The lady behind the fame: Lady Gaga

Almost immediately after she deposited herself in a corner booth at L'Espalier, the restaurant at Boston's Mandarin Oriental Hotel on the December afternoon after the first American date of her Monster Ball tour, Lady Gaga made a confounding statement.

"I don't see myself as ever being like anybody else," said the 23-year-old known to her mom (eating lunch nearby) as Stefani Germanotta. "I don't see myself as an heir."

Yet there she was, in a blonde Hollywood bob and black tuxedo-bra combo much like the costumes Madonna wore 20 years ago, discussing a show that conjures the spirits of Michael Jackson, David Bowie and the punk-rock drag queens of downtown New York and promoting music - the newly expanded edition of her 2008 debut album, The Fame, greatly enriched by eight new songs and repackaged as The Fame Monster - that pays blatant homage to ABBA, Queen, Eurodisco and Marilyn Manson.

Gaga doesn't care. She wants you to trace her references. "John Lennon talked about how with every song he wrote, he was thinking of another artist," she said, making a less expected connection to a pop deity.

 Top sensation

She has yet to attain the status of the Beatles, but in the ever-accelerating pop cycle, Gaga is a top sensation, and many people's vote for the most exciting artist of 2009. The Fame has sold nearly two million copies in the US and reportedly double that internationally; her album and the single Poker Face both made the top three on the year-end tally of top iTunes downloads.

The Fame Monster continues this sales sweep, but it also considerably advances Gaga's artistic project with some of her strongest songs yet, including the ear-worm-infested Bad Romance and the sumptuously emotional ballad Speechless.

The world is responding. She has made friends with Madonna, been interviewed by Barbara Walters and met the Queen of England at the annual Royal Variety Performance. The Monster Ball has sold out multiple nights in major cities.

This is all happening not because Gaga is cute or takes off her clothes but because (to use one of her favourite words) she is a monster - a monster talent, that is, with a serious brain.

During nearly two hours of conversation, she not only reiterates her assertion of total originality but also finesses it until it's both a philosophical stance about how constructing a persona from pop-cultural sources can be an expression of a person's truth and a bit of a feminist act.

Gaga views her music as a liberating force. "When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves," she continued. "I don't make it as a defence. I make it as, OK, guys, its been two years, and I've made a lot of music, and I know my greatness is individual. And I want every woman to be able to say that."

This is one of Gaga's gifts, maybe the one that most distinguishes her from the other talented women directing the pop zeitgeist right now, such as her recent collaborator Beyoncé, her fellow couture hound Rihanna or her rival in redefining blondness, Taylor Swift.

Gaga makes outrageous declarations - which, when you break them down, actually make sense. And then she backs them up, not only through her now famously provocative interviews but in her videos, her collaborations with designers and artists, her live performances and those infernally catchy hits.

Gaga says she never wanted her songs to be anything but massive hits. "I don't want to make niche-oriented music," said the songwriter, who entered the music business writing hits for other artists, including Britney Spears. "I don't like it! I don't mean that to be in a rude way. But my taste is not there."

Gaga has tapped into one of the primary obsessions of our age - the changing nature of the self in relation to technology, the ever-expanding media sphere, and that sense of always being in character and publicly visible that Gaga calls "the fame" - and made it her own obsession, the subject of her songs and the basis of her persona.

"Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with because it forces us to judge ourselves," she said. "I guess what I am trying to do is take the monster and turn the monster into a fairy tale."

That stars embody the social concerns of their age is a pop-culture truism. But only rarely does an artist dig beneath the dermis of our shared anxieties, exposing the liquid matter that runs through the shared fantasies and delusions of a particular moment. "It's kind of like a crusade in its own way," she said. "Me embodying the position that I'm analysing is the very thing that makes it so powerful."

Since the release of The Fame, Lady Gaga has been uncovering new layers within her basic themes. At first she just seemed like the most pop savvy of the clever young people using club beats as a basis for music that could be both cerebral and cathartic - the way indie rockers used heavy guitars a generation before. It was easy to dismiss her as no more than a well-educated New York girl with a gift for pop hooks and self-marketing.

Disturbing

But then her public appearances began not simply to provoke but disturb. She made a video for her song Paparazzi that had her in gilded crutches and a leg brace. She turned that vision of crippled glamour even bloodier on the MTV Video Music Awards, an appearance she described as "my first truly original moment."

She has worn costumes that recast childhood icons like Kermit the Frog and Hello Kitty into ingénue's pelts. She has painted her eyes to look like an animé heroine. In the climactic dance sequence from Monster Ball, she adorns herself in the black feathers of a vulture and the yards-long blonde braids of a victimised princess.

"The great thing about Gaga is she always want to push for the most extreme option," said Gary Card, who made the skeletal headgear she and her dancers wore on the AMAs. "With Rihanna and Beyoncé there is an end result of desirability and unattainable sexiness, whereas Gaga is a really interesting bridge between the desirable and the grotesque. She's not at all worried about looking ridiculous or hideous; actually, I think she thrives off it."

Completely gaga

Lady Gaga's trademark hairstyle is tying her platinum blonde tresses into a bow.

She went to the same school as Paris Hilton.

David Bowie, Queen, Madonna and Michael Jackson are her influences.

Her stage name Lady GaGa is a reference to the popular song Radio Ga-Ga by Queen.

Lady Gaga is a natural brunette, but she dyed her hair blonde as more often than not she was being mistaken for British singer Amy Winehouse by various interviewers while trying to make it to the top.

She mostly wears futuristic outfits and carries a glow-in-the-dark disco stick during her bizarre performances.

Her song Boys, Boys, Boys was inspired by rock group Mötley Crüe's hit Girls, Girls, Girls.