Artist

Lady Gaga

Lenox Hill Hospital, United States • b. 1986

Lady Gaga is a musician from Lenox Hill Hospital, United States, active since 1986. Their discography on Gatefold includes 24 records.

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Albums tracked

385

In collections

1986

Since

Biography

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born 28 March 1986), known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. She is known for her image changes and musical versatility and is considered an influential figure in popular music. With estimated sales of 124 million records, she is among the best-selling music artists of all time. Publications such as Billboard and Rolling Stone have included her in lists of significant artists.

The Arc of Lady Gaga

The pivots — what forced Lady Gaga to reinvent.

The RedOne Radio Invasion
Producer RedOne brought a heavy, metallic European club energy to a stale American pop market on The Fame and The Fame Monster. They tracked these anthems on cheap digital gear, pushing the vocal compression until it hurt. You hear it on "Bad Romance," where the hook is essentially a industrial-strength synth line disguised as a pop chorus. It made radio sound like a Berlin basement.
The ARTPOP Collapse
Tension with manager Troy Carter and a desire to be taken seriously by the fine-art world led to the chaotic, over-budget sessions for ARTPOP. Producers like Zedd and Madeon piled on layers of digital noise, completely burying her vocals under synth-brass and EDM drops. The record sounded exhausted and frantic, a document of an artist fighting her own pop machinery. It remains her most polarizing, cluttered document.
The Strip-Down and Legitimacy Play
Needing to wash off the ARTPOP excess, she teamed up with jazz veteran Tony Bennett for Cheek to Cheek before bringing in Mark Ronson to cut Joanne on analog tape. Ronson brought in Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme to play guitar, resulting in a dry, mid-tempo rock record that sounded like a band in a room instead of a computer grid. On "Million Reasons," the theater-kid voice finally had room to breathe without a vocoder.

Influences

Queen — She took her stage name directly from their 1984 single "Radio Ga Ga" and eventually brought guitarist Brian May into the studio to play on "Yoü and I." You hear the influence in the massive, multi-tracked vocal harmonies and theatrical stadium-rock arrangements on Born This Way. It's glam rock disguised as modern dance music.
Madonna — The structural and melodic similarities between "Express Yourself" and "Born This Way" caused a massive public feud that highlighted just how much of the 1980s pop provocateur blueprint she adopted. The influence is loudest in her visual-first approach to singles and the deliberate provocation of religious imagery in her videos. She took the template and turned the volume up.
Grace Jones — Jones's collaboration with designer Jean-Paul Goude laid the exact visual groundwork for the avant-garde, high-fashion-as-armor aesthetic Gaga used during her rise. You hear the sonic connection in the cold, mechanical spoken-word delivery on tracks like "Government Hooker." It is the sound of absolute authority over a dance beat.
David Bowie — She performed a tribute to him at the 2016 Grammys and has cited his constant persona shifts as the validation for her own career pivots. You hear it on "Applause," which borrows the theatrical, alien-pop vocal delivery Bowie perfected during his Scary Monsters period. He proved to her that pop music could be performance art.
Bruce Springsteen — She has repeatedly cited his working-class epic songwriting as a massive influence, particularly during the Born This Way era where she recruited E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons to play on "The Edge of Glory." The driving, blue-collar stadium energy of Clemons' solo is the emotional anchor of the entire record. It grounds her space-pop in New Jersey sweat.