Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. She is known for her image reinventions and musical versatility. Gaga began performing as a teenager, singing at open mic nights and acting in school plays. She studied at Collaborative Arts Project 21, through the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, before dropping out to pursue a career in music. After Def Jam Recordings canceled her contract, she worked as a songwriter for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, where she signed a joint deal with Interscope Records and KonLive Distribution, in 2007. Gaga had her breakthrough the following year with her debut studio album, The Fame, and its chart-topping singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". The album was later reissued to include the extended play The Fame Monster (2009), which yielded the successful singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone", and "Alejandro".
Gaga's five succeeding studio albums all debuted atop the US Billboard 200. Her second full-length album, Born This Way (2011), explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold more than one million copies in its first week. The title track became the fastest-selling song on the iTunes Store, with over one million downloads in less than a week. Following her EDM-influenced third album, Artpop (2013), and its lead single "Applause", Gaga released the jazz album Cheek to Cheek (2014) with Tony Bennett, and the soft rock album Joanne (2016). She ventured into acting, winning awards for her leading roles in the miniseries American Horror Story: Hotel (2015–2016) and the musical film A Star Is Born (2018). Her contributions to the latter's soundtrack, which spawned the chart-topping single "Shallow", made her the first woman to win an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, and Grammy Award in one year. Gaga returned to dance-pop with her sixth studio album, Chromatica (2020), which yielded the number-one single "Rain on Me". She followed this with her second collaborative album with Bennett, Love for Sale, and a starring role in the biopic House of Gucci, both in 2021.
Having sold an estimated 170 million records, Gaga is one of the world's best-selling music artists and the only female artist to achieve four singles that each sold at least 10 million copies globally. Her accolades include 13 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, 18 MTV Video Music Awards, awards from the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and recognition as Billboard's Artist of the Year (2010) and Woman of the Year (2015). She has also been included in several Forbes' power rankings and ranked fourth on VH1's Greatest Women in Music (2012). Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010 and 2019 and placed her on their All-Time 100 Fashion Icons list. Her philanthropy and activism focus on mental health awareness and LGBT rights; she has her own non-profit organization, the Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people. Gaga's business ventures include Haus Labs, a vegan cosmetics brand launched in 2019.
Musical style and themes
Critics have analyzed and scrutinized Gaga's musical and performance style, as she has experimented with new ideas and images throughout her career. She says the continual reinvention is "liberating" herself, which she has been drawn to since childhood. Gaga combines a variety of music genres, particularly incorporating elements of rock into her pop and dance music. She has also branched out into jazz and other non-pop musical genres. Gaga is a contralto, with a range spanning from B♭2 to B5. She has changed her vocal style regularly, and considers Born This Way "much more vocally up to par with what I've always been capable of". In summing up her voice, Entertainment Weekly wrote: "There's an immense emotional intelligence behind the way she uses her voice. Almost never does she overwhelm a song with her vocal ability, recognizing instead that artistry is to be found in nuance rather than lung power."
According to Evan Sawdey of PopMatters, Gaga "manage[s] to get you moving and grooving at an almost effortless pace". Gaga believes that "all good music can be played on a piano and still sound like a hit". Simon Reynolds wrote in 2010, "Everything about Gaga came from electroclash, except the music, which wasn't particularly 1980s, just ruthlessly catchy naughties pop glazed with Auto-Tune and undergirded with R&B-ish beats.
Gaga's songs have covered a wide variety of concepts; The Fame discusses the lust for stardom, while the follow-up The Fame Monster expresses fame's dark side through monster metaphors. The Fame is an electropop and dance-pop album that has influences of 1980s pop and 1990s Europop, whereas The Fame Monster displays Gaga's taste for pastiche, drawing on "Seventies arena glam, perky ABBA disco, and sugary throwbacks like Stacey Q". Born This Way has lyrics in English, French, German, and Spanish and features themes common to Gaga's controversial songwriting such as sex, love, religion, money, drugs, identity, liberation, sexuality, freedom, and individualism. The album explores new genres, such as electronic rock and techno.
The themes in Artpop revolve around Gaga's personal views of fame, love, sex, feminism, self-empowerment, overcoming addiction, and reactions to media scrutiny. Billboard describes Artpop as "coherently channeling R&B, techno, disco and rock music". With Cheek to Cheek, Gaga dabbled in the jazz genre. Joanne, exploring the genres of country, funk, pop, dance, rock, electronic music and folk, was influenced by her personal life. The A Star Is Born soundtrack contains elements of blues rock, country and bubblegum pop. Billboard says its lyrics are about wanting change, its struggle, love, romance, and bonding, describing the music as "timeless, emotional, gritty and earnest. They sound like songs written by artists who, quite frankly, are supremely messed up but hit to the core of the listener." On Chromatica, Gaga returned to her dance-pop roots, and discussed her struggles with mental health. Her second album with Tony Bennett, Love for Sale, consists of a tribute to Cole Porter.
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