Remember the “People I Admire” series? Remember when I actually blogged regularly (old Mid-Atlantic Bias)? Semi-regularly (new Mid-Atlantic Bias a few months ago)? Yeah, well, I’ve been slacking. Rather than explain why I’ve been slacking (laziness!!! apathy!!! winter doldrums!!!) lets just get back into finding out who I admire and why.

I admire Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga, or just “Gaga.” It wasn’t long ago (last year) when writing that sentence would have worried me, but alas, things change. The first time I was made aware of her was on VH1. I saw this video for some song about dancing and wondered what had happened to Christina Aguilera’s face. Once the video was over, I found out that it wasn’t actually Christina, but instead some idiot named Lady Gaga who would assuredly become some minor footnote in music history. Case closed. Right?

I find the video for “Just Dance” to be humorously ironic looking back, in that the Lady Gaga in that video is nothing like the Lady Gaga we see now in the blogs and the MTVs and the TMZs. Gaga in the “Just Dance” video, to me, is kind of just Stefani Germanotta: some blonde girl singing about having too much red wine and losing her phone.

Cut to the video for “Bad Romance” and we’ve got Lady Gaga. She’s a measured kind of crazy. I don’t actually think she’s insane, but she’s at the very least the right amount of insane to stay relevant. I feel that if Lady Gaga had continued to perform artistically in a fashion similar to that of the “Just Dance” video, she would have been that aforementioned footnote (much like that girl with the “Tik Tok” song on the radio will be in about 23 minutes).

I admire Lady Gaga because of how brilliantly she has managed her career. Whether this was planned or not, she has never been complacent. “The Fame (her debut album)” spawned 4 mega-hits: “Just Dance,” “Poker Face,” “LoveGame,” and “Paparazzi.” So, you know, she’d just take a year off, collaborate with Gucci Mane, Kid Cudi, and Lil Wayne, and release an album similar to “The Fame” and hope to strike gold again, right? No. Instead she took no time off, recorded a vastly different EP, called “The Fame Monster” and had another mega hit with its first single, “Bad Romance,” all the while touring constantly and always managing to be mentioned in the magazines and internets with her eccentric, crazy couture outfits. Like this one.

Oh, and there’s one other thing I forgot to mention about my admiration of Lady Gaga: Her music is great. Like, really great. Beyond being obsessively catchy, it has also developed into something that is musically, dare I say, profound? Okay, maybe not profound. But listen to the tracks “Alejandro” and “Teeth” from “The Fame Monster” and tell me that she’s a clone of the Pussycat Dolls or, I don’t know, Fergie. Whomever. Taylor Swift. Whatever. Lady Gaga is what would happen if Bjork and Madonna had a baby.

I don’t know if Lady Gaga truly has “staying power,” but I do know one thing, she comes off as being incredibly humble and grounded. In any serious interview I’ve ever seen with her, I’ve been struck by how thoughtful she has been in her responses and in the respect that she exhibits for the interviewer. I don’t see Gaga being a diva.

Time will tell if I will continue to admire Lady Gaga, but right now, when it comes to pop music, there is no one who I have more respect for and whose hard work and determination I admire more than Stefani Germanotta.