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Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star of 2009: Lady Gaga


Lady Gaga is Billboard's Greatest Pop Star of 2009 for how she raised the standard for pop stardom in the late '00s.

A year and a week after that, Gaga traded the black latex in for (fake) blood-soaked lingerie and played dead as she swung from the rafters at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. The lavish, outlandishly murderous plot of “Paparazzi,” the nocturnal New York subway adventure of “LoveGame,” and of course the instantly iconic “Bad Romance,” which had Gaga outfitted in off-the-runway Alexander McQueen designs and “hatching” out of a clinical white nightmare coffin — she experimented with texture, technology and narrative and nailed it every time. No impulse was too wacky or surreal as she and her Haus of Gaga creative team dreamt up the visual counterparts of her infectious pop hooks, and “Bad Romance,” especially, set a new standard for her multidimensional capabilities.

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