The Other Lady Gagas

By Jody Rosen

 

Lady Gaga—but which one?"I've always been Gaga," Lady Gaga told Rolling Stone in 2009, and spiritually speaking, she may be right. But for most of her life she was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta—"Stef" to her friends. It was one of those friends, her ex-boyfriend and former manager, Rob Fusari, who gave the singer her nom de guerre, by accident, in 2004. Fusari sent Germanotta a text message that read, simply, "Radio Gaga," a reference to the 1984 hit by Queen. Or rather, Fusari tried to text "Radio Gaga"—his cellphone autocorrected "Radio" to "Lady." Germanotta had been looking for a stage name, and "Lady Gaga" had the right ring. Fusari told an interviewer: "She texted me back. 'That's it.' After that day she was Lady Gaga. She's like, 'Don't ever call me Stefani again.' "

As pop-star aliases go, Lady Gaga is awfully good—an ideal combination of regal and ridiculous. It pays tribute to Queen's Freddie Mercury, the glam rock titan who is audibly one of Gaga's heroes. The honorific Lady strikes the right note of diva-ish pretension; there's a hint of Dada in Gaga.

But there's also 2,600 years of history in it. Did Germanotta know that she was not the first Lady Gaga—that she was staking claim to a title previously held by a Babylonian slave owner, an Irish-born French noblewoman, and a fictional habitué of the Roaring Twenties London party scene?

The first Lady Gaga enters the historical record in a letter, inscribed on Babylonian cuneiform tablet, dating from the sixth century B.C., probably during the reign of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The letter, addressed from Gaga to her father, Sa-pi-Bel, concerns minor domestic matters. It begins with Gaga chastising Sa-pi-Bel for not having written her recently—"Why … have my daughters and I passed the time in thirst for a letter from thee? Rack thy brains (for an excuse). ..."—before asking for advice about some stolen fruit. Evidently, this same Babylonian Gaga owned a Jewish slave named Barachiel, who several years after Gaga's death unsuccessfully petitioned a Babylonian court for his freedom, in what may be history's first recorded fugitive slave case.

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