Lady Gaga wants you to know she is not a Method actor.
The 23-year-old ingenue behind hits such as Poker Face and Paparazzi believes in cultivating what thespians call "theatrical truth".
But while devotees use the exercises developed by the late acting coach Lee Strasberg and others to go deep into character and pull themselves out again, Gaga has made artifice her permanent home.
"Hated Lee Strasberg," Gaga says on her website, reminiscing about New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
"You create sensory scenarios for yourself," she explains.
"Like, I'm gonna feel a coffee cup right now, or feel the rain, and when I feel rain, I feel this way. Then you go into that state and you stay there. And then you have to learn in the classes how to get out of that state.
"But that's what I don't do," she says.
"I'm in a permanent state of Gaga."
The former Stefani Germanotta, who says that Lady Gaga is "not a character" and who is offended when someone uses her given name, is the most insistent of pop artists questioning the value of an old artistic standard: authenticity.
The balance between "real" and "fake" in pop music runs in cycles.
Rawness and spontaneity come into fashion, then formalism and glitz.
In fact, both extremes are always present, with some artists expressing emotions in unstudied ways, others adopting a mannered style, and most combining both approaches.
The nature of authenticity has been debated by pop artists, who've battled in rhyme; fans, who think whatever their community does is the most real; and critics, who've written enough on the topic to sag several bookshelves.
Lately, though, the split between "real" and "fake" has closed, with all of pop in a permanent state of Gaga.
This isn't because authenticity has been abandoned; for some artists, fake is what feels real.
Across pop genres, artifice, theatricality and synthesised sound rule the day.
The biggest group in the nation is the Black Eyed Peas, hip-hop's answer to both the Monkees and Cirque du Soleil.
Green Day, formerly a snotty punk band, has gained respect and success by writing rock operas; the band's Billie Joe Armstrong and Spring Awakening director Michael Mayer are turning one into a musical.
And Slipknot-style masks and pseudonyms have returned to the hard rock underground via the band Hollywood Undead.
Theatre veteran Adam Lambert turned American Idol on its head by wearing glitter and metal wings and performing with KISS; he reportedly is working with Gaga's producer, Red One, on his coming album.
Lambert's friend, Katy Perry, became the most talked-about female artist of 2008 by resurrecting classic feminine masquerade, including burlesque and screwball comedy, and releasing songs such as UR So Gay and I Kissed a Girl, which make hay from the hot topic of fluid sexual identity.
Even college rock, once a bastion of frumpy sincerity, has been taken over by the drama club kids - from the kitchen-sink epics staged by the Decemberists and Of Montreal to the fairy tales spun by fantasists Bat for Lashes and St Vincent. (Real names are not cool these days, unless your mama called you Panda Bear).
Even country music has a synthetic sheen: The hot new single by crossover band Gloriana kicks off with a drum machine, while industry standard-bearer Brad Paisley celebrates video chatting on Welcome to the Future.
This embrace of the world as stage goes beyond glam rock and disco of the past because it's assisted by sophisticated technology.
Auto-Tune, the software program that alters vocal pitch, is ubiquitous as a corrective and a carnival mask, used by artists such as T-Pain to upend listeners' expectations about what a song should sound like.
Auto-Tune is so overused that it's engendered a backlash.
The first single from Jay Z's upcoming album, The Blueprint 3, is called Death of Autotune, and similar polemics come from hip-hop veterans Wyclef Jean and KRS-One.
The real story is the emergence of the computer as pop's main musical instrument, not only in dance music and hip-hop but across the spectrum.
Using digital audio workstations that provide libraries of sounds, songwriters create whole soundscapes without strumming a guitar or hitting a drum.
Even neo-hippies such as Bon Iver couldn't enact their "rustic" experiments without computers.
The new realities of musical composition mirror the ways we bare our souls on Facebook or Twitter.
No filter exists on the web to separate a true confession from an artful lie.
Virtual connections can feel very real.
Reality television has blurred lines too: One of Lady Gaga's concepts - that anyone can think themselves into the self-confident state she calls "feeling the fame" - makes sense only in a culture in which fame can strike the average person.
In the permanent state of Gaga, old distinctions don't hold.
In 1971, David Bowie, one of Gaga's idols, said, "I don't want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on stage - I want to take them on stage with me".
Bowie pioneered the idea of rock as theatre, incorporating mime and Japanese Kabuki into an act that stressed the dreamlike quality of his work.
But he still made a distinction between that dream life and his real one.
A decade later, New Wave art star Grace Jones reiterated the split.
With her signature hairstyle and elaborate outfits, Jones was possibly the most high-concept pop diva ever.
But she could step out of her role.
"Listen, I'm two people," she said in 1980. "Otherwise, I'd be insane!"
In 1994, Courtney Love and her band, Hole, released the single Doll Parts after the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain.
"I fake it so real I am beyond fake," Love sang in what became one of the most quoted lyrics of the era.
But Love, like most musicians of the time, wasn't that good at faking.
In her torn ballgowns and smeared make-up, singing about failing to live up to feminine ideals, Love presented herself as what a pop star was supposed to be in the 1990s: willing to be ugly, immediate.
Those qualities added up to "real" for artists like Love, who'd read feminist theory and believed that identity was, in part, a construct.
Like Cobain, Love wrote songs that questioned social norms, especially gender roles, but behind her act (and his) was the assertion of a believable self.
Lady Gaga and her peers have gone beyond fake.
It's not that they don't recognise the distinction between real life and performance; it's that they don't care about it.
Few pop stars immerse themselves in their personae as completely as Gaga.
But many are preoccupied with the idea that stage guises cannot, or need not, be removed.
In the video for her song Overpowered, Irish electro-pop artist Roisin Murphy performs in a checked outfit and rectangular hat - then leaves the nightclub, eats dinner, walks home, and tucks herself into bed, all in the same massive costume.
Janelle Monae gained accolades in 2008 for Metropolis: The Chase Suite, an EP that served as the first chapter in an unfolding science-fiction epic.
In her songs and her shows, Monae presents herself as "a cyborg without a heart, a face or a mind".
Her jerky dance movements imply that she's in character, but her stage journeys are never scripted.
The moves these young artists make rarely seem new.
In fact, Monae, Gaga and others wear their debts to Bowie, Jones and Madonna on their shoulder-padded sleeves.
But is this a lack of originality or a refusal of it?Originality is, in its own way, a sign of authenticity: only Bowie could be Ziggy Stardust, because the character, however garbed, came from within.
Lady Gaga is more a collection of quotes than a singular performer.
Every move, every crazy ensemble, is easily traced.
She's recycled and reused.
But what pop innovator hasn't also been a borrower? In the permanent state of Gaga, "new" is a false category, just like "real".
Every thought's been had by someone who came before and is searchable through Google.
Every image has been minted and uploaded to YouTube.
"I know I'm a magpie, right?" Gaga says in a video. "I see shiny things... I'm like, waaaa."
And she grabs for the air.
This is one way forward in the age of too much information, when even the drug of novelty has been exposed as a placebo.
The evidence is that every artist is a borrower, every genius a liar. Why pretend otherwise?
