Imagine, for a second, that Lady Gaga didn’t dress like a member of wrestling team Demolition, pose for fashion spreads wearing nothing but the rings of Saturn around her head or give interviews dressed in the carcasses of Kermit the Frog. Imagine if she didn’t speak her mind, delight in tweaking the media or treat her fame as one gigantic, Warholian art project. In other words, imagine if she were just another boring, bottle-blond, midriff-bearing pop star.

I know all that is pretty difficult to consider — without any of the flair or the insanity or the nudity, Gaga just wouldn’t be Gaga — but if you somehow managed to strip away all the ephemera, what would you have left? Would Gaga still be interesting? Would she still have sold 1.3 million copies of The Fame here in the U.S., or have been nominated for nine MTV Video Music Awards? Would she be announced, in the same breath as Jay-Z no less, as a VMA performer?