Bornthiswaygaga

The apple doesn't fall far from the Metal Tree :). My Best friend, Ladies + Gents: Lady Starlight

I'm so thankful for the blessing of my fans. My family+I are thankful for u. For those lonely today, we set an extra place at our table. ♥
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When Punk-tius comes to kill the King upon his throne, I'm ready for their stones - Mother Monster
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POSH! has been one of my closest friends for years, and on tour w me now. He's brilliant, watch

POSH! THE PRINCE - RE-BOKK ROBOT

www.youtube.com

Endless melodies, hooks, + poetry sledge-hammering my skull. It won't be much longer, its almost perfect. But I (we) don't want almost.
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Help Gaga secure nominations for the 2011 NRJ Music Awards in France, click below to vote now!

Lady Gaga : News

www.ladygaga.com

The Official Web Site for Lady Gaga. Get the latest News, Photos, Video, Tour Dates and more.
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Everyday that I'm with you, I'll wear your favor-ite perfume. And on the days I am without, I'll wear only my tears, and pout. - gagaloo
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Lady Gaga Revenge 2, the follow-up to Gaga's Lady Gaga Revenge app for iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, is available NOW in the app store! App includes 10 of Gaga's hits, new themes, visual effects, and even chat! Check it out now at http://bit.ly/LadyGaga2!

26 postures to freedom. Possible yoga junkie, is there such thing as Bikram rehab?
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Vote for Lady Gaga as Tiem Magazine's 2010 Person of the Year!

Lady Gaga - Who Will Be TIME's 2010 Person of the Year? - TIME

bit.ly

With only two albums under her belt, Lady Gaga has breathed much needed new life into pop music. The 24-year-old star has become an icon by combining dance numbers with performance art to create...
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I nominated lil monsters to be featured in V Magazine,+they chose u! Send photos or projects to [email protected]. Ur so Famous!
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Lady Gaga has been nominated for 4 awards at the People's Choice Awards 2011! Vote for her now in the Favorite Female Artist, Favorite Song, Favorite Pop Artist & Favorite Music Video categories!

‎"To find comfort, I was thinking about a new fantastic + different world, buying fashion magazines instead of my lunch" thanku littlemonster
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HOLY HOOKER 7million little monsters! Thank u for all the amazing messages about BORN THIS WAY. They inspire me and keep me strong.

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Never could I have imagined the connection we share. Hrvatska, 2nite there was no politic, no economy, no society. Just us. Monster ball.

John Lindquist, 'Style Magazine' 2009
Vad Tycker Ni Om Dem Här Bilderna Kommentera !!♥♥

It is through reciprocal loyalty and dedication that vision becomes Justice; Justice for the nerds, the disenfranchised, + the insecure. BTW

Reporting from Boston – Almost immediately after she deposited herself in a corner booth at L’Espalier, the restaurant at Boston’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel on the December afternoon after the first American date of her Monster Ball tour, Lady Gaga made a confounding statement.

“I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else,” said the 23-year-old known to her mom (eating lunch nearby) as Stefani Germanotta. “I don’t see myself as an heir.”

Yet there she was, in a blond Hollywood bob and black tuxedo-bra combo much like the costumes Madonna wore 20 years ago, discussing a show that conjures the spirits of Michael Jackson, David Bowie and the punk-rock drag queens of downtown New York and promoting music — the newly expanded edition of her 2008 debut album, “The Fame,” greatly enriched by eight new songs and repackaged as “The Fame Monster” — that pays blatant homage to ABBA, Queen, Eurodisco and Marilyn Manson.
Gaga doesn’t care. She wants you to trace her references. ” John Lennon talked about how with every song he wrote, he was thinking of another artist,” she said, making a less expected connection to a pop deity.

She’s yet to attain the status of the Beatles, but in the ever-accelerating pop cycle, Gaga is a top sensation, and many people’s vote for the most exciting artist of 2009. “The Fame” has sold nearly 2 million copies in the U.S. and reportedly double that internationally; her album and the single “Poker Face” both made the top three on the year-end tally of top iTunes downloads.

“The Fame Monster” continues this sales sweep, but it also considerably advances Gaga’s artistic project with some of her strongest songs yet, including the earworm-infested “Bad Romance” and the sumptuously emotional ballad “Speechless.”

The world is responding. She’s made friends with Madonna, been interviewed by Barbara Walters and met the Queen of England at the annual Royal Variety Performance. The Monster Ball has sold out multiple nights in major cities including Los Angeles, where it comes to the Nokia Theater at L.A. Live for shows Dec. 21-23.

This is all happening not because Gaga is cute or takes off her clothes but because (to use one of her favorite words) she is a monster — a monster talent, that is, with a serious brain.

During nearly two hours of conversation, she not only reiterates her assertion of total originality but also finesses it until it’s both a philosophical stance about how constructing a persona from pop-cultural sources can be an expression of a person’s truth — à la those drag queens Gaga sincerely admires — and a bit of a feminist act.

“I’m getting the sense that you’re a little bit of a feminist, like I am, which is good,” she said. “I find that men get away with saying a lot in this business, and that women get away with saying very little . . . In my opinion, women need and want someone to look up to that they feel have the full sense of who they are, and says, ‘I’m great.’ ”

Gaga’s casual use of the term “feminist” was interesting; like many female pop stars, she’s rejected the term in the past. But she’s evolving. She is growing “more compassionate,” she says, and focusing more on ideas of community, especially the one formed by her core fan base, a mix of gay men, bohemian kids and young women attracted by Gaga’s style and her singable melodies.

Grand declarations

Her new songs address serious themes like women’s shame about their bodies and the need for open communication in relationships; her often physically distorting costumes show that the pursuit of the feminine ideal is far from natural. Her commitment to confront the changing notion of what’s “natural” puts Gaga on the same road traveled by artists she admires, such as the photographer Cindy Sherman. Her frank talk about how female artists aren’t expected to write their own songs or about how young women are afraid to ask for what they need from their sexual partners inches her toward a new articulation of feminism.

“If you ask somebody where you see sexism in your life, all they think of is the old stuff,” said Nona Willis Aronowitz, co-author of the new book “Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism,” by phone. “Equal pay, that’s not really on their radar. Domestic violence and rape aren’t necessarily in the forefront. But you ask about double standards or restrictive gender roles, they don’t think of that as sexism; they think of that as the way it is. That’s kind of like what Lady Gaga is talking about.”

Gaga does view her music as a liberating force. “When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves,” she continued. “I don’t make it as a defense. I make it as, OK, guys, it’s been two years, and I’ve made a lot of music, and I know my greatness is individual. And I want every woman to be able to say that.”

This is one of Gaga’s gifts, maybe the one that most distinguishes her from the other talented women directing the pop zeitgeist right now, such as her recent collaborator Beyoncé, her fellow couture hound Rihanna or her rival in redefining blondness, Taylor Swift. Gaga makes outrageous declarations — which, when you break them down, actually make sense. And then she backs them up, not only through her now famously provocative interviews but in her videos, her collaborations with designers and artists, her live performances and those infernally catchy hits.

Upending genres

As good a game as she talks, Gaga’s real language is visual and, of course, musical. Discussing videos like the one for “Bad Romance,” which she says is about “how the entertainment industry can, in a metaphorical way, simulate human trafficking — products being sold, the woman perceived as a commodity,” or the Ace Bandage-adorned costume she wore at the American Music Awards, which she said was “meant to be feminine, healing, bondage gothic,” she sounds more like an art critic than an evolving club kid.

“It’s a feeling,” she says of the way she builds these little horror musicals. “There is a narrative, but the narrative isn’t nearly as important as the images are, sewn together.”

As for the songs that serve as the foundation for all of her other forms of expression, Gaga says she never wanted them to be anything but massive hits. “I don’t want to make niche-oriented music,” said the songwriter, who entered the music business writing hits for other artists, including Britney Spears. “I don’t like it! I don’t mean that to be in a rude way. But my taste is not there.”

At a time when pop genres are colliding and collapsing, Gaga is contributing to their downfall. She notes that “Boys Boys Boys,” the first song that she wrote with her main producer RedOne, is a club track that borrows its “gang chorus” from the hard rock of AC/DC. “I told him, I want to make pop music that my heavy metal friends will listen to,” she explained.

“Aside from her few piano ballads, which are like early 1970s Elton John, her dance music is pretty much on-the-money current Euro dance,” said her recent collaborator Adam Lambert in a separate interview. “But she’s a rock star in her mentality. [Her attitude is] like, ‘I hope this makes you look. I’m going to be subversive and out there because it makes me feel good and liberated to be that way.’ ”

It’s arguable that Gaga could only realize her artistic vision in the center of the pop mainstream. Her critical supporters laud her for reconnecting pop to other cultural forms and for revitalizing the stream of art-into-pop first opened up by bands like Roxy Music and the Patti Smith Group.

But she’s not alone in that effort. Kanye West played a gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art before she did; Beyoncé referenced Bob Fosse. Go a notch lower in visibility, as Gaga’s critics point out, and examples abound of rock and club kids with art connections, from Karen O to Alison Goldfrapp.

Gaga has done something more specific: She’s tapped into one of the primary obsessions of our age — the changing nature of the self in relation to technology, the ever-expanding media sphere, and that sense of always being in character and publicly visible that Gaga calls “the fame” — and made it her own obsession, the subject of her songs and the basis of her persona.

“Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves,” she said. “I guess what I am trying to do is take the monster and turn the monster into a fairy tale.”

That stars embody the social concerns of their age is a pop-culture truism. But only rarely does an artist dig beneath the dermis of our shared anxieties, exposing the liquid matter that runs through the shared fantasies and delusions of a particular moment.

“It’s kind of like a crusade in its own way,” she said. “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.”

Owning her image

Since the release of “The Fame,” Lady Gaga has been uncovering new layers within her basic themes. At first she just seemed like the most pop savvy of the clever young people using club beats as a basis for music that could be both cerebral and cathartic — the way indie rockers used heavy guitars a generation before. It was easy to dismiss her as no more than a well-educated New York girl with a gift for pop hooks and self-marketing.

But then her public appearances began to not simply provoke but disturb. She made a video for her song “Paparazzi” that had her in gilded crutches and a leg brace. She turned that vision of crippled glamour even bloodier on the MTV Video Music Awards, an appearance she described as “my first truly original moment.”

She’s worn costumes that recast childhood icons like Kermit the Frog and Hello Kitty into ingénue’s pelts. (The Kermit dress was designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, who’d previously adorned Madonna in teddy bears; the kitty couture was the brainchild of Gaga’s main creative partner, Matthew “Matty Dada” Williams.) She’s painted her eyes to look like an anime heroine. In the climactic dance sequence from Monster Ball, she adorns herself in the black feathers of a vulture and the yards-long blond braids of a victimized princess.

“I had a different vision for it in the beginning. Dada thought it should be braided, and I said, ‘I never wear my hair braided.’ He said, ‘I know, but it’s so Rapunzel, and it’s something people deeply understand. And when you’re wearing sunglasses on a scaffolding piece with a giant alien dancing behind you, I promise you it’s not going to look like Rapunzel.’ ”

The hairpiece does look like something concocted by crafty kids in a basement; it reflects a key element of Gaga’s aesthetic, the do-it-yourself spirit that contrasts with her taste for million-dollar couture. She works with major designers such as Alexander McQueen, who created many of the Monster Ball costumes, but also with newcomers like Gary Card, who made the skeletal headgear she and her dancers wore on the AMAs.

“The great thing about Gaga is she always want to push for the most extreme option,” Card said. “She’s brave enough to let herself be a canvas for a designer to go and really express themselves. Nothing is off limits! With Rihanna and Beyoncé there is an end result of desirability and unattainable sexiness, whereas Gaga is a really interesting bridge between the desirable and the grotesque. She’s not at all worried about looking ridiculous or hideous; actually, I think she thrives off it.”

If Gaga is to maintain her distinctiveness, she’ll need to preserve her orientation toward art as kids putting on a show. It’s what connects her performance of fame to Andy Warhol’s vision instead of Simon Cowell’s. She’s been derided for constantly citing the Pop pioneer, but the connection is real.

Having gotten her start in the bohemian enclaves of downtown New York City, Gaga is deeply indebted to Warhol’s “Superstar”-oriented Factory scene and its aftermath, which produced drag performers like Candy Darling, artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and streetwise rock stars including Lou Reed and Patti Smith, who declared glamour accessible to anyone with a Polaroid camera, a glue gun or a cheap guitar.

“The idea is, you are your image, you are who you see yourself to be,” she said. “It’s iconography. Warhol and I both went to church when we were younger. That’s how I see things. I don’t want anyone to feel trapped by their own lives. That to me is more dangerous than anything.”

On fantasy island

In Gaga’s movie, she is both Andy and the Superstar. Warhol supported and exploited a coterie of outsiders who likely would never have emerged from their corners without his help. Gaga takes control but also shows herself losing it; she blurs the lines between self-realization and self-objectification, courting the dangers of full exposure for a generation of kids born with camcorders in their hands.

Though she talks nonstop about liberation, Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.

She says she wants her fans to feel safe in expressing their imperfections. “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

But what is this freakishness, which she hopes to nurture? In songs like “Poker Face” and the new “Speechless,” Gaga focuses on women as unreliable narrators, misunderstood or even unable to speak. When she presents herself as a cartoon character or a space alien, she explores old questions about gender, artifice and “reality” using the new language of social media, body modification and transgender sexuality.

These deep issues are her tools, as important to her art as the glitter and latex in which she shrouds herself. “If you’re on an island, stranded, and all you have is sticks and leaves and pineapples, you’re gonna make a boat out of sticks and leaves and pineapples,” she said. “I view glamour and celebrity life and these plastic assumptions as the pineapples. And I spend my career harvesting pineapples, and making pies and outfits and lipsticks that will free my fans from their stranded islands.”

Source: LATimes.com

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Can you talk about the songs on The Fame Monster?
This is a new album. It's eight songs, I could have put more songs on it, but I just decided not to because I thought they fit beautifully together. I'm really excited about all my new work, and I've been going through some really wonderful times and some really rough times all at once, so it's been really good for my artistry. On the re-release, I wrote this song called "Speechless," which I think is the best song I've ever written. It's about my dad, it's a really beautiful ballad. It's piano-driven, and there's no beat on it, it's all live instruments. I produced it with Ron Fair, so we did a full live orchestra, recorded everything with live drums, live guitar and bass with me playing piano. We got that really organic, delicious feeling.

What was the thinking behind The Monster Ball?
I wanted to really put together a show that would be the most beautiful, expensive-looking, delicious show, but that my fans wouldn't have to pay a ton of money to come see. So we're playing a few nights in a row. I've got super loyal fans, so I feel this tremendous obligation to take care of them.

You said it was a pop-electro opera.
Yeah. It's the first ever, so it's really whatever I want it to be. The theatrics and story elements are in the style of an opera. Imagine if you could take the sets of an opera, which are very grand and very beautiful, and put them through a pop-electro lens. The design of the show is very, very forward, very, very innovative. I've been thinking about ways to play with the shape of this stage and change the way that we watch things. So what I've done is I've designed a stage with Haus of Gaga that is essentially a frame with forced perspective, and the frame is put inside the stage.

It's got kind of a triangular inset, like a diamond, and everywhere we're playing, the dimensions fit this box that I'm bringing, so it's this giant box that fits into every show. So no matter where I go, my fans get the same experience. So often you go into theaters and there's ambient light flying in from all sorts of places, and the audience is in different spots, and the stage is in different shapes and lengths and widths and depths, so this is a way for me to control all the light and all of the different elements of the show. The theme of the show is evolution.

How will that theme express itself?
Each one of these songs on my album represents a different demon that I've faced in myself, so the music is much more personal. I don't write about fame or money at all on this new record. So we talked about monsters and how, I believe, that innately we're all born with the monsters already inside of us — I guess in Christianity they call it original sin — the prospect that we will, at some point, sin in our lives, and we will, at some point, have to face our own demons, and they're already inside of us. So we talked about growth, and that led us into this kind of scientific space, and we started talking about evolution and the evolution of humanity and how we begin as one thing, and we become another.

This is the first time you've had the resources to do a tour the way you wanted. You've visualized ambitious things before, but you probably weren't able to do it to this extent.
No, I couldn't, but there was one major ingredient that was missing, and that's my fans. Now, I have the inspiration of my fans, and I know what they want. I think there's a lot of artists that are very self-serving, but I'm not one of them. When I create and make music, I make music that my fans want to hear. My record label didn't want to put out that photo that's my album cover, with the brown hair.

They found it too confusing?
It was World War III. They were like, "It's confusing, it's too dark, you look gothic, it's not pop," and I said, "You don't know what pop is, because everyone was telling me I wasn't pop last year, and now look — so don't tell me what pop is, I know what pop is." It's funny, because I fought and fought and fought, and I actually ended up having two covers, because I wanted to do this yin and yang presentation with the covers. When I go to see what my fans are saying, I go onto GagaDaily — they see the cover and say, "I don't really like the blonde one, but the brown one is fucking sick". They love it, and I know what they love, so I make it for them, I don't care what anybody else wants.

Were there elements of the Fame Kills Tour with Kanye West that were going to be in The Monster Ball?
I'm certainly inspired by what we were doing, but I made a decision based on integrity not to use any of the things that we had designed together.

So it's the great lost tour, then.
Yeah, probably. I guess that's kind of perfectly epic, isn't it, though? Isn't that exactly what's supposed to happen? It just wasn't the right timing. I don't want to embellish on it too much, because I want to respect Kanye's privacy. But we just had our own reasons. We're real friends, real friends can make decisions like that, and we wanted to keep the momentum going in terms of pop music staying innovative with hip-hop and R&B, and we really wanted to do it, and it just wasn't the right time. But who's to say what will happen in the future?

Is this tour going to include the band and dancers we saw on SNL?
It's going to be much bigger, but I love my guys. My dancers that are with me now have been with me for two years. I just shot a music video for "Bad Romance" and the Haus of Gaga did the whole art direction for it. We worked with Francis Lawrence, he's a movie director, and he almost never does music videos anymore, and I'm really impressed, even with myself — it's so amazing. That's another thing that keeps me going, when you have moments of adversity and challenge in your life, you have to dig deep. It's my music and my sadness that runs into one another and mutates and gives me the ability to make new things.

Have you already begun to plan the show's fashion?
The fashion, certainly, is going to be another exploration and another level from where we were with the Fame Ball. The theme of monsters is certainly going to be an influence, as well as the theme of evolution and change. It's going to be a truly artistic experience that is going to take the form of the greatest post-apocalyptic house party that you've ever been to.

I made a quick slideshow of some of the Gagaween costumes I found! There's so many! I love you!

Eltoneo + Guliet! Finishing our duet Hello, Hello in studio. Sounding so amazing, some last finishing touches and off to the movies!

We reached 1Billion views on youtube little monsters! If we stick together we can do anything. I dub u kings and queens of youtube! Unite!

About to do my very first interview for Born This Way, I'm so excited and happy! Have all little monsters in my heart to carry with me xx MM

We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart

I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby. I was Born This Way.

I'd wear any of my private attire for the world to see. But I would rather have an open flesh wound than ever wear a band aid in public.

“I would imagine this year there’s going to be ten million Lady Gagas dressed up trick or treating for Halloween. She’s great because she gets it, but she can back it up. She can sing, she can write, she can play piano, she’s not just a costume queen.

“You can be as outrageous as you wanna be, as long as you can back it up with the music. She said if you’re gonna do it, go as far out on a limb as you can, like Alice Cooper did. She’s totally outrageous. Lady Gaga’s already in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

“Everybody’s trying to be so politically correct, everybody’s so afraid of offending people, of stepping outside the norm. I see bands and I go, ‘What, he went down to Gap and bought a pair of corduroys and a shirt?’ What fun is that? Nobody will remember 90% of the rock bands, but they’ll remember Gaga. When people say party like a rock star, they don’t say party like a politician, party like a banker. Be Keith Richards.” 


I HANS NYASTE INTERVJU SOM ÄR MED I DEN BRITISKA TIDNINGEN THE SUN.