I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

Lady Gaga is describing why her work can be misunderstood when judged by conventional pop criteria. She frames her songs as inseparable from staging, costume, persona, choreography, and conceptual spectacle—elements that make the “work” closer to performance art than to purely audio music. The remark also defends theatricality as an artistic necessity rather than a marketing accessory: the meaning of the music is completed in the act of performance. Implicitly, she is arguing that critics and audiences who separate “the song” from “the show” miss the medium she is working in, where image, narrative, and embodiment are part of the composition.