If I had to guess, I’d say once she became hideously popular Gaga was able to take more control of her career, the early result being “Bad Romance”, arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009. And the video is part of the package: Like Madonna or Prince, it’s impossible to separate the song from the performer. But unlike those artists, Lady Gaga isn’t particularly attractive, and she uses this to her advantage by suppressing her vanity and making herself a slippery figure. She’s still largely unknowable and also almost unrecognizable from moment to moment, as she contorts, disguises, masks and maims her face and body like a Matthew Barney or David Cronenberg creation.

Gaga comments on fame as she becomes more famous: It’s in her record titles— The Fame, The Fame Monster, “Paparazzi”, “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”, “Starstruck”. It’s also in her wearable art, and the way she deconstructs her own look— rigid, robotic dance moves as if she’s a puppet on a string, moving in crutches after being damaged by her outsized fictional celebrity in the “Paparazzi” clip. In “Bad Romance” she alters whoever Lady Gaga the Pop Star might be into any number of female types— at times recalling Britney Spears, Madonna, an Anime character, Angelique, Christina Aguilera, and Amy Winehouse. In that sense, she’s a perfect 21st century pop icon— a regular person willing to manipulate herself into whatever it takes at any given moment to be a star.

And yet, unlike the empty famewhores climbing atop the shoulders of reality TV and tabloid journalism to notoriety, we know next to nothing about her personal life. In that sense, she’s the anti-Kanye, the anti-Eminem, and the anti-Winehouse— the twists and turns of her private life don’t inform her art. Rather, she is whoever she wants to be at any time, and her art is as much the manipulation of that image and notions of modern celebrity as it is music or fashion. And it’s refreshing to have a big pop star communicating to us from afar, like pop stars used to.