Throughout the past decade, artist Lady Gaga has made waves in the music and social world. Setting aside the way she set the standards for synthetic pop in the early 2000s which has resulted in the pop music we see today, the image she has paired with her career also heavily impacted the music industry.
One of the most notable examples is the meat dress that Lady Gaga wore to the 2010 Video Music Awards. This look sparked a lot of conversation and was one of the benchmarks in Gagaās fashion looks throughout her career. While many viewed this look as part of Gagaās āout thereā image and flashy style of dress, each piece she wears seems to have a deeper meaning. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, she explained how the meat dress was part of her protest against the militaryās ādonāt ask, donāt tellā policy, which only allowed LGBTQ+ soldiers to join the military if they kept their sexual identity a secret. Gaga explained her choice behind this look by saying for her, the dress means āif we donāt stand up for what we believe in, if we donāt fight for our rights, pretty soon weāre going to have as much rights as the meat on our bonesā. This is just one example of many that Gaga has used her platform to advocate for human rights and other causes she cares about.
In addition to her red carpet looks, Gagaās performances throughout the years have set the standard for pop performance and has turned music into a performance art and spectacle. One of the first examples of these performances was at the 2009 VMA awards, where she performed her hit song āPaparazziā. She began the performance by stating āamidst all these flashing lights I pray the fame wonāt take my lifeā, and by halfway through she is covered in blood and finishes the song hovering over the crowd. In her explanation of this performance, she stated āI also remembered my obsession with young women when I was younger that died, beautiful young actresses and poets ā Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Sylvia Plath, these young women that died that we never saw their death. We see the deaths of these other women, but we donāt see their death. So I think I wanted to show that, and in my showing that, if youāre wondering what Iām going to look like when I die, here it isā. This dramatic scene was the first of many examples of the artistry Lady Gaga has exemplified throughout the course of her career.
And if the creation of performance art and the use of her looks to make political statements wasnāt revolutionary enough, Lady Gagaās constant reinvention and experimentation into different genres has solidified her place as one of the most notable trailblazers of this generation. Between the synthetic pop on āThe Fameā,Ā āARTPOPā, and her recently released āChromaticaā to her jazz classic album āCheek to Cheekā with Tony Bennet, to her ballad album āJoanneā, to the blues-rock-musical album from the Oscar winning film A Star is Born, is there anything she canāt do? Currently, Gagaās next project is Ridley Scottās Gucci biopic, āHouse of Gucciā, and I for one, am eager to see what this new era brings.
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