Secrets of pop's Queen of Shock

Lady Gaga performs during the annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images Source: Getty Images

"People say it's artistic and stuff. I'm just like, `You're an egg'," he told talk show host Chelsea Handler this week.

His youthful braggadocio aside, Gaga still got Bieber talking. Along with every news and gossip outlet on the planet, her 28 million Facebook friends, the 68,000-plus on the I Hate Lady Gaga page, eight million Twitter followers and a good chunk of the planet's population.

Before we could exhaust the egg conversation or the infinite Madonna comparisons with the ponytail and the conical breastplate, the world's most talked-about woman turned up again - this time wearing horns - on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.

For the past 2½ years, Gaga has been the pop omnipresence. The 24-year-old singer, songwriter, performance artist, designer and controversialist launched her campaign to consolidate her post - The Fame debut album and Monster world tour.

What started as a drip tease of impassioned tweets about her upcoming album, Born This Way, became an avalanche of "reveals".

Born This Way the single, with its cover artwork on her Twitter post that revealed the horns for the first time several days before we clocked it on Leno, arrived at 10pm last Friday on her website.

Pop radio stations worldwide scrambled to be the first to air it as the MP3 was distributed to their secured digital file-sharing service by Universal Music.

It went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 a few days later, making history as the 1000th chart-topper in the chart's history.

The single is already the most-played track on Australian radio and should smash straight into the ARIA top spot tomorrow with more than 40,000 downloads.

Well before Gaga emerged from her incubation in the egg to perform the song live for the first time at the Grammys in a ponytail recalling the Blonde Ambition tour, Gaga had been critiqued almost exclusively through the Madonna prism. She struck an instant chord with the gay market with her debut single, Just Dance - just like Madonna did with Holiday.

There have been myriad costumes, poses and sounds struck by Gaga which have triggered a Madonna memory. She's Vogued, she's done the Holiday dance and the Latin-flavoured Alejandro, which inevitably drew La Isla Bonita bows and crucifix name checks for its video.

There has also been "didn't Kylie do that too?" mental eyerolls. But we would claim Our Kylie ushered in the post-modern cape with her Can't Get You Outta My Head get-up.

Even with all the eggs and horns, it was the complete coalescence of Madonna's influence in the sound and Grammys performance of Born This Way that dominated last week's Lady Gaga water cooler conflabs and blog commentary.

Born This Way sounds like Express Yourself with a soupcon of Vogue. Gaga's vocal delivery uncannily mirrors the Material Girl. The Before-Madonna and After-Gaga debate was waged fiercely by the fans and foes of both camps until mostly everyone came to the same round-about conclusion.

Madonna is to Gaga what AC/DC and Led Zeppelin are to guitar bands and what The Beatles are to every musician who has written a pop song since the 1970s.

On the Tonight Show with Jay Leno the night after she picked up three Grammys and emerged from her egg incubation to perform Born This Way, she even claimed Madonna's emailed blessing.

"There is really no one that is a more adoring and loving Madonna fan than me. I am the hugest fan, personally and professionally," she said.

"Well, the good news is that I got an email from her people and her sending me their love and complete support on behalf of the single. If the queen says it shall be, then it shall be."

In the 24 hours after her Grammy win, she told various news outlets she had spent 72 hours incubating in her egg.

Then she told another she had scrapped her costumes and choreography for the big Grammys moment just 48 hours before she was due to take the stage.

Surely it's tough to rehearse your new moves with your dance posse inside an egg? Other statements proved a little more shocking, but not that much in Gaga's scheme of things.

When she confessed to American 60 Minutes that she smoked pot and drank whisky when songwriting - and didn't encourage others to, of course - it was just another blip on the Gaga celebrity radar rather than a global headline.

It is also interesting to note that Gaga's performance didn't spark as many Michael Jackson comparisons.

The truth is Gaga draws her influences from far and wide and has proven an accurate barometer of which way the culture pendulum will swing.

She joined the Thriller revival bandwagon a couple of years back by amassing her Monsters army of disenfranchised misfits who loved her Euro-house anthems.

But not everything she does is in tribute to her pop predecessors.

She gained early admission to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as a 17-year-old and wrote an 80-page essay on post-modern artists Damien Hirst and Spencer Tunick. Her meat-dress and Haus Of Gaga costuming no doubt owe some debt to their influence.

Born This Way is an unbridled gay and lesbian anthem and she has been accused in some quarters of stepping over the line between embracing that audience and directly marketing to them.

Could she have been so globally astute to know it would drop in perfect time for Sydney's Mardi Gras, one of the biggest gay and lesbian parties of the international calendar? Of course she could.

By the time her next album Born This Way drops in May, Gaga will have kept the fame fires burning via a film clip for the single. She is already the most-viewed video star on the planet.