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Born This Way: Lady Gaga Is (Distant) Cousins With Madonna
By
Ben Yakas
Published May 14, 2011
Modified May 14, 2011
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By
Ben Yakas
Published May 14, 2011
Modified May 14, 2011
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It turns out there's a perfectly good reason why Lady Gaga seemingly cops all of her style and sound from 80s Madonna: they're actually distant clones cousins! So much for our theory that Gaga was actually Marilyn Manson...unless Manson is also cousins with Madonna?
Celebrity genealogist Chris Child, who works for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, told Boston Globe that, "They are ninth cousins once removed." He showed them a handwritten piece of paper, which traced the relations of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta back to a French immigrant farming couple who came to Quebec in the 1600s. “When I saw that Lady Gaga had French Canadian ancestry I thought there might be something there,’’ said Child, who previously had success linking Ben Affleck and Matt Damon together (as if those guys needed any more reason to hang out together all the time).
We're not that surprised by this turn of events, considering that even Madonna's brother Chris Ciccone has called Gaga "like my sister on crack." That description seems quite apt in context with Gaga's recent foray into column writing for V Magazine, in which she tries way too hard to sound pretentious. Here's one particularly, um, albumen excerpt:
Picasso said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Maybe he only said that because he and Matisse were in a bitchy queen fight for two decades (some called it a boxing match, I call it a conversation in art). But maybe it’s just that the resolution is: art gives birth to new art. There is no chicken or egg. It’s molecular. Cells give birth to cells. To put it more bluntly, the Hussein Chalayan vessel I wore at the Grammys wasn’t inspired by a chicken. It was stolen from an egg. But the transformation, the context, and the approach taken to reinterpret the meaning of birth and rebirth in terms of fame on a fucking red carpet — this is what creates the modernity of the statement. The past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.
Here's a question to ponder: what happens when the past gets regurgitated so much it's no longer homage, parody or "mitosis," but rather just vomit all over your meat dress?
Tagged
clones
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lady gaga
madonna
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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