Lady Gaga Didn't Need *A Star Is Born* to Be Taken Seriously
After Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the 2016 Super Bowl, Twitter was flooded with people expressing their genuine shock at her voice. “Who knew [Lady Gaga] could sing like that? No hiding in [the] national anthem,” one user wrote. “I had no idea lady gaga [could] sing like that,” another praised.
One could argue that there’s not a large overlap of Lady Gaga fans and NFL viewers—and I’ll get to why that’s frustrating—but a similar situation also happened the year prior, at the Oscars. Gaga performed a Sound of Music medley dressed in a simple gown with her hair long and flowing. After, the reviews on Twitter were clear: She brought the house down with her powerful pipes. “Lady Gaga can actually sing. Who would’ve thought of that? #Oscars,” a new fan wrote.
https://twitter.com/DaniVCraigMeyer/status/696478452929720320
But these comments are a bit perplexing, because Gaga has been singing “like this” for years. It just took her covering two American standards for the general public to notice.
Before this, Gaga was seen as a shock-and-awe pop provocateur whose skill took a backseat to spectacle. People didn’t pay attention her good voice at the 2009 VMAs because of the whole bleeding outfit thing. Her soulful rendition of “Poker Face” and “Speechless” at the 2010 Grammys was completely lost on them until Elton John showed up. Both instances clearly showcased Gaga’s abilities, but it wasn’t taken seriously by some until she took on the national anthem.
Now, she’s winning the masses over again with A Star Is Born. The Bradley Cooper-directed movie isn’t even out yet, but Gaga’s turn as a struggling singer named Ally has critics completely floored. One reviewer describes Gaga as a “nuclear bomb”, while another says she “positively soars.” An article from Noisey predicts A Star Is Born will cement Gaga’s position as an all-time Hollywood great. The problem with that assessment, though, is that Gaga’s already proven herself to be great time and time again. So why is the world just now noticing?
The answer is a bit frustrating and, to be clear, has nothing to do with the music community’s perception of Gaga. To me, this is about people we all know: the strangers sitting next to you at a bar, the drivers in front of you in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the Twitter users stunned by Gaga’s singing. They’re the ones who don’t see the value in her work—or Britney Spears’ or Taylor Swift’s, for that matter. My theory: Female-focused entertainment is still viewed as frothy, whimsical, and lighthearted. It’s something to enjoy but not take seriously, like a slice of key lime pie.
This rings especially true for pop music. The genre is led by female artists, so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s often dismissed as hollow and overproduced. Swift, for instance, had to combat accusations that she was selling out when she dropped her pop-oriented record 1989 four years ago. “What my fans in general were afraid of was that I would start making pop music and I would stop writing smart lyrics,” she told Barbara Walters in 2014, as if “smart” and “pop” are mutually exclusive.
Gaga herself even shut down a journalist in 2009 for suggesting her music deflected her talents. “If I was a guy and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hand, grabbing my crotch and talking about how I make music because I love fast cars and f—king girls, you’d call me a rock star,” she said. “But because I’m a female, [and] because I make pop music, you’re judgmental and you say it’s distracting.”
Evidence that female pop isn’t taken seriously also exists in A Star Is Born. Gaga’s character (Ally) has a meteoric rise to fame that eclipses in the latter half of the movie when, according to critics, she’s abandoned her singer-songwriter roots for glossy dance-pop. The implication here is that Ally is no longer an artist when she goes pop, but just a cog in the machine. “Can music movies chill with this whole ‘pop = soulless crap, singer-songwriter rock = real artistry’ nonsense? As if Lorde and Beyoncé don’t crush that false dichotomy on a bad day,” tweeted A.V Club critic A.A. Dowd after seeing A Star Is Born.
But this “false dichotomy” only applies to female artists, in my opinion. I’m having trouble recalling any male pop singer who’s had to defend the intelligence of their work like Gaga or Swift. Case in point: The late Michael Jackson was viewed as an artistic visionary with otherworldly dance skills and an impeccable ear for music. Compare him to Madonna, his female contemporary. She spent actual decades battling the idea she was a talentless manipulator who “reinvented” her image to stay current—despite the fact she’s also an amazing dancer with writing credits on all her records. “I felt [the word ‘reinvention’] trivialized what I did,” Madonna said in 2004. “People would say, ‘Oh she’s just reinvented herself. By the way, it’s not that easy because it requires investigation. It requires work.”
Simply put, female-focused entertainment straight-up isn’t respected in the same way male-focused entertainment is. It’s why “chick flicks” like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or Sex and the City are branded “guilty pleasures.” (Hell, it’s why the terms “chick flick” and “guilty pleasure” exist in general.) “A quote ‘girly’ movie is taken less seriously than an action movie where people are just shooting people left and right and there’s no deeper thematic message,” Sierra Burgess Is a Loser screenwriter Lindsey Beer said when Glamour talked to her in July about romantic comedies. “For some reason, less muscular fare is taken less seriously.”
Hollywood’s power structure is certainly one reason why this disparity exists. The industry is still majority led by men placing emphasis on male-driven music and movies, and that no doubt affects public perception. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is still mostly comprised of men, which means testosterone-laden films get the most Oscar buzz. Movies led by women, meanwhile, are labeled as “niche.” This is slowly but surely changing, but for decades we’ve been programmed to think masculinity is mainstream and femininity is fringe. It’s a baffling concept, seeing as how women make up more than half the population, but it’s prevailed nonetheless. Our society literally has no problem paying women unequally, so of course it doesn’t place the same value on works made by (or for) them.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Lady Gaga singing the national anthem at the 2016 Super Bowl.
It’s only when Lady Gaga stepped into more masculine and traditional worlds that she was universally praised. In 2016, it was for her take on the national anthem, arguably the song for rough-and-tumble American ambition. And now it’s for A Star Is Born, a whiskey-soaked tale as old as time with an Oscar-nominated man steering the ship. The trend is clear: In many cases, female performers are only taken seriously when they play not with the boys, but like them. Anything too colorful or too flamboyant is perceived as lesser-than. For women, talent is often ignored if there’s too much tinsel. Gaga’s Oscar campaign is well-deserved, yes, but she shouldn’t have needed it for people to see her as a tour-de-force. She’s been one since 2008. We were just too distracted by her meat dresses to notice.
Christopher Rosa is the staff entertainment writer for Glamour.