The Fame

So, let’s pretend the year is 2008. It’s summer and you’re making a huge transition in your life. For me, it was the fact that I was growing up at an alarming rate. High school would be approaching me in the fall, so it felt like my last summer to be a kid. Luckily, the summer after middle school was one of my favorites. Personally, I met some of the most important people in my life, and had a close knit friend group with amazing memories. One of the things we would do together was listening to music. I didn’t see it then, but the time we were living in was what I had previously coined “The Golden Age Of Pop.” Around this time, pop queens Katy Perry, Kesha and Lady Gaga would reign supreme. As new artists, they each brought something unique to the pop scene and it felt like they knew so much about who they were. Among these artists, I’d say that Lady Gaga was especially self-aware. Her debut album The Fame is still one of the most ambitious dance records out there. To be honest, I haven’t really heard anything like it since its release, and I do believe that’s one of the major things that has catapulted Lady Gaga into one of the biggest names in music.

2008-2009 is an integral year in my life. I just graduated from college and I was about to embark on a journey to the corporate world. The sudden need to commute to work on a rush hour can be daunting that’s why having my iPod mini as a companion in train and jeepney rides kind of helped. I tend to stick to my old favorites, but during that time, I got interested with a newbie pop singer named Lady Gaga. She is a protégé of RedOne whose songs were all over the place that year. When I saw her music videos on TV and the sort-of brand new YouTube, I just thought that well, she has it. But I never thought that she will be THAT big. Let’s be honest here: Most of the female singers who were big those days where either band members embarking on a solo route (Gwen Stefani and Fergie) or those who took a while before they scored that big hit (Rihanna and Katy Perry). When you go to the dance-pop route with no public history, you really need to exert a lot of effort to be noticed and to gain loyal followers. Ladies and gentlemen, Lady Gaga is one of the few brave artists who chased fame by singing about it.

It often happens like this. You wake up one morning, it seems a quiet, ordinary day, and might not even realize it, but the world of music is going to change forever in a blink of an eye, and nothing will be like before. This happens when a new album is released, and the album is going to sell millions and millions of copies in the next periods. Its tracks will be downloaded for years, billions of times by young people from every country of the world. This also happened in 2008 when Lady Gaga released The Fame. A title that is also a goal and a destiny for the album and for the artist. Actually, the first single was released some months before, and Lady Gaga already gained some popularity especially in the US, so she was definitely not new to the music scenes. But nobody could probably forecast the skyrocketing career that was about to begin. The new album featured several worldwide hits, but most of all introduced to the world a new dance and pop icon, with a very personal style. She learnt a lot of lessons from the iconic divas that came before her, and raised the bar to new, unprecedented levels of provocative and teasing images and clips. The name Gaga was born almost randomly during a conversation with her producers, who were talking about Queen and mentioned their milestone hit “Radio Ga-Ga”. It sounded great as a stage name for new star, and the brand Lady Gaga was born! For those who loved the 80s music, she definitely took inspiration from Madonna style, controversy, and taste for excess. For those who loved the 90s music, she is a sort of Gwen Stefani brought to the extreme level. For those who love 2000s music, she is simply Lady Gaga, the first and purest star of the millennium. What I really love in this wonderful woman, artist and performer, is the continuous escalation of her production, be it lyrics, music, and videos. You have never seen anything like this before. But, will you be ready for the next level?

I posit that even if Lady Gaga decided to just become a ‘normal’ pop singer – I mean, if there were no weird make-up and over-the-top dresses – or all those strange accoutrements she has included to boost her persona, with songs as solid as the ones in her debut album The Fame, I think she’ll still make it as a big pop star that she is already. During the “olden days”, when an artist is able to release seven songs from an album and all of them reaches the top 10 in the US charts, it shows how ‘deep’ the bench is in that album and shows how appealing that performer is to the fans. Michael Jackson’s Thriller did that, as well as his follow-up Bad. His sister, Janet Jackson, came close with six. Although Lady Gaga had four top 10 songs in the US charts for this album, with two of those getting to #1, I can think of four other songs from this album that could’ve reached the top 10, maybe even the top 40. I feel that’s how ‘deep’ the bench is for this album – even if it’s a debut album.