Lady Gaga says the biggest “horror” of being famous is losing your “sense of self” and the distorted reality that comes with all the attention.
During Tuesday’s episode of SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show,” Stern asked Gaga to elaborate on the meaning of her new song “Perfect Celebrity” –– which details her “complicated relationship with fame.”
“I think in a way, when I was writing, I was feeling like there was the real me and there was the clone me,” she said. “It’s kind of one of the more angry songs I’ve ever written.”
The “Poker Face” singer, 38, explained that she was “mad at [herself]” for making it her “choice” to get involved in the industry.
“The song is a little bit of a retaliation against myself, and I’m just sort of trying to figure out as I go through it, how I feel about it all, and it’s kind of a reckless tune, I think, in a way,” she added.
When asked what the “horror” of fame was, Gaga confessed that she “lost [her] sense of self in it all.”
“There’s a high I used to get from being in the public eye all the time, and it kind of, like, burnt me out and made me value what people thought of me over who I was in my everyday life,” she shared. “Ultimately it was my responsibility to start to value myself differently.”
Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, explained that her mindset eventually led to her having a “distorted way of thinking” about herself.
“It actually feels really nice to have things not be about me all the time,” she reflected. “I enjoy being there for the people I love, supporting other people. I guess what I’m trying to say is everything orbiting me for a really long time, it was just, it created a distorted sense of self.”
In the song “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga refers to herself as a “human doll” who works to please others and get satisfaction from outsiders.
“I’m made of plastic like a human doll / You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all / I talk in circles, ‘cause my brain, it aches / You say, ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate,” she sings.
Gaga adds in another lyric, “I’ve become a notorious being / Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.”
The Grammy winner previously told InStyle that the lyrics refer to the “idea that we all, in a way, have our real selves and then our clone version that we project to the world.”
Gaga has previously spoken about her mixed feelings with fame and even made headlines in 2019 when she tweeted, “Fame is prison.”
After her Netflix documentary, “Gaga: Five Feet Two,” premiered in 2017, she admitted that fame was “not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“It is lonely, it is isolating, and it is very psychologically challenging because fame changes the way you’re viewed by people,” she wrote via Instagram in September 2017.
She added, “Yet I am so humbled by the side of fame that breeds love from the world, the voice I’ve been given by my fans to spread messages of empowerment and equality, the fortunate life it’s brought to me and my family and how we can now give to others in need.”
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