Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga [ハードカバー]

I'm a big Gaga fan, I'll come right out and say that. So I've picked up two different books on her which I've been reading. Of the two, I've enjoyed reading this more, but I still have some issues with it.

It's pretty clear to me that "Pokerface" is well-researched. The author sites numerous resources throughout the book. Many times in the book, in fact, she cites how different resources give different accounts of certain events in Lady Gaga's life, and she calls out those discrepancies. The book is also very well put together. Unlike the other book I read, Callahan is good writer. In addition to stating a detailed chronology of Lady Gaga's young life, she is also very analytical about it. And that's where, as a fan, I start to take issue with the book.

The book is just filled with so much negativity and venom that it is tough to swallow. Lots of silly, pointless banter like going way out of her way to cite discrepancies between accounts given by acquaintances of Lady Gaga, and those of Lady Gaga herself for example. She also breaks down the various costumes that Lady Gaga has worn, and tries to find artists in the past who have worn similar garments, with the constant criticism that what Lady Gaga is doing is unoriginal. There is also a really silly section in the book, where she lists various groups and performers that Lady Gaga has said are major influences to her, and then found interviews where Lady Gaga was asked very detailed "trivia" type questions about those performers that she couldn't answer. The point apparently being that because she lacked an encyclopedic knowledge of those artists, that she was somehow a fraud for claiming that she was influenced by them. Grrr, that's going way too far imho. I can't help feeling that the author has some very negative anti-Gaga thesis she is trying to prove by writing this book, and so everything is balanced in that direction.

Anyhow, I picked up the book to learn, not just to hear what I wanted to hear about Lady Gaga, so I was prepared and interested in the negative stuff too. And I did learn quite a bit about Lady Gaga through reading the book. There's no doubt, that it's full of a lot of interesting and insightful factual stuff. But I can't help feeling, as a fan, that I just read a book by a "hater", which is a bit tough to swallow. So that's a heads up for trying to decide whether to invest the time to read this book. You've gotta make that call for yourself.

For me, like many others, Lady Gaga seemed to come out of nowhere. This book helps to understand the phenomenon of Lady Gaga.

It is to our benefit that the author does not take Lady Gaga at face value and instead dissects the myth of Lady Gag. Although Lady Gaga has tried hard to portray it as such, there is no doubt that Lady Gaga did not simply come out of nowhere to be a big hit. The author catalogues Lady Gaga's extensive efforts to build her carreer. That the author is able to show how Lady Gaga's "overnight" stardom came about over time that should not be taken as the author criticizing Lady Gaga. On the contrary, the author shows that Lady Gaga is probably the hardest working entertainer in the music business. The author also portrays Lady Gaga as one of the more honest entertainers: despite her carefully crafted image (which makes my use of the term honest seem ironic), she does not seek fame only to complain of it. I disagree with other reviewers who suggest that the book was overly negative or filled with venom. I came away with an appreciation for Lady Gaga's work ethic.

The book is quote heavy. This has a couple of benefits It certainly establishes the author's source material and therefore increases the author's credibility. It also illustrates how the same events were seen differently by different people.

To her credit, the author covers the personal relationships that shaped both Stegani into Lady Gaga and her carrier, but for the most part declines to delve into sordid details. Let's face it, personal relationships would have shaped Lady Gaga and certainly gave rise to some of her music, and so cannot be completely ignored. Fortunately, this is not People magazine in book form.

Lady Gaga exploded into consciousness largely because of her image. She worked hard at it. The author describes many of the missteps. I agree with most commentators that there is little original in Lady Gaga's image (she is channeling Madonna) or her sound (often like Madonna too). But that hardly matters. The simple fact is that her music, particularly songs such as Bad Romance, Love Game, Papparazi, are vastly superior to most other pop music out there right now. It may be because of her carefully constructed image, shock tactics, etc., but who cares? That does not detract from the music being very good. Since the music is at the heart of Lady Gaga (that's what she does), I would have liked the book to explore the making of Lady Gaga's music in technical sense more. Her voice is rarely autotuned, which means she can actually sing, and sing well, but that aspect of Lady Gaga is not really explored. The technical music aspects of Lady Gaga may have been beyond the author's background (and of mine).

My other criticism is in terms of construction of the narrative. It is basically chronological, of course, but within that broadly chronological framework the author jumps back and forth quite frequently. Sometimes it is hard to determine what happened when. For a book that strips the way the myth of an overnight success, that is surprising.

You could say that all pop music is inherently manufactured by definition in order to provide the broadest accessibility. So, it's no surprise nor is it an insult to say that Lady Gaga's "spontaneous" appearance on the world stage was carefully cultivated and built up by corporate forces. This book provides just the right mix of innuendo and facts for the reader to piece together a pretty good idea of what the business and persona of Lady Gaga is about. The disjointed chronology and unnamed quotes tends to be the weakest points in the book but there's plenty of info provided which is verifiable through a little internet sleuthing. This book isn't as defamatory or one sided as Gaga's cult-like "little monsters" (the pop world's version of Juggalos) make it out to be, it's a reasoned look inside the business and art of super stardom itself. The mainstream music industry has had a long reputation for being a venal place full of exploitative, sociopathic, and derivative personalities. It's interesting to see the birth of a superstar from the ground floor which with today's media access it's hard to hide the backroom string pulling, investments, and other ugly business mechanisms at play. The myth-making of the modern pop star was perfected by the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna but they lived in an era where it was easy to wall themselves off with selective paper and tv media fiction. The "real" personality and nature of the super stars never fully filtered down with amateur media collected by friends and acquaintances over the course of their life like it is now. Internet and youtube provides a much more candid picture and this book tracks how Gaga used modern media to her advantage even though for any casual fan her mystique is considerably diminished when you see her less than glamorous upper class east coast "jersey shore" type roots. This book actually doesn't make any concrete statements about the quality of Gaga's work except to say that she has real talent as a performer which any casual observer should agree with. However the book does go into how derivative her image is which is left up to the reader to determine the merits of this argument. Overall, it's an interesting read but it's obvious this was a rush job to cash in on Gaga mania.