Lady Gaga always puts on a show, even when she doesn’t appear to be. She referred to Harlequin as “LG 6.5” because it doubles as a Lady Gaga studio album and a companion to the film Joker: Folie a Deux, in which she stars as Harley Quinn. The record, a collection of jazz classics polished with modern flair, is about dressing down to dress up. Lady Gaga called it “metamodernism”, a philosophy that recognizes the importance of art even if it doesn’t constitute history. “No matter what you want from me, I will be myself,” she told Rolling Stone.
Lady Gaga brings theatricality to “Good Morning”, a cover of the song popularized by Judy Garland in the 1940s. An on-the-nose commitment to Gaga’s nostalgia bit contextualizes the song in the singer’s enterprise. Stefani Germanotta’s entrance into the public consciousness relied on the idea of fame itself; her first album, The Fame, included the number-one single “Just Dance”, which soundtracked the last moment of bliss before the Great Recession. Lady Gaga’s follow-up, The Fame Monster, implied a prophecy had come true. However, a reckoning with celebrity was the first act in her decade-long performance, which uses fame to make a statement about showmanship.
Lady Gaga’s early work may have been commercially successful, but it wasn’t revolutionary in an artistic sense, as she often implied. “I’m going to give you the best album of the decade,” she said before the release of 2011’s Born This Way. Her selling point is her persona, which makes her the perfect pop star for an era of media oversaturation. She is everywhere and nowhere. She is everyone and no one. “Lady Gaga is the whole me,” she told Vogue.
In that same interview, profiler Jonathan Van Meter describes the collective experience of interviewing Lady Gaga on several occasions: “I was too swept up in the thrill of it all…the interview as performance art.” Making theater out of an interview is a very metamodernist sentiment. A single journalistic profile is not necessarily canon literature but worthy of fanfare.
In an essay about Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour for The New York Times, Taffy Brodesser-Akner expressed that she initially intended the piece, a personal reflection on attending the concert, to be an interview but was turned down. “[Celebrities] will be happy when the entire profile format is eradicated,” she wrote. Indeed, invasive journalists can wreak havoc on the personal lives of famous people. There is something to be said for what Swift once called “self-preservation”. Lady Gaga’s persona embodies the tension between the public and its idols. Her constant shape-shifting exists to point out ever-changing demands.
In Taylor Swift terms, Gaga is in her actress era. In 2018, she played Ally Maine in A Star Is Born, a film about the discovery of a rock star. In 2020, she starred opposite Adam Driver in House of Gucci. Lady Gaga’s onscreen second act tells a story her pop albums were not equipped to convey. However, Harlequin revives her ability to traverse between genres by using a character as its starting point. “I wasn’t done with her,” Gaga said of Harley Quin after Joker’s filming concluded.
The centerpiece of Harlequin, “That’s Entertainment”, summarizes Lady Gaga’s enterprise: “Everything that happens in life/can happen in a show.” When the performer and presentation are one in the same, there is no separating them, even if she does certain things as Lady Gaga and others as Stephane Germanmotta. Fame is worse than a monster: it’s a dictatorship. The act of being watched allows a celebrity to dictate the parameters of what people want to see.
Throughout Harlequin, Lady Gaga exercises total control. The grand musical scale nor immense legacy of its songs overwhelms her; an intense vibrato puts high notes in check, or inserts them where they did not exist before. Smooth orchestral production also situates the songs in time: “a modern take on vintage pop,” she said.
On “Joker”, brash electric guitars animate a theater classic, reminding listeners that Lady Gaga is a pop star who can discard classical training at will. “The joker is me,” she proclaims, accomplishing a familiar feat: revealing a new persona in an unmasking that feels personal.
Lady Gaga’s “real self” and persona are so intertwined that it’s impossible to tell which is coming to light in a given instance of uncovering. “[Lady Gaga] is not a persona,” she told Vogue, taking a note from Lana Del Rey‘s playbook. Celebrities exist because of persona. When they claim to not have one, as a means of avoiding confession, they rewrite reality so their theatrics become a pillar of it.
On “Happy Mistake”, Harlequin’s only song not written for Joker: Folie a Deux, Lady Gaga pauses to wonder: “How’d I become so addicted / To the love of the whole world?” Portraying fame as torture and glory in the same breath is vintage Lady Gaga. It sounds like a personal admission, but could only occur in abnormal circumstances. Of writing her Vogue profile, Van Meter said, “I never got the sense she wasn’t being real with me…but I almost always flew home worried.” Lady Gaga’s talent is an ability to make enigma feel real.
The necessary evils of fame can’t invalidate the persona they sustain because the public needs those machinations to consume the product of celebrity. Lady Gaga’s role in culture prompts both sides of an equation, average consumers and Hollywood stars, to evaluate whether those machinations are worthwhile. The phrase “Folie a Deux” refers to a mental illness shared by two people in close association. It describes the relationship between celebrities and the public. Why do we need famous people, anyway? Both sides have convinced themselves of the necessity of their exchange.
In the essay on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Brodesser-Akher describes celebrities as “the people who we elect to represent us in our own imaginations”. The degree of Lady Gaga’s authenticity is the wrong question. She reflects a mystery that exists inside all people. To find out the truth about her would be to ignore the truth about ourselves.
Harlequin’s true-to-form reprisal of big band tunes removes Lady Gaga, a cultural fixture, from her context, proving her true passion: showmanship. After a decade of spectacle, the best way to make her point became to swerve away from its costuming. Following A Star Is Born’s acoustic makeover, she released Chromatica, an album of dance pop. By changing, she ensured the demand for her foundational product would always exist.
“I can try to hide behind my makeup, but the show must go on,” Lady Gaga says on “Happy Mistake”. But must it? In life, it is possible to fall for your own mythology. When the central tenant of that credo is showmanship itself, you are hostage to your audience. In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” Lady Gaga is evidence that self-erasure can be an act of humanity.