Authors: Maureen Callahan
Poker Face (2 page)
T
he first feat of Lady Gaga’s young career: It was not that
long ago that next to nothing of her personal life was known. There was no thread connecting her life three years ago to her life now as a super-high-concept, demographic-smashing global pop icon. This is deliberate; she doesn’t study the lightweights.
The small details Gaga has doled out—she was a waitress, a working musician, a burlesque dancer, a coke addict, a wild young denizen of the Lower East Side—aren’t wholly false, but they’re well chosen ones that bolster her new persona, one that has wholly subsumed the girl formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, the girl who today only answers to Lady Gaga. “I think she’s got this Prince thing [happening now],” her former producer Rob Fusari said to the
New York Post
. “It’s changed. She’s Gaga now.”
“When she says in interviews, ‘I live and breathe fashion’—she may be fooling other people, but she’s not fooling me,” says Jon Sheldrick, a moon-faced twenty-four-year-old who knew her at New York University and whose friends were members of the Stefani Germanotta Band. “I don’t mean to sound demeaning,” he continues, “but she was really normal.” (Because this is really one of the meanest things one art-school kid could say about another.) Sheldrick, it should be noted, is wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
“She wasn’t super-outspoken or into really edgy clothes,” he says. “She was wearing T-shirts and sweatpants and shit. She was not a misfit.”
“She was a very suburban, friendly, social party girl,” said a former dorm-mate, who was friends with the boys in Stefani’s then–jam band. “There was nothing that would tip you off that she had this Warhol-esque ‘new art’ extremism.”
“Her ‘crazy’ outfit,” another friend recalled for the same
Post
story, “was putting suspenders on her jeans.”
While the crafting and controlling of one’s creation myth is
hardly new—it’s an American art form, from P. T. Barnum to Henry Ford to the Kennedys to Bob Dylan—what’s remarkable about Lady Gaga is that she’s the first star born in and of the Internet age to master this difficult art.
She’s also the first pop star to truly understand, even at this late date, how to exploit, in the best possible sense, the reach of the Web and social media. In November 2009,
Forbes
magazine stated, “Lady Gaga isn’t the music industry’s new Madonna. She’s its new business model.”
Gaga (or, most likely, a member of her team) is constantly communicating with her fans via Facebook and Twitter, and when she says something, the response can be seismic. When she announced the debut of her single “Bad Romance” at Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer 2010 collection, the site that was streaming the McQueen show crashed almost immediately. Nearly four million people follow her on Twitter. She debuts her videos on YouTube; in March 2010, she became the first artist in history to generate one billion hits, and by February, her album
The Fame
went diamond, having sold ten million copies worldwide. In 2009, she was the most downloaded artist in UK chart history, and was, inexplicably, second only to the Black Eyed Peas as the most downloaded artist on iTunes. It’s no exaggeration to say that her closest living relative in this regard might be another global phenomenon who was also little known just a few years ago, and whose peerless use of the Web and social networking largely helped get him to the White House.
Perhaps she had help from her father, Joe, a burly, tough Italian-American who himself was an Internet entrepreneur back in the mid-eighties, when few people had any idea what was coming. He made his fortune with a company called GuestWiFi, which provides wireless service to hotels. Like him, she’s been described as not necessarily book-smart but intuitively business-minded, excellent at reading people. She knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a performer; perhaps she always had the long view in mind.
“I’m a friend of hers on Facebook still; she still has her original profile up,” says Seth Kallen, a fellow musician at NYU. “She only has, like, four hundred friends. At first it was like, half her Lady Gaga pictures and half normal pictures. I remember having a sort of revelation—‘Wait a minute, she’s getting extremely famous.’ And I checked out her Facebook profile, and the normal pictures disappeared.”
There is very little to be found of the young Stefani Germanotta on the Web. There’s one clip of her on MTV’s now-defunct practical joke show
Boiling Points,
a sort of postmodern
Candid Camera
in which unsuspecting people in everyday situations are provoked until they lose their temper. In Stefani’s episode, she’s sitting alone at Bari, a generically upscale coffee shop near her NYU campus. She’s wearing a strapless black cotton sundress and flip-flops, her long black hair pulled up in a ponytail, black eyeliner and nude lipgloss her only makeup. She looks utterly unremarkable.
Like two other lone diners, she gets up to take a call on her cell phone, and when she returns, her food is gone. When she asks the waitress if she can have her salad back—“It wasn’t even eaten!”—the waitress returns her food with a dirty napkin and a balled up piece of plastic on top of it. The other two unwitting contestants are equally shocked, but guess who loses her temper first?
“Who puts that in their mouth?” Stefani asks the waitress. “Would you put that in your mouth? It has shit all over it. Clearly you would, because you’re just fucked up.”
Stefani lost; for keeping their cool, the other two won $100.
In her high school yearbook, she claims to have been on
The Sopranos
. She spent her teen years auditioning for talent scouts, and tried out for
Rent
when it was still on Broadway. She says her mother kept telling her to slow down when she was in high school. “But,” Gaga says, “I was getting hungrier and hungrier.”
She was a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street. It’s an exclusive, all-girls Catholic school set in two converted mansions; alumni include Paris and Nicky Hilton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Caroline Kennedy. Students begin learning French and Spanish in kindergarten; in eighth grade, they can take Mandarin. Tuition for the 2009–2010 school year is $33,985, and the school’s foremost goal, as stated on its website, is to “educate to a personal and active faith in God.”
Of her time at Sacred Heart, Gaga has said that she felt like “a freak,” that she didn’t fit in. But photos from this time show a fresh-faced girl, perpetually smiling, surrounded by other, perpetually smiling young girls. They all look like they’re part of the same well-adjusted, uptown tribe: long groomed hair, age-appropriate makeup, jeans and T-shirts and sweaters for day, strapless gowns and pearl chokers at high school dances.
“Stefani was always part of school plays and musicals,” said a former Sacred Heart classmate. “She had a core group of friends who she remains close with to this day. She was a good student and wore her uniform mostly to dress code. She liked boys a lot, but her singing and her passion for the arts was number one for her. You could pick Stefani’s voice out from others during Mass or a prize-day ceremony. She was always wanting to be an actress or a singer, and it was plain to see that she was going to be a star.”
The few early, substantial clips of Stefani that exist on YouTube are performances. There’s a now-famous one of her at an NYU talent show, seated behind a piano in a strapless green dress with long, filmy white panels, barefoot. She’s singing two very earnest, Norah Jones–sounding ballads. There’s another, much earlier one, of her at the Bitter End, a deeply uncool space that evokes all the danger of a suburban rec room. Here, she’s a teenager with a little baby fat, in a one-shouldered sweatshirt,
Flashdance
-style, exposing a meridian of belly. She’s working out, with swagger and a smirk and smudgy black eyeliner, an early version of “Hollywood.” She introduces everyone on stage as “the Stefani Germanotta Band,” impatiently looks over at her noodling guitarist, and finally begins. She is probably all of sixteen. “Listen,” she growls, full of force and verve, “I’ve got the sickest ambition.”
And another clip, shortly after she got her first record deal—“I didn’t sign with Sony, I signed with Island Def Jam,” she somewhat haughtily corrects the emcee—sitting behind the piano in a pink minidress and go-go boots. Here, too, she looks thoroughly pedestrian in her long black hair and thick bangs, but she has already started to go by Lady Gaga; this song, called “Wonderful,” is another ballad. Her vocals at this point are far more reminiscent of Christina Aguilera—she’s begun studying with Aguilera’s vocal coach—and this song, sonically and thematically, is very similar to Aguilera’s 2002 self-empowerment piano-ballad “Beautiful.” (“Wonderful” will eventually go to future
American Idol
contestant Adam Lambert, himself a performer given to high theatricality and heavy eye makeup.)
These clips are evidence of Gaga’s undeniable talent; they prove that she’s the real deal when it comes to musicianship, vocal ability, and commanding stage presence. Maybe she allows them to live because she cannot legally take them down, but maybe she allows them to live to show that she’s nobody’s puppet: not a creature of Auto-Tune (the software that manipulates off-key vocals into soulless perfection); not a lip-synching glitter queen, but a true artist with a voice and a vision. Also, in that last clip, she does claim to own a blow-up doll. “And I make love to it every night,” she says. So there are glimmers of the witty provocateur she will become.
To her devotees, however, there’s not much disconnect between the suburban-looking Stefani Germanotta and the dance-pop dominatrix Lady Gaga, and those who claim there is are quickly mocked for their overall naïveté. And this, too, is probably generational; her younger fans came of age when reality TV and DVD bonus tracks and the Internet exposed most of the sausage-making involved in attaining and retaining modern celebrity. There’s not much mystery left anymore, but Gaga, so far, is working both sides of that expertly.
It’s hard to think of a recent celebrity who seemed to emerge from nowhere, who’s captivated the attention of such wide swaths of people, and about whom next to nothing is known. Her backstory was intentionally limited; you didn’t know the details of her childhood, whether she suffered any traumatic domestic episodes, who she was dating, who her friends were. She’s not been shot stumbling out of a trendy nightclub or party filled with other young celebrities; she’s been able to credibly claim that she’s really not of that world, has no real celebrity friends, and has no interest in anything but her art. She’s posited herself as none of her peers have: a blank slate, a creature of self-invention, an object of emotional projection and wish-fulfillment. Prince pulled it off, Bowie, too, but both did it before the Internet, and both did it without the warmth Gaga has been able to exude; their mystery seemed born of an essential coldness, a disaffection with the human race. It was totally believable that both belonged to an alien species. Gaga’s seems born of genuinely feeling like the misfit she’s claimed to be. She seems human.
So it’s no surprise that tracks from a 2009-released demo EP called “Red and Blue”—this one sounding like a cross between Avril Lavigne and Alanis Morrissette, more pissed-off mall rat than lovelorn poetess—elicit world-weary debate among the YouTube commentariat.
For example:
“omg this song is so . . . non-perverted!!!! WHAT HAPPENED LADY GAGA?????!!. . . . maybe she went down the wrong path somewhere.”
“8kater, what makes the path she went down ‘wrong’? Had she kept down this path, she would never have been known.”
“if she made the same songs with the stefani persona do you think she would of sold records? Nope.”
“true these are really good, but what shes doing now is heard much more = more sales for the record companies.”
“Gaga herself has said that she was bored with being this angry white girl crooning and would have walked out on her performances. So when she was doing this she was selling out because she didn’t really like it. I’m not sure if she is 100 percent happy with what she’s doing now, but I’m sure she’s happy that she’s being different.”
Gaga’s own explanation for the yawning gap between then and now perfectly aligns with that last contention. “The way that I perform, people think it’s exhibitionist because it’s so theatrical,” she said in a previously unpublished interview. “But I tell you, there is something in me that I can’t help, and that is the girl who got made fun of all those years. And when I went to college, I got rid of her and I started to be something that I thought I was supposed to be. And when I went in with [my producer], he said, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you bring her out?’ Everything I tried to erase about myself, he loved. And so here we are.”
Here’s where the creation myth begins to unravel.
Her friends and fellow classmates at NYU’s Tisch School of
the Arts, which Gaga attended for only a year, speak mainly to her laserlike focus. They don’t really remember who her friends were or what classes she took or which boys she dated or what parties she attended; they remember her working, performing, always hustling. Her NYU classmate Sheldrick recalls first meeting Stefani at the Alphabet Lounge in fall 2005, after his own set. Her opening line: “Hi, I’m Stefani. I’m trying to start a band. We need a guitar player.”
Sheldrick was good friends with Calvin Pia and Eli Silverman, already Stefani’s recruits. A few days later, on his way to audition for her band, he found himself at the address he’d been given, walking to a set of open sidewalk grates on the Lower East Side’s Ludlow Street, descending a metal staircase, then loping through a long, dirty, pipe-lined hallway until he reached a pocket of rooms in the back. He remembers thinking two things: that this below-ground rehearsal space was disgusting, and that they were probably all on the same page musically. He was into jam bands, as were Calvin and Eli. Stefani was conversant, if not proficient.
“If you looked at her, you’d think she was a jam-band chick,” Sheldrick says. “She had a heady, grimy vibe to her. I remember we played Phish’s ‘Down with Disease.’ We did some jam on a one-four-five progression kind of thing, and then after playing Phish for like twenty minutes she was like, ‘Can we play some of my songs now?’ ”
