Bigger Than the Sound wonders: Is Gaga the most everyman pop star around? By James Montgomery Lady Gaga Photo: Gabriel Bouys/ Getty Images By now, you are probably aware that Lady Gaga is an unstoppable moneymaking machine , an insatiable studio junkie , a high-ranking Polaroid executive , an honorary Hair Wars champion , a burgeoning fashion icon , the next Madonna , more popular than Barack Obama and quite possibly a member of the Illuminati . But, chances are, you didn’t know that she’s also a big fan of A&E’s “Intervention.” Or maybe you did. After all, she tweeted about it Tuesday, calling the show “informational, heartbreaking and inspiring.” And while the idea of Gaga sitting in a hotel room, hair done up in Diet Coke can curlers, cigarette sunglasses still smoldering on the bedside table, watching Allison huff duster (and subsequently walk on sunshine ) is rather amazing, it’s also important too. Because it’s just another step in the latest chapter of her career: her continued transformation from otherworldly pop deity into an actual human being. And perhaps I am reading entirely too much into one simple tweet about a phenomenally addictive reality show (about addiction), but now — more than at any point in her time in the spotlight — Gaga seems determined to be one of us. She chugs beer at baseball games (albeit while wearing a leather jacket and a bikini), crushes BBQ at Boston dive bars and spends her off-days in New York cooking for her dad, drinking and watching episodes of “Cops” (something she made a point of mentioning onstage at her tour kickoff in Montreal ). She spoke openly and frankly about her ex-boyfriend in an interview with Rolling Stone, and her newest song — a piano ballad called “You and I” — seems to be very much about reconciling with him, in perhaps the most un-Gaga setting imaginable: a dark and dirty bar. (It’s also worth noting that the songs sounds a whole lot like a Billy Joel B-side, and who’s more everyman than the Piano Man?) At this point, I don’t know what she could possibly do for an encore — maybe start Tivo-ing “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” or take on a disastrous adjustable-rate mortgage? — but the fact remains that right now, despite all her trappings, Gaga is probably the most openly human pop superstar on the planet (or at least the most open). Can you imagine any of her contemporaries — the Beyonc
