The First Pop Star

There have always been outsized personalities. Before mass media, talent was recognized and rewarded locally, in parlors and living rooms or on modest stages. Once modern technology let us find these performers and broadcast them around the world, however, a new set of skills developed: how to be a star.

Lady Gaga

The art of mythmaking and headline grabbing is a curious mixture of PR and performance. Honed by The Beatles and Madonna, it was perfected by Lady Gaga, who has made herself news with astonishing skill and speed. But nothing she’s done is new— save a few tweaks for the social media age, she’s learned from the best.

And Eva Tanguay was the best. She put on propulsive, kinetic extravaganzas, changing costumes every three minutes. She wore elaborate, outrageous outfits, had expensive taste and a “raucous love life” (including a black man!), and carried on high profile feuds with other celebrities. She sang about herself and her own fame, and even about her copycats, performing a precursor of “The Real Slim Shady” called “Give an Imitation of Me.”

Most importantly, she made sure everyone knew every juicy detail, along the way creating celebrity as we know it. Jody Rosen, writing in Slate, found the story:

She was the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity, with a cadre of publicists trumpeting her on- and offstage successes and outrages… She was the first singer to mount nationwide solo headlining tours, drawing record-breaking crowds and shattering box-office tallies from Broadway to Butte. Newspaper accounts describe scenes of fan frenzy that foreshadowed Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre and Beatlemania.

This brazen and thoroughly modern career, built around the desirability and the desires of one willful, self-made woman, lasted from 1904 to 1920.

Eva Tanguay

Rosen again:

She concocted publicity stunts (“Eva Tanguay, the Only Actress in the World Who Ever Made a Balloon Ascension”); threatened to retire before making splashy “comebacks”; contrived tell-all confessional interviews for magazines; and struck an ironic attitude toward these machinations, confessing her lust for attention in songs like “I’d Like To Be an Animal in the Zoo” (1911).

All of Tanguay’s story is like this: fascinating, eerily familiar, and unfairly forgotten. The Queen of Perpetual Motion only made one record and ended her life ignored and alone, but she paved the way for every media savvy superstar we’ve seen since. Read Rosen’s whole article, which goes into amazing detail about her singing and dancing and includes a sample of her voice. It’s well worth your time.

There’s a wonderful postscript to this story. Tanguay’s chart topping hit, the one she recorded, was “I Don’t Care.” It’s the “My Prerogative” of 1904: “I don’t care / What they may think of me / I’m happy go lucky / Men say that I’m plucky / I’m happy and carefree.” Shortly after Rosen’s article ran, Slate found and posted a clip of one of Tanguay’s most famous descendants performing “I Don’t Care.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Britney Spears.

That little girl can sing. What ever happened to her? How come these things never turn out well?

My Teenage Dream Tonight

What is there left to say about Lady Gaga? Our minds are made up; we savor or dismiss the music, and all the rest, without blinking. But there are always stories worth finding. John Seabrook writes:

Kenny Gorka, who booked the Stephani Germanotta Band, as the act was called, recalled recently how he met Germanotta. She telephoned him pretending to be her own publicist, raving about this incredible new talent. “She lied to me, talking about how great Stephani was in the third person,” he said. “But it was enough to pique my interest, and I brought her in for an audition and booked her.”

The future Ms. Gaga was nineteen at the time.