Lady Gaga wants you to know she is not a Method actor. The 23-year-old ingénue behind hits like "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi" does believe in cultivating what thespians call "theatrical truth." But while devotees use the exercises developed by the late Lee Strasberg and others to go deep into character and pull themselves out again, Gaga has made artifice her permanent home.
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When rock stars fake it
It's not about just the music. Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, Janelle Monae and others never break character. But is it real or merely an elaborate act?
FOR THE RECORD
Katy Perry: In a photo caption with an article on music and theatrics in Sunday's Arts & Books, singer Katy Perry's first name was misspelled as Katie.
Katy Perry: A caption under a photograph of singer Katy Perry last Sunday misspelled her first name as Katie.
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"Hated Lee Strasberg," Gaga says in a behind-the-scenes video on her website, reminiscing about her youthful studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "You create sensory scenarios for yourself," she explains. "Like, I'm gonna feel a coffee cup right now, or feel the rain, and when I feel rain, I feel this way. Then you go into that state, and you stay there. And then you have to learn in the classes how to get out of that state."
"But that's what I don't do," she concludes. "I'm in a permanent state of Gaga."
The former Stefani Germanotta, who tells every journalist she encounters that Lady Gaga is "not a character" and who gets offended when someone calls her by her given name, is only the most insistent in a wave of pop artists actively questioning the value of an old and often-debated artistic standard: authenticity.
The balance between "real" and "fake" in pop has run in cycles. Rawness and spontaneity come into fashion, then formalism and glitz. In fact, both extremes are always present, with some artists aiming to express unfiltered emotions in unstudied ways, others adopting a deliberately mannered, costumed, referential style, and most combining elements of both approaches.
Since the dawn of the popular music age, the nature of authenticity has been debated by artists, who've battled in rhyme and punched each other backstage over the matter; fans, who tend to think whatever their community does is the most real; and critics and theorists, who've written enough on the topic to sag several bookshelves.
Lately, though, the split between "real" and "fake" seems to have closed. It sometimes seems that all of pop is in a permanent state of Gaga. This isn't because the quest for authenticity has been abandoned. It's because, for artists like Gaga, fake has become what feels most real.
Artificial conventions
