Diva Divo - Dance Magazine

"I'm a bit of a con artist."

So says Lady GaGa, the rising 22 year-old performance-artist-cum-club-diva whose debut single "Just Dance" just hit the #2 spot on the Billboard Club charts.

Con artist: it's not the kind of title most would wear with pride. In fact, it's the kind of title most would wear with an orange jumpsuit and a court-appointed lawyer. And once upon a time, artists – especially recording artists, those singers of songs who are expected to caress our collective ears with only the most authentically inspired personal poetry – were supposed to reject (not embrace!) any insinuation that portrayed their fame as a calculated career move.

But this is not Walden Pond; it's New York City, circa 2008. And when you hail from a generation raised on paparazzi, Paris and Perez, fame isn't an accident.

It's a performance.

"I tricked people for years into believing I was famous," says GaGa of her big con, one that would make Thomas Crown green with envy. "I tricked people for years into believing I was famous: walking down the street, going to nightclubs, and waiting in line. It's con art."

Indeed, despite the fact that she's been singing, playing piano and writing songs since childhood (not to mention earning herself early admission to NYU's prestigious Tisch School for the Arts), GaGa says that her greatest strengths have been her attitude, perseverance, and the aforementioned manipulation of the media and masses.

"You don't need to have the background that I do," says GaGa of acquiring her seat on the road to stardom. Due out in September, her debut album The Fame, she says – in all of its electro-pop, disco-frenzied, synth-cyclone giddiness - is her personal tribute to the sense of "inner fame" that is inherent in everyone, lying latent, and just waiting for the right moment of self-empowerment and self-entitlement to burst out.

"It's a basic human right to feel good about yourself," says GaGa. Speaking by phone, her voice has the husky sleepiness of a hot chick with bed head; but it's also filled with the same kind of assertive, petulant self-assuredness as a certain other good old Italian-American gal who, once upon a time (and before the Kabbalah got hold of her) similarly declared herself heir apparent to the universal spotlight and the throne of dance-pop stardom.

"Anybody can do it," says GaGa of acquiring fame, her (presumably) fake eyelashes nearly batting their way through the phone. "It's about valuing your own thoughts more than you would ever believe. It's not about being arrogant, but it's about being sure and opinionated… and knowing who you are down to the sneakers you wear."

Not that GaGa would ever be caught dead in something as pedestrian as sneakers. She's not exactly the kind of gal who blends in to the crowd, after all: the fashionista designs her own stage clothes, which usually involve the sensibility of a drag queen, the retro-rock theatricality of Ziggy Stardust, and copious amounts of skin, eyeliner and sequins (is that all redundant?).

If that's not enough to garner attention, GaGa made an early name for herself doing "shock art" performances on the Lower East Side club scene; singing while lighting cans of hairspray on fire, things like that.

For GaGa, the synthesis of music, fashion and performance is the intersection where she differentiates herself from the rest of pop music's increasingly banal traffic.

"Everything I do, the music and the stage performance… all those things are conceived through one another," says GaGa. "I'm always thinking about the fashion on stage… the performance art… the music bursts out of a vision in my head of what the song would look like, how I would perform it and how I would move. What it really means."

"It's pop performance art," she adds. "Super theatrical."