Poker Face (7 page)

Lawrence introduced the young Stefani to execs at the Disney Channel and suggested she audition to replace the lead singer of a sugary teen girl group called No Secrets, who appear on their album cover in matching white jeans and unfortunate two-tone hoodies. They got their start in 2001, in the Fordlândia teenage factory that produced the ’N Sync/Britney/Christina Aguilera/Backstreet Boys teen-pop explosion of the nineties, first singing backup for Backstreet Boy Nick Carter’s scrawny, abrasive little brother, Aaron, on the unfortunately titled songs “Oh Aaron” and “Stride (Jump on the Fizzy).”

“It gave me a taste of the record industry,” Gaga said of making the teen-pop-factory rounds. “I thought I was about to become Whitney Houston. But you don’t realize what that takes until later.”

While shopping around for a record deal, Gaga continued
booking as many live shows as she could, now sometimes performing as the Plastic Gaga Band. “I played in every club in New York City,” she said. “I bombed in every club, and then I killed it in every club. I did it the way you are supposed to:
Y
ou go and you play and pay your dues and work hard.” Around this time, Besencon was convinced to see her live; he did, and he finally signed on to manage her.

The viral success of the two singles she’d posted online became her leverage with record labels; she was a best seller in cyberspace, so why
wouldn’t
they take a meeting with her?

“She is perfectly, almost genetically engineered to be a twenty-first-century pop star,” says Eric Garland. As CEO of BigChampagne.com, Garland is an expert in the consumption of music online; his company tracks data, including peer-to-peer file sharing, for all the major labels.

Gaga, he says, “is an incredibly social animal in the new definition of social. She’s sort of promiscuous. And I don’t mean promiscuous in the Ke$ha sense—I mean socially promiscuous online.” (Ke$ha is the pop singer who styles herself as the avant-gardist of the trailer park, who does what she can to draw comparisons to Gaga.) But it was Gaga’s innate understanding of creating and cultivating an online identity—and a sense of community with those who responded—that would, as much as major-label backing, catapult her into global consciousness. She would later actively cultivate the support of gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whose site, as of April 2010, was ranked 192 in most-trafficked websites in the United States and 517th globally.

As for the brick-and-mortar music business, the earthbound major labels: Gaga got a lot of no’s. They would say she didn’t have the right look, that they didn’t hear any hits in the material. She didn’t stop trying. She tried to get a publishing deal—basically, a contract to write songs that could be sold to other artists—with Irwin Robinson, her old boss at Famous Music. He said no. She tried to get a publishing deal with Sony/ATV; they said no. Her meeting at Sony/ATV, according to a source, was with Danny Goldberg, who had managed Nirvana and had run three major labels. She was there with Fusari, which should have conferred a level of respect, but Gaga felt Goldberg wasn’t listening to a thing she was saying, that he couldn’t have made his disinterest clearer. She left the meeting in a rage, yelling at Fusari that she would never sign to Sony/ATV. Then she took her act up to the Island Def Jam offices in midtown Manhattan to audition for a deal in late 2006.

An Island Def Jam employee remembers seeing Gaga coming down the hall: “She reminded me of Julia Roberts [in]
Pretty Woman,
” she says. “But in American Apparel.”

What happened that afternoon at Island Def Jam has become part of the Gaga myth, and even one of her closest friends from this time—who was not present but heard about the audition from Gaga immediately afterward—tells it the same way: Gaga sang and played piano for a gaggle of execs. She saw one, out of the corner of her eye, get up and leave; she panicked, but you’d never have been able to tell by looking at her. She kept going and, when she was done, looked up to see label head Antonio “L.A.” Reid in the doorway. He said, “See legal on your way out”—industry-speak for “We’re signing you.”

It didn’t really go down that way, according to someone who was in the room. For one thing, her appointment that day was with Reid himself: “She walked into L.A.’s office,” says the source. “A couple of minutes later, someone asked me if I would go watch Gaga do a showcase
in
L.A.’s office.”

Also in the room: Gaga’s future artist and repertoire person Josh Sarubin; senior VP Karen Kwak, also known as Reid’s right-hand woman; and a few others. Reid had a tiny room off his office, maybe ten feet by ten feet, outfitted with an upright piano; this is where Gaga auditioned.

“She sat down at the piano and introduced herself,” says the source. “Then she started playing—she did ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’ and a few other songs. She was amazing. There was no doubt about it—the minute you saw her behind her instrument, you knew she was special. But the thing is—and I know I’m not the only person who thinks this—I don’t remember anything about the songs, because the whole time we could not take our eyes off her ass. She was in this tight little skirt or tube dress. She moved back and forth and you could just see her ass cheeks running up and down, like on a seesaw almost. Everyone was looking around the room with these giant smiles, looking at her ass.”

After her mini-set, she turned around to face Reid, and this part of the story actually aligns with the myth. Says the source: “L.A. just goes, ‘I want you to march downstairs to Business Affairs and we’re going to offer you a deal. Don’t leave the building till you sign.’ ”

Gaga met with the label’s lawyer, and when she got hold of her own attorney, he asked her who over at the label was handling the deal. Her lawyer told her that the Island Def Jam deal was going to be big—the label had tasked one of their best lawyers with handling it.

“She would say, ‘I’ll be with this lawyer for the rest of my life; that will never change,’ ” says Starland. “Her lawyer is no longer her lawyer anymore. That will be a common theme.”

Her contract, according to Gaga, was huge: She told friends
that Island Def Jam signed her to an $850,000 deal. Jim Guerinot, who manages, among others, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, and the Offspring, says there’s no way Gaga signed a deal worth anything near $850,000.

“I don’t believe it,” he says. “That’s how ridiculous it is. To give an unknown that much money and a distribution deal . . . Huh? Highly successful artists can occasionally get deals of that nature. It’s absolutely unheard of for new artists.”

One person who was in the room for the signing and saw the contract insists that $850,000 was the exact figure, and it was Fusari’s very recent, very huge successes with Destiny’s Child and Jessica Simpson that secured Gaga such a huge deal. But another industry veteran says he, too, finds this deal highly, highly unlikely.

“Rarely in the last ten years were artists getting a check for anything north of $500,000,” he says. “It’s so hard to believe that one artist is getting $850,000 for one album. I don’t know the terms—there are so many factors. It could’ve been a five-album deal.” Fusari’s involvement might have been a help, he says, but even the producer’s reputation would not have translated into that much money. “But you know,” he adds, “I’ve seen crazy shit. There are some bulldog New York attorneys who may get that money.”

Whatever money she was making had to be divided up. She, Joe, and Fusari had formed a production company together, and it was the company, not Gaga, that was technically signed to Island Def Jam.

In addition to her 80-20 deal with Fusari, her new manager Besencon was getting a 20 percent cut of everything. Starland, who’d discovered Gaga and was cowriting songs with her, had only a verbal agreement that she, too, would get a cut of any future deal, and she was not pleased when Gaga offered to give her just publishing rights; Starland would only be able to collect if anything she wrote wound up on the record. Starland says Gaga also offered to pay her a $10,000 flat fee.

“I was like, ‘That’s nice, but given that Laurent’s been in the picture a very, very short time and I’ve been doing this development, I feel I deserve at least half of what Laurent makes—10 percent, and some publishing on two of the songs,’ ” Starland recalls. “And she was like, ‘That’s totally fair.’ ”

A few days later, Starland says she sat down with Gaga and Fusari at a restaurant on the Upper West Side to go over the terms of the deal. “He said, ‘Wendy, we will all work out something fair and equitable—this would not be happening without you,’ ” she says. “And I was like, ‘Great, so can my lawyer be in touch?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

Now that she had a deal, Gaga had to hone her stagecraft
and her image as fast as possible. She couldn’t afford a stylist and didn’t really have an eye, so she was still relying on the hipster porno-chic of American Apparel. But it only made her appear overtly, plainly sexual, not edgy or outré.

So she started to experiment with stage looks, which mainly meant performing in her bra or a bikini top. She was young still, only twenty-one years old, and had not been properly introduced to the figures, mainstream and cult, she would later so successfully reappropriate. Gaga, though, has engaged in a bit of revisionist history, talking about her “underground New York following.”

“The shows, at that time, were shock art,” she said. “I was like the Damien Hirst of pop music, doing something so offensive. In that neighborhood, it’s junkies and metalheads—how do I get them to come and listen to pop music? I take my clothes off, I use a lot of hairspray, and I write songs about oral sex.” It should be noted that in downtown New York City, in 2007, absolutely none of that behavior would have been considered shocking. Quaint, maybe. Or a nice try.

Around this time, Gaga befriended a girl her age who doesn’t want to be identified; she worked for a small music publishing company and spent about six or seven months hanging out with Gaga constantly. “One night,” says the friend, “she was doing this show at the Bitter End, and she wanted to find a shirt and she literally took the subway to Queens for it. It was funny—she was wearing one of those wife-beater [tank tops], but as a dress. But it wasn’t American Apparel—it was, like, Hanes. And she ended up finding this piece of jewelry she was looking for. We were like, ‘Stefani, what are you doing?’ She almost missed the show. We were like, ‘This chick will go out to Queens to pick up a piece of jewelry.’ Everything about her was crazy and original.”

Chapter Four
Art of the Steal

G
aga kept calling around town on her own
behalf, trying to book herself into clubs and parties. Her success, as ever, was scattershot. “I remember she used to call around and ask people, because she did call us,” says New York City nightlife fixture Ladyfag, who at the time was, along with well-known club kid Kenny Kenny, behind a party called Sebastian. She has trouble recalling exactly when this was, but she says Gaga’s performances had been generating buzz, so she booked her.

“It was her and two other girls,” says Ladyfag, “and she was wearing a bra and high-waisted panties with mirrors all over them. And it was just a big joke. Everyone was kind of making fun: ‘Who does she think she is, coming in here?’ ”

That said, Ladyfag thought Gaga was great. “She did maybe three or four songs, and one of them was ‘Boys Boys Boys.’ She was fabulous. It was a great performance.” Contrary to her backstory, Ladyfag says Gaga was not a presence in gay clubs, either as a performer or a partier. (In New York City, gay clubs have long been places where trends and careers are launched.) Actively cultivating a gay following, as a performer, says two things: You are open-minded and nondiscriminatory, and you know that a gay fan base not only tends to be incredibly loyal but quite often ahead of the mainstream curve.

“I have nothing bad to say about her, but she is trying to create this whole myth,” says Ladyfag. “It’s not like she was some kid who ran away from home and was hanging out in all the gay clubs, ’cause that’s so not true.” She laughs. “It’s not true. She played a few gay parties, but that was after her album came out. Before she became really big.”

It’s hard to say how much the creation myth accounts for
Gaga’s meteoric, global rise. But it’s clear that her music, so polished and accessible, is in no way avant-garde. As talented as she is, she never would have broken through without the wackiness. “Most likely it wasn’t the music, an electro-soul mélange that has made Lady Gaga famous despite its contentedly low aims,” wrote the
New York Times’
s Jon Caramanica in a review of her first big NYC gig, at Midtown venue Terminal 5, six months after
The Fame
had been released. He went on to call her music “an odorless, colorless, almost unnecessary additive to the Lady Gaga spectacle.”

In a review of
The Fame
in the UK’s
Guardian
newspaper, critic Alexis Petridis pilloried her for her claims of fantastical uniqueness, both musically and aesthetically. Her success, he wrote in his January 2009 piece, “seems to have led Lady Gaga to come to some pretty bullish conclusions about her own originality: ‘I’m defying all the preconceptions we have of pop artists,’ she recently told one journalist, seemingly confident of a place in the history books as the world’s first pretty female singer performing synthesizer-heavy R&B-influenced pop. ‘I’m very into fashion,’ she clarified, all previous pretty female singers having apparently performed their synthesizer-heavy R&B-influenced pop clad in stuff they grabbed at random from the George at Asda half-price sale.”

And yet, in an age of confessional culture, in which “reality” is routinely put on display in tabloids, on TV, on the Web, and we regularly see, as she put it, “legends taking out the trash,” Lady Gaga managed to explode on the pop-music scene as a fully formed entity. Aside from those few performance clips on the Web, there was no trace of the “guidette” Fusari met, very little documentation of Gaga’s development.

Actually, given the ready-made nature of her sound, it’s even more incredible that Gaga sold by-the-numbers dance tracks as mini-revolutions of the soul and a major revolution in the direction of pop music. It’s a true feat of performance art.

“She did a brilliant job of reinventing herself as a naked,
visual spectacle that was backed up by really solid songwriting,” says Tony DiSanto, president of programming and development at MTV. He is sitting with Liz Gateley, the network’s VP of series development and the mastermind behind
The Hills,
in his office in Times Square. The space, like DiSanto himself, is welcoming and unpretentious: There are a few framed pictures and gold records, but these sit low on the windowsill; the medium-sized office is dominated by a huge flat-screen TV, which is situated between a black leather sofa and DiSanto’s desk. He is in blue jeans and a black shirt, ankle across his knee.

“When I started hearing the buzz, it was through people who were tweeting through Facebook. I’ll never forget her first big show here in New York”—on May 2, 2009, the Terminal 5 show. DiSanto—who is in his forties, yet whose shock of black hair and natural exuberance makes him seem much younger—wasn’t there, but he remembers getting “an explosion” of texts and tweets from people in the industry who were.

“It reminded me of when Guns ’N Roses did that show at the Ritz in 1988”—which was an MTV special taped in New York—“and all of a sudden it was like we’d just seen the second coming of rock. Her buzz explosion through social media was, for me, this generation’s version of the Guns ’N Roses Ritz show.”

There are only two other performers in recent memory who exploded globally via the Internet: Susan Boyle, the sensitive recluse exploited to brilliant effect by Simon Cowell & Co., and Justin Bieber, the teenage Canadian with an asymmetrical helmet of chestnut hair and dead eyes. Gaga, however, “created a buzz factor for herself before we ever saw an image of her,” says Liz Gateley. Gateley, like DiSanto, is in her forties, yet she, too, with her expensive blond hair, slim frame, and warm manner, comes across as an eternal teenager.

“A year and a half ago,” she continues, “my head of talent came to me and said, ‘You have to do something with this person.’ The buzz was so big, but her imagery had not reached the mainstream fifteen-year-old girl in Iowa yet.” Gateley and DiSanto say they knew it wasn’t a matter of if Gaga was going to break, but when; they began a series of talks with her people about doing a documentary that would use, fittingly,
Madonna: Truth or Dare
as a template. And then, says Gateley, she just “fired off”—went from no one knowing who she was to mainstream fame so fast that the network lost its window. “We couldn’t even get a time to sit down with her and talk about it,” Gateley says.

Gaga came across, immediately, as both a total original and a walking, derivative mash-up of the greatest pop androgynes of the twentieth century: the aforementioned Bowie, Madonna, Prince. For the urban sophisticate who consumes pop culture, there are deeper, more rewarding references, rivulets leading to tributaries: There’s the late visionary artist, promoter, and dandy Leigh Bowery and singer and performance artist Klaus Nomi, provocateurs and source material for the likes of Boy George (Bowery) and David Bowie (Nomi).

Bowery especially—with his Kabuki-white face, super-exaggerated black lips, and plump body aggressively distorted by painful clothes—made it purposefully difficult to look at him. At times, he didn’t even seem human; as Bowery and Nomi had before, Gaga can make it hard to look at her. She spent the first year of her celebrity wrapping up her face, and still sometimes does; it can be such a visual assault that you have to strain to work through whatever thicket is obscuring her head. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, for example, she wore a red lace minidress, the material snaked up and around her neck and face like some out-of-control haute-couture network of vines—a direct reference to the same look in the late designer Alexander McQueen’s 1998–1999 fall/winter show. (McQueen wound up dressing her and giving her access to his archives, and she wore a head-to-toe look from one of his last collections, made famous for its outsized, sequined “armadillo” shoes, in the “Bad Romance” video.)

Gaga would borrow something deeper from both Bowery and Nomi: the tragic image of the artist as married to the art, forever a loser in love, intermittently sated by random sex but relying on the adulation of the audience to live, devoted to them above all. She currently claims to be single and celibate, but as of this writing, she is actually involved with her stylist, Matt Williams, and has been for some time. “When you’re lonely,” she says to her audience in the short film that runs at the end of her current show, her face repeatedly contorted and distorted, “I’ll be lonely, too.” It’s a poignant message in this age of false intimacy, of five hundred Facebook friends one never actually sees and thousands of Twitter followers one’s never met.

The current list of Gaga influences is vast and interdisciplinary, and though she claims they’re all personal favorites, those who know her well say they’ve never really heard her discuss the more esoteric ones. The people and things she’s always cited, they say, are hardly obscure: Andy Warhol, Chanel, Donatella Versace. In much the same way her high school and college friends attest that she was a normal, well-adjusted teenager with mainstream interests, those who’d later ask Gaga about her avant-garde reference points would find themselves talking to a flummoxed girl.

“She’d been talking about Warhol and Bowie and Grace Jones—those were her talking points,” says journalist Jonah Weiner, who interviewed Lady Gaga for a
Blender
magazine cover story in late February 2009 (it never ran; the magazine folded). He says, though, that when he’d ask her a follow-up question, “You’d see she didn’t have an answer prepared, and she’d get cagier. You could see her discomfort level rise. I’d ask her about Warhol and she’d say, ‘He believed that pop culture could be high art, and I believe the same thing.’ And if I asked her to [expound], she couldn’t do it.”

When she brought up the controversial 1974 film
The Night Porter,
starring Charlotte Rampling as a concentration camp survivor who embarks upon a sadomasochistic affair with the Nazi who tortured her—fashion people love this movie, maybe because it’s so transgressive, but probably for the scene in which Rampling wears tailored pants with suspenders and no shirt and looks utterly chic—Weiner says Gaga was out of her depth. He asked her about the film’s theme, about the notion, he says, “of the victim falling in love with the tormenter. [For her], it was more about how sexy Charlotte Rampling was.” (One question Weiner, who found himself liking her despite having a low opinion of her music, regrets omitting: “I don’t know why I didn’t ask her why she was into this
Eurotrash house,
” he says, laughing.)

It’s in this way, too, that Lady Gaga is so obviously a product of the Internet age. No longer does familiarizing oneself with the obscure require tenacity and legwork and fruitless trips to vintage vinyl or magazine shops (which hardly exist anymore). Now you just Google it or Wiki it or download it to your iPod and go down the electronic rabbit hole of references—and that’s not a bad thing. But it does tend to result in a facile working knowledge of once-obscure people and art and movements, and that kind of surface knowledge, when masquerading as deep immersion, can be an affront. An underprepared Lady Gaga claiming a deep affinity with decades-old countercultural figures does not go down well with music journalists, critics, and obsessives, whose outsider interests tend to reflect inner alienaton.

She was not as knowledgable as you’d expect during a 2009 interview on the Fuse music network; when the journalist Touré asked, “Do you know what ‘Strong J’ means?” Gaga was taken aback. “Strong J?” she asked. “I’m talking about Grace Jones,” Touré said, and Gaga quickly recovered: “Yeah, yeah, Grace is a huge inspiration to me.” Jones is not impressed: “Well, you know, I’ve seen some things she’s worn that I’ve worn,” she recently told the
Guardian,
“and that does kind of piss me off.” (Jones’s second album, by the way, was called
Fame.
)

From German singer Nina Hagen and Missing Persons’ Dale Bozzio, Gaga stole a rough, aggressive sexuality that never read as actually sexy. (There are pictures of Bozzio that, placed side by side with Lady Gaga, look indistinguishable.) From early Peter Gabriel, Leigh Bowery, and Boy George she stole the Kabuki-like face paint. From Icelandic pop star Björk—who lives with art star Matthew Barney, and who had a then unknown McQueen design her 1997 album cover for
Homogenic
—she stole the aesthetic futurism and the impression that she, too, routinely receives transmissions from another planet. (Back in 1995, when Björk was reaching the heights of her creativity, Madonna stole directly from
her
—the kimonos, the space-age techno beats—filming a hallucinatory video for “Bedtime Story,” a single that Madonna commissioned from Björk, who, according to industry legend, at first wrote lyrics criticizing Madonna’s unoriginality.)

Moving on: From Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper, Gaga stole the scary makeup, the androgyny, and the construct that she is Lady Gaga 24/7, that this alter-ego long ago subsumed her former identity, that she is never off-duty. (The latter notion is also borrowed from Prince.) She borrowed Gwen Stefani’s sound, and has cited her as a huge inspiration: “[Gwen]’s lined her lips with red since we saw her and she’s never stopped,” Gaga said. “It’s so powerful to me. Her fame was in her mouth. I don’t know where mine is yet . . . my vagina or my hair.”

From Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland, she’s stolen a propensity for overwrought ballads and the tragedy of the overly made-up, romantically unfulfilled chanteuse loved primarily by gay men. From Bette Midler, she stole the outrageous stagecraft and costumes, the unspoken triumph of the unconventional-looking underdog-cum-diva who’d be nowhere without the gays. From the late British fashion muse Isabella Blow—who discovered McQueen—she has stolen many indelible looks almost wholesale. Gaga, as it turns out, was not the first woman to wear a lobster hat. Blow was. (McQueen and Blow were likely inspired by the 1937 collaboration between Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí that resulted in their famed Lobster Dress.)

It’s unclear who turned her on to the likes of Bowery and Nomi, obscure pop culture figures who never attained the fame they so desired, but whose art, aesthetics, and attitudes were ripped off, to greater and greater effect, by successive generations. Nomi, who died of AIDS three years before Gaga was born, was a German ex-pat in New York, a trained opera singer who also covered pop songs. He’d perform at the Mudd Club, Max’s Kansas City, and Danceteria, and worked the same kind of exaggerated silhouette—the aerodynamic shoulder pads that created the effect of an inverted triangle over the torso—that Lady Gaga would eventually adopt.