Some say Lady Gaga is far too overrated, but let’s look at it another way: we closed out the noughties with James Blunt’s album as the bestselling CD. The X-Factor single is a reliable number one. Mediocrity is celebrated, vanilla pop exalted. Commercial pop has eaten itself alive and its spat-out Übermensch is… the High School Musical crew. To say that pop needed a saviour was an understatement. But nobody would have guessed that it would take an ex-Catholic schoolgirl from New York to remind us that pop music can be as weird and visual as Bowie promised.

Most criticism about Gaga stems from the argument that her steroid-addled Euro-disco stompers can’t keep up with her image. “Where will she be in 20 years?” moan the arbiters of good taste, as if Gaga sneaked into public consciousness pretending to be the next Bjork. She hasn’t, and while she doesn’t exactly possess musical genius in Radiohead spades, that’s not really the point. Few of our past pop princesses, hoiked onto a stage from the Disney Channel, have actually been able to sing, let alone pen, a tune (though Gaga does both – she was admitted into the prestigious NYU Tisch School of Arts at 17 based on her songs).

Anyway, who cares? Pop music, by its nature, is meant to be fun, populist, of-the-moment bubblegum. Good pop music - music we remember - has everything to do with context and image: Britney in the schoolgirl skirt. Christina in the chaps. But lately, pop’s backed itself into a corner. Stars wriggle around poles and sing tired, ‘risqué’ lyrics (see: Katy Perry), or market themselves as squeaky-clean ingénues (Taylor Swift).

It’s the combination of that out-there image and generic pop that makes Gaga interesting. She pushes the idea that you don’t need to buy into blandly conventional sexiness or prettiness to be successful. In fact, the reverse is true – you can wear Kermit the frog jackets, dance like a Thriller zombie doing the twist, and people will lap it up. She could easily have scrubbed off the drag queen make-up and allowed herself to be marketed as Britney 2.0, but she’s actively pushed against that; she’s more innovative and challenging than anything in pop right now. And if Grace Jones did it all before, well - Grace, bless her soul, has never been this huge.

Gaga is blasting away preconceptions of how women in mainstream pop are marketed and presented, and the fact that she makes ear-pleasing pop is all the more delicious because it’s coming out of the mouth of somebody dressed like a latex Max Clifford nightmare/wet dream. She’s the much-needed example that musicians – and female pop musicians in particular - don’t need to cater to the lowest common denominator of market-approved sexiness. And for that, we must thank her. In other words: roma, roma-ma, ga ga, ooh la la.