Entertainment

SHE DOES IT HER WAY

LADY Gaga is the future of pop – and not just because that’s the term she uses to describe her own music.

With her electro/dance/pop debut record “The Fame” dropping today (download the title track at nypost.com), the 22-year-old hometown girl is out to prove that she deserves to inherit Britney Spears’ pop princess crown.

“It’s all about me fighting the good fight,” says Gaga, who was born Stefani Germanotta and grew up on the Upper West Side. “We can make pop music that’s a little bit left of center and a little edgy, that has something new and fresh to say . . . and still put it on Top 40 radio – it’s the future.”

Click here to listen to Lady Gaga’s “The Fame”

While it might seem like Gaga popped up out of nowhere, she’s anything but an overnight sensation.

In fact, she spent two years toiling away behind-the-scenes at Interscope, penning tracks for label mates like the Pussycat Dolls and New Kids on the Block, before being allowed to release her own disc.

After she was signed in 2006, “I started to exist in the company as a writer before they really took me on as an artist,” Gaga says. “You really have to prove yourself and show your worthiness as a star with the way the industry is today.”

It wasn’t until she wrote “Just Dance,” an ode to partying hard and having fun on the Lower East Side, that she was given the go-ahead to unleash her irresistibly catchy and sexy brand of tunes upon the masses under her own banner. Said banner includes the petite singer sporting

a long, platinum blond wig and rocking a carefully crafted aesthetic courtesy of her personal creative group, the Haus of Gaga.

Although she favors exaggerated and outlandish costumes that feature hot pants, sequins, stilettos and mirror-ball appliques, Gaga says that she’s most definitely not camp.

Using that four-letter word to describe her “is the hardest for me to read,” Gaga says. Nowadays, “we’re just not used to artists having really strong sensibilities about fashion, art and visuals and everything tying in together, so people assume that ‘Lady Gaga’ is a character, and it’s totally not.

“I’ve always been somebody that stands out in a crowd. I’ve been making clothes for myself and dressing the way I do for a really long time, so it’s not a look for me, it’s my lifestyle,” she explains.

Another thing that isn’t an act is her live show, which has evolved from the LES club performances that got her dubbed a “shock artist” when she was starting out – lighting hairspray on fire and wearing bikinis while dancing to heavy metal – into “pop art.”

Her shows are “wilder” than they were in the old days, but in a different way. “It’s more conceptual now and has more to do with the imagery and less to do with [punk] attitude,” Gaga says.

“The way that Andy Warhol attempted to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, is the way I want to make pop music, pop art performance and pop fashion that’s taken seriously as high fashion and highbrow.”

To reach that goal, Gaga says she does “nothing but eat, breathe, sleep and live my work. I don’t have boyfriends. I don’t party every night and get wasted. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”