Lady Gaga's staying power extends beyond her ability to get fans on her 'outcast' team.
Gaga's outrageous costumes onstage are a part of her unique appeal.
Had Lady Gaga sashayed onto the scene 25 years ago, some skeptics doubtless would have said she only became a star because of MTV.
They would have argued that she and/or her marketing team parlayed modest musical talent into a novelty package perfect for an age when many young pop-music fans care as much about look and attitude as sound.
These days, however, there is no MTV, or at least no MTV like there was in 1986, when it was a video channel.
So whaddaya say about Gaga?
"Well, she sure is everywhere, isn't she?" says Joel Salkowitz, who may have been the first mainstream radio programmer to bet on Lady Gaga when he put "Just Dance" into the rotation of New York's Pulse-87 on May 4, 2008. "Think what you will of her, she's a phenomenon. There's no getting away."
If you need further evidence of her success, HBO is airing a concert special this Saturday from 9 to 11 p.m. titled "Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden."
Taped Feb. 21-22, the special shows Gaga reveling in a triumphant homecoming for the kid no one ever thought would go anywhere. Actually, she sells her whole career as the revenge of the outcast. In this show she pounds the theme as often as she changes outfits, which is at least once a song.
"I grew up 20 blocks from here," she tells the crowd. "I watched every name go up on the marquee. I used to dream I'd seen my name go up in lights."
She calls success her in-your-face answer "to anyone who ever made you feel you didn't belong ... anyone who ever made you feel you would never win a Grammy or sell out Madison Square Garden."
On paper, this might all sound like some odd combination of whining and gloating. The HBO show helps explain why so many of her fans find it more than that.
Some rock fans will snort at even raising this name, but Lady Gaga in several ways has gone to school on Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen built a lot of his early persona on the struggles of a misfit, the whole "when they said sit down, I stood up" and "tramps like us" image that made millions of kids say, "He was me."
Lady Gaga plays that card with less subtlety, reflecting a video age when things tend to be spelled out more explicitly because less is left to the imagination.
But it's the same misfit/ outcast/rebel card that's been part of rock 'n' roll since Elvis, and Springsteen is widely acknowledged as a master at understanding and delivering it.
That's part of the reason Springsteen audiences turn into a sixth man at his shows, and this special suggests some of the same phenomenon happens at the Monster Ball. However she does it, Lady Gaga makes the crowd part of her "outsider" team.
Since the Lady only showed up in the mainstream three years ago, it's too early to know if that "I'm a star for all of us" approach will give her career durability.
But the HBO show provides a couple of potentially encouraging signs for her Little Monsters.
One is that she has versatility.
Lady Gaga's performances incorporate everything from dance numbers to piano solos. (Ethan Miller/Getty)
Yes, she does the mandatory numbers where she lines up 10 dancers for a hit like "Poker Face." From Madonna through Britney, that routine has been as essential to pop shows over the last two decades as guitar solos are to heavy-metal shows.
But Gaga's got guitar solos, too, and then she sits down at the piano for the ballad "You and I." While she does hop up on the piano like Little Richard — now there's an early rocker who was "born this way" — including this segment proves she understands the dynamics of a show, that loud works better when you break it up with quiet.
Any dismissal of Lady Gaga as the flavor of the month also recalls the same criticism being tossed at a hundred other rock and pop stars, from Elvis and the Beatles to Madonna.
Those folks endured. In other cases, from the Monkees to Menudo, the Spice Girls and Britney, the criticism was accurate to this extent: They made wildly popular music that will one day be remembered as charming artifacts of a pop-culture moment.
That's not the worst goal in the world. It's all that Disney seeks, for example, from the cute instant teen stars it grooms for the "High School Musical" world.
Outside of Disney, it's telling that the biggest pop-music centers on TV today are "American Idol" and "Glee," where mostly familiar songs are performed by someone other than the artists who made them familiar. The "Glee" cast just tackled Gaga.
Pop and rock can still sometimes be heard late at night — "Saturday Night Live," Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien — but in the prime-time world, where it has never thrived, pop's most prominent exposure comes on the downloadable soundtracks to a "Grey's Anatomy" or all those ABC Family shows.
In any case, there isn't the constant presence, and thus promotion, that MTV used to provide.
"I don't think fans are less interested in video," says Salkowitz. "But now YouTube has supplanted everything else. It's the on-demand world, where you see it when you want to instead of having to sit in front of the TV set and wait for it."
That saves time. It also means thousands or millions of fans aren't seeing the same thing at the same time, which makes it a little harder for a Lady Gaga to get the broad-based popularity that comes from that shared cultural moment.
"MTV exposed all sorts of memorable, hook-filled music performed by visually arresting stars," says Larry Berger, who programmed WPLJ in the giddy early years of MTV. "Top-40 radio in the 1980s had a renaissance due in part to MTV. Think not only Madonna, but Michael Jackson, the Police, George Michael, Cyndi Lauper."
There's no question that if she came along 25 years ago, Gaga would have been on the list.
Heck, says Salkowitz, given her material, she probably could have even gotten a couple of videos banned.
"And that was promotion you couldn't buy," he says. "It immediately made everyone want to see this thing. Today, where can you get banned? Banned from what?"
Even without that option, though, he says Lady Gaga has plenty of sparkle.
"After Pulse played her record, she came to the station and I had my picture taken with her," says Salkowitz. "I gave a copy to my son, and he was immediately the coolest kid at camp."
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