Lady Gaga

Def Jam signed her and dropped her in three months. That should've been the end of it. Instead, she spent 2007 writing songs for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls while grinding the Lower East Side club circuit at night with no label and no budget. Interscope and Akon picked her up, and The Fame hit in 2008 with two radio chart-toppers from a debut album. She hadn't worn the meat dress yet, but the formula was already clear: commit fully to the spectacle, trust the songs to do the rest.

Seven Grammy nominations at the 68th ceremony, more than any other woman on the ballot, and a tour projecting over $300 million gross. The Mayhem era is running at full tilt. She's also touring without the chronic fibromyalgia pain that forced her to cancel the final ten dates of the Joanne World Tour in 2018. The public stopped debating whether she's a serious artist. That argument closed somewhere around the Oscar for A Star Is Born.

At 15, she showed up in an uncredited Sopranos bit part before anyone knew her name. She studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute for a decade alongside her music career. Her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, first appeared in Vogue Hommes Japan in 2010 and has shown up in music videos and editorial shoots ever since. She's also said that if music hadn't worked out, she wanted to be a combat journalist. The theatrics aren't performance anxiety. They're the whole project.