New York’s various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students. (“My artpop could mean anything,” a song of hers goes.) Her eclectic music videos are theatrical: full of depth, volume, costume and color, every move thought out to the edges of the frame. She has collaborated with Robert Wilson, master of avant-garde theater, making in 2013 the controversial video “Flying,” in which she is bound nude and hoisted aloft. (“Do what you want with my body,” she sang in another song. “You can’t stop my voice.”) In a series of video portraits, also from 2013, Wilson had Gaga portray, among other images from European painting, the head of John the Baptist on a charger.

And she keeps branching out; she can’t see spending her life keeping up with the kids. “I wanted to become a woman,” she said of the album of jazz standards she released in 2014 with Tony Bennett. “My audience went, ‘Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?’ And then they went, ‘Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.’ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.” She knows the history, and what it means to be a white artist singing jazz, but when she was a kid she did not “process music in a racial way or in a gender way.” She was, she said, just listening.

Though she did not grow up a black girl, “I can feel and see the fear and the power of it,” she said. “The justice system is broken. I have seen what I’ve gone through with [the LBGT community], or what I feel I’ve gone through with them on a spiritual level. When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.”