

Her new album is a work of self-citation, rummaging around in Gaga’s own past for inspiration. It’s also, somehow, the freshest collection of songs she has released in years.

By Rachel Syme

In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, “Born This Way,” did something unexpected—at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I’m not talking about the way she’d shown up at the Grammy Awards that year, nestled inside a giant plexiglass egg that was paraded into the venue atop a rustic palanquin. By that time, Gaga was already notorious for pulling such stunts; arriving inside the ovoid vessel—which she later claimed to have slept in for three straight days prior to her Grammys performance, as a “creative, embryonic incubation”—was not even her most outré awards-show caper. (The year before, she’d attended the MTV Video Music Awards in an outfit made entirely of raw meat, a pungent provocation that managed to draw the ire of vegans and carnivores in equal measure.) The strange act I am referring to is a stint that Gaga did, for a little less than a year, writing a magazine column describing the inner workings of her creative process. The idea to do this was hers—she’d allegedly approached Stephen Gan, the editor-in-chief of the avant-garde fashion magazine V, with the pitch. Gan told the Times that Gaga required very little editing.

The six articles that Gaga wrote for V—she called them “Gaga memoranda”—are bizarre, fascinating, and often very funny pop curiosities that read like a cross between Diana Vreeland-esque stream-of-consciousness musings and an art-school thesis. With exaggerated hauteur, Gaga explains that she does not, ultimately, have to explain herself to anyone. She is her own greatest creation, sprung from her own forehead the moment she decided to stop being Stefani Joanne Germanotta, a precocious, piano-playing Catholic schoolgirl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and started performing gigs around the Lower East Side wearing her stage name and not much else. “Lady Gaga” was a work of artifice, she conceded, but she’d come by the act honestly. “Art is a lie,” she wrote. “And every day I kill to make it true.” Her penchant for costumes and her “natural inclination to be grand” made her seem like a “master of escapism,” she added, but “Maybe I am not escaping. Maybe I am just being. Being myself.”

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