When rock stars fake it

We've also come a long way since 1994, when Courtney Love and her band, Hole, released the single "Doll Parts" after the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain. "I fake it so real I am beyond fake," Love sang in what became one of the most quoted lyrics of the era. But Love, like most musicians of the time, wasn't that good at faking. In her torn ball gowns and smeared makeup, singing her bloody songs about failing to live up to feminine ideals, Love presented herself as exactly what a pop star was supposed to be in the 1990s: uncontainable, willing to be ugly, immediate.

Those qualities added up to "real," even when embodied by artists like Love, who'd read their feminist theory and believed that identity was, at least in part, a construct. Like Cobain, Love wrote songs that questioned social norms, especially when it came to gender roles, but behind her act (and his) was the assertion of a believable self.

Lady Gaga and her peers are the ones who've gone beyond fake. It's not that they no longer recognize the distinction between real life and performance; it's that they don't care about it. The pose initiates the self; what's behind it just can't be that interesting.

Few current pop stars immerse themselves in their personae as completely as does Gaga -- T-Pain, for example, has a song about his children in which he doesn't use Auto-Tune. But many are preoccupied with the idea that the guises of the stage cannot or need not be removed.

In the video for her song "Overpowered," Irish electropop artist Roisin Murphy performs in an eye-popping checked cape and dress and rectangular hat -- and then leaves the nightclub, gets dinner at a chip shop, walks home, does her evening toiletry routine and tucks herself into bed, all in the same massive costume.

Janelle Monae, a protegee of Outkast and Diddy, gained critical accolades last year for "Metropolis: The Chase Suite," an EP that served as the first chapter in an unfolding science fiction epic. In her songs and her live shows, the theater-trained Monae presents herself as "a cyborg without a heart, a face or a mind." Her strange, jerky dance movements imply that she's in character, but she's said that her onstage journeys are never scripted.

The moves these young artists make rarely seem new. Quite the opposite, in fact. Monae, Gaga and others like them wear their debts to Bowie, Jones and Madonna on their shoulder-padded sleeves. But is this a lack of originality, or a refusal of it? Perhaps that's the most powerful point of all.