“Monster” was released on Lady Gaga’s album The Fame Monster (2009), and the song comes as one case study that uses metaphorical language to enhance Lady Gaga’s brand image. As an example, Lady Gaga repeatedly sings in the chorus,“that boy is a monster,” and she follows the line with, “he ate my heart.” 

With this line in the song, Lady Gaga utilizes a metaphor to compare a romantic and sexual partner to a monster. She seems to utilize this metaphor in order to highlight how her heart is getting broken by a boy (“he ate my heart”), which seems to be the reason why the artist compares the man to a dark and evil monster. She uses other lines later in the song to further solidify the monster metaphor: she claims that the boy said to her that she “looks good enough to eat” and that he  “ate [her] heart and then he ate [her] brain.” This monster metaphor is used throughout the song to highlight and exaggerate Lady Gaga’s mental, romantic, and sexual struggles with a man. Scholar Erica Peterson discusses this monster metaphor in her thesis project “Lady Gaga: Performing Monstrosity as a Cultural Revolution,” in which she highlights how the monster metaphor allows Gaga to “establish herself as a powerful shape-shifting artist with a philanthropic motive” to expose her sexual identity.

Through the use of the lyrical reference to a monster, Gaga creates a metaphorical lyrical style that forms a particular brand image. Further, the song “Monster” has created a brand image for Lady Gaga’s entire career; the song helped launch her fandom name as ‘little monsters’ and is a direct reference to the album name The Fame Monster. And with the exaggeration, and perhaps humor, of comparing a boy to a monster, the metaphorical lyrical style follows this project’s framework of camp. Thus, “Monster” directly reflects how Lady Gaga utilizes a specific lyrical style in order to create a campy brand image that carries on for the rest of her career in order to sell her music to a broader audience.

“Venus” comes as another example of Lady Gaga’s metaphorical lyrical style. The song was released on Gaga’s third studio album titled ARTPOP as the third track. In the song, the artist asks her lover to “take me to your planet” and “take me to your Venus.” She also claims that her lover is “out of this world, galaxy, space, and time,” and she asks the “goddess of love” to “please take me to your leader.” 

In “Venus,” Lady Gaga uses the metaphor of the planetary system and Greek mythology to convince her lover to have a sexual experience with her. Venus acts as both a planet (“take me to your planet”) and the Greek goddess of love (“goddess of love”), making it a double metaphor to highlight Lady Gaga’s desire to have sex. The entire song mostly revolves around Lady Gaga wanting her lover to take her to Venus (i.e. the song often repeats the lyrics “take me to your planet”), but her listing of the planetary system in the bridge of the song (“Neptune, go / Now serve, Pluto / Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury”) further solidifies her desire to have otherworldly sex. 

With the double metaphor of Venus, Lady Gaga creates a brand image through her metaphorical lyricism. Her metaphorical language solidifies a particular lyrical style that tells a vivid story through her music—in this case, “Venus” uses Greek mythology and the planetary system to tell a story about a sexual encounter with a man. Using the planetary system and mythology also feels quite hyperbolic and exaggerated, making the lyrical style feel campy. Thus, her metaphorical, and often campy, lyrical style is reflected in ARTPOP’s “Venus,” which builds a recognizable brand identity that transforms Gaga into a consumer product.

“John Wayne” was released on Lady Gaga’s fifth studio album titled Joanne. In the song, Lady Gaga claims that “every John is just the same” and that she “crave[s] a real wild man.” She ends the pre-chorus of the song to claim that she’s “strung out on John Wayne.” Although not a massive United States or global success, the song did receive a music video of its own and was released as a single on Joanne. 

In “John Wayne,” Lady Gaga utilizes metaphorical language to convey her desire for a male partner. She uses a famous Hollywood Western actor, John Wayne, in order to highlight her desire for a cowboy-like man instead of a city man (“I’m sick of their city games”). John Wayne is notable for his representation of being a hypermasculine figure in American culture, so Lady Gaga’s reference to him means that she desires a man that is wild, rough, and masculine. Considering it acts as the title of the song, this reference to John Wayne is used all throughout the lyrics, making this metaphor stand out as quite important. 

Lady Gaga’s use of the John Wayne metaphor highlights her ability to create a brand image through her lyricism. She draws upon nostalgia and knowledge of classic American entertainment culture in order to tell a story about her romantic and sexual desires, and this storytelling through metaphorical language has become an important part of Gaga’s brand identity. John Wayne as a figure may not be considered ‘campy’ perse; however, the exaggeration and irony of a notably eccentric artist using the actor as a metaphor may reflect the style. As a result, “John Wayne” follows suit in creating a calculated brand identity for Lady Gaga through her use of metaphorical language, which transforms her into a consumer product that could be recognizable to many people. 

Lady Gaga released “Babylon” on her sixth studio album, entitled Chromatica (2020). The song focuses on the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon and relates it to gossiping. She repeatedly sings “Gossip, babble on / Battle for your life, babylon” during the various choruses of the song, with “ba-ba-babylon” and “that’s gossip” being repeated in the post-chorus. 

With the reference to the city of Babylon, Lady Gaga uses metaphorical language to make a commentary about gossip. She references the story of the Tower of Babel, in which gossip and miscommunication occurred in the city of Babylon after God changed the citizen’s languages. The story usually places Babylon in a negative light and tone. In one line of the song, Gaga refers to the story by singing “bodies moving like a sculpture / on the top of Tower of Babel tonight.” With this mentioning of Babylon in the song, Lady Gaga both uses a play on words (“babble on” and “Babylon”) and a metaphor to highlight the negative association with gossip. The song uses the metaphor to highlight how Gaga has overcome gossip through “battling for her life.” 

This unique reference to Babylon in the song highlights Lady Gaga’s lyrical style of drawing upon metaphors to convey particular themes and stories. In this specific song, Gaga uses an ancient story to comment on a prevalent modern issue both within celebrity culture and everyday life, which follows suit with her metaphorical style. Her exaggeration and play on words throughout the lyrics (i.e. “battle for your life” and “babble on / that’s gossip”) also mirrors the camp and theatrical style. Thus, through “Babylon,” Gaga creates a campy and recognizable brand identity through her metaphorical lyricism, which transforms her into a consumer product that could be sold to a broad consumer base.