Billboard: How Gaga raised the standards for ambition in pop
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Stars like Beyonce and Rihanna were beginning to push at pop's walls a little bit, but weren't yet at the place of completely breaking the mold. The EDM boom, and accompanying explosion in festival culture, were still a couple years away. Something big really needed to happen.
It didn't take long for Lady Gaga to prove that she was the asteroid pop music was begging to have crash through it. Before long, this sleazy, sexually ambiguous club diva with mainstream pop smarts and underground grit was the biggest thing in Top 40.
And of course, the videos. "Paparazzi" -- proved her most striking visual to date, ante upped later that year with the landing of the "Bad Romance" clip, an extraterrestrial odyssey that proved instantly iconic, in a way videos weren't supposed to be anymore. Gaga celebrated her coronation as the franchise player of 21st-century MTV (and YouTube) by wearing a meat dress to the '10 VMAs, and finally Millennials had a pop star who could hold her own against Madonna and MJ.
But other pop stars have picked up the slack. Kanye Weststepped up his game even further after her arrival, blowing his music videos into 35-minute short films and eventually expanding the art form to include live projections and stadium premieres. Beyoncé also went through a conceptual makeover, eventually reviving interest in both the music video and the LP format with her self-titled surprise visual album. Rihanna released her weirdest album a year after Gaga's breakthrough and was never quite the same after. Even Britney -- who "Telephone" was initially written for -- ended up trying to make her own version of the song's video.
She took American mainstream music at one of its least-interesting and most star-power-deprived moments and made it bigger, weirder, more visual and infinitely more personality-driven -- in other words, much more fun.
Beyoncé also went through a conceptual makeover, eventually reviving interest in both the music video and the LP format with her self-titled surprise visual album.
