Poker Face

Book: pokerface- the rise and rise of lady gaga
Author: Maureen Callahan
Completion date: 05/10/10
Method: purchased

This is another book I had to read for my popular culture class. There are currently a surprising number of books on lady gaga and her career (which is relatively young). I found this one to be quite compelling in all honesty.
Gaga is an enigma. She is the biggest thing in pop music and also the strangest. We know she can sing (her acoustic versions of pokerface, speechless and paparazzi) and play the piano pretty well, but we don't know what she is really like under everything.
Gaga has always promoted herself as a freak. She never fit in, she was always an oddball. Much of her work is demonstrating how painful it can be to you on the outside and the inside when you try to fit in and just don't or can't. Her costumes are always bizarre and at times painful. So the discussion I always seem to have is this: is she a carefully manipulation creation of the record industry, or is she the next great performance artist who lives her artwork.
In the novel, the author mentions that gaga was told early on in her career that the didn't think she was pretty enough. She was no great beauty and thus wasn't a guarantee. She was directly told this, and then decided to use and exploit her creativity and began creating gaga as we know her.
What I really enjoyed about this book is it didn't feel like a fan piece. The author is unraveling the mystery of gaga, which it turns out is a compelling one.
The only thing I really feel like I learned about gaga is that she is a perfectionist, and knew from the get go that marketing 'stephanie' was not going to cut it. What we needed was a goddess, not a mortal and this is what she has succeeded in creating. All celebrities are larger than life, and gaga is larger than them.


Xo-ellebee