Throughout her career, the artist and singer Lady Gaga has portrayed a great number of personas in her performances. This thesis uses Gaga’s performances of ”Paparazzi”, ”The Edge of Glory”, and ”Million Reasons” to evaluate how her musical personas have been expressed between 2009 and 2018. Philip Auslander’s theories on musical personas are applied as a tool to examine and analyze Lady Gaga’s use of personas in nine performances. The results of the analysis suggest that, in addition to genre conventions, performance contexts also impacted the adaptations of Gaga’s musical personas. Furthermore, Gaga’s Born This Way Ball tour showcased how a musician can adopt a temporary character tailored for a specific tour plot, suggesting the idea of a “tour persona” as a distinct entity separate from musical personas and song characters. The conclusion drawn from the case study suggests that the term ”persona adjustment” may be more suitable than ”persona development” or ”evolvement” when analyzing changes in musical personas over time. Finally, Gaga's changing personas in this case study challenge Auslander's idea that a performer's persona development relies on longevity and audience negotiation, as Gaga's artistic image is sustained through unpredictable fashion choices and diverse mannerisms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-531473 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Nagy, Zsófia |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för musikvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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