I've been listening to mainstream radio all my life, so I don't mind is songs are "overplayed" - I think it just means people are requesting to hear the songs

I worked for a top 40 radio station a few years ago, in fact the biggest top 40 station in the US, and I can tell you requests from listeners factor in very little as to what they'll play. They have format programmers that pick the songs they'll play, not necessarily what's big with listeners. Also, how much the record label decides to promote it and do promotions with that station or format plays a big role. It's a pretty rigged system.

If anyone follows music charts, like I do, you'll notice a lot of the times the most popular songs in radio airplay aren't necessarily the same songs that people are downloading on their owns to comprise the digital download charts.

How do guys get exposed to non-North American artists if you're living in North America?

You could try researching the music charts from other countries to see what's big worldwide. I frequent the UK a lot, but I also keep up with the UK music charts, and from there, I'll see what's popular and download or YouTube it to see whether or not I like it.

There's also a variety of music forums out there with download sections with artists from all around the world. I believe I've sen Chris B on a few of them I frequent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M71VrEBuFA

Take notes Britney. This is how you do a good music video.

And apparently The Fame Monster's been delayed and is only gonna include Lady G's new music.

Originally, the album was intended to be a two-disc re-release of The Fame, but Gaga told MTV on November 12, 2009 that the album is to be a standalone extended play/second studio album. Along with this EP, Gaga also announced the release of The Fame Monster Deluxe Edition, also being released on November 18, 2009 and the Super Deluxe Fame Monster Pack, which will be released on December 15, 2009. The pack will provide an assortment of products from Gaga's production collaborative Haus of Gaga and even included a lock of hair of one of her many wigs.

Source: Wikipedia

Bad Romance fashion credits, including the polar bear faux coat:

http://nicolaformichetti.blogspot.com/2009/11/lady-gaga-bad-romance-fashion-credits.html

Well there was a screw up and ALL copies of the album (at least in N America) both the one disc EP and the two disc edition with The Fame shipped with the censored disc--which for some reason even censors "bitch" in Bad Romance (I thought bitch had slipped into "ok" vocabulary--soaps have no probs with it). VERY annoying. Cherry Tree Records or whoever says they will remedy this but I doubt that means senseing out the corrected actual disc to people who bought it already. (It's funny for this to happen with Gaga of all people)

Impenetrable art bollocks?! :lol: Loving it!

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Shady lady: The truth about pop's Lady Gaga</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">She’s loud, brash, trashy and sexually ambiguous, but this shameless self-publicist claims to be traditional at heart</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma"> Lynn Barber</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><font face="Georgia">Lady Gaga is only 70 minutes late, which I suppose (sigh) is quite good by pop-star standards. This gives me ample time to case the pavements round the May Fair hotel for the packs of paparazzi who are supposed to follow her everywhere she goes — but there are disappointingly none. Her young English PR, Adrian, tells me that she is busy putting on her make-up, to which I respond rather forcefully that she really need not bother because I won’t notice whether she’s wearing 10 layers of slap or none. But according to Adrian, she won’t ever leave her room without full make-up. He takes me up to the penthouse suite where the interview will take place. All very Kelly Hoppen, black-and-gold upholstery, lacquer tables, buddhas, white orchids, bamboo, the usual. “Have a look at the bathroom!” Adrian says excitedly. It has a freestanding granite tub exactly like a sarcophagus. “And the master bedroom!” Circular white bed, ginormous flatscreen, more white orchids. Yes, the decor is impressive, but the waiting is long.

Eventually she appears, a frail little body tottering along on absurdly high platform heels, in fishnet tights, a rather skewwhiff Marilyn Monroe wig, and a short, black silk wrap, which keeps falling open to reveal her somewhat undernourished breasts. I preferred the photos of her at Glastonbury with flames shooting out of her bra. Her skin is pale, almost milk-white, but she has thick black hairs on her arms and a hodgepodge of tattoos (a ban-the-bomb sign, some lines of poetry), which spoils the porcelain effect. But she is very polite. She takes her sunglasses off as soon as we start talking, revealing lovely, big hazel eyes, and — best of all — produces two ashtrays, some cigs and a lighter, and tells me that, though she doesn’t smoke on performance days, she can today.

If you google Lady Gaga the first thing you see is a related search asking “Is Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite?” Naturally this question has been weighing on my mind and I have spent an unseemly amount of time studying close-ups of her crotch on YouTube. Jonathan Ross raised the question when she came on his show and received the immortal reply “I do have a really big donkey dick,” which certainly shut him up. Her early career seems to have been dogged by rumours that she was a man in drag, and Christina Aguilera said dismissively: “I don’t know if it is a man or a woman.” But why should she be a man, or even a hermaphrodite? She does have a deep voice but she is quite clearly a woman. The whole hermaphrodite story has the feel of a rather desperate publicity ploy.

One of the problems with — and for — Lady Gaga is that the music industry and publicity machine don’t quite know what to make of her. She writes these catchy, feel-good electro-pop tunes that go down a storm in clubs, but then talks a load of impenetrable art bollocks in interviews. Her heroes are the utterly predictable Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Madonna, Grace Jones, and of course she claims to be a “performance artist” rather than a singer. Don’t they all? She complains that just because she is blonde, people treat her like an airhead, but she has to dye her hair, she explains, because otherwise she gets mistaken for Amy Winehouse, and I can see that — yes — with her long face and big schnozz there is a distinct resemblance.

She is a 23-year-old New York singer-songwriter, née Stefani Joanne Germanotta, daughter of an Italian-American internet entrepreneur. She went to the same Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Manhattan as Paris and Nicky Hilton (though she didn’t know them), and says she got “an incredible education”. She started at the Tisch School of the Arts at 17 but dropped out after a year when her singing career took off. She began singing at open-mic nights from when she was 14 — her mother accompanied her — and was contracted to write songs for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls by the time she was 20. Eventually she was signed by Interscope and released her first album, The Fame, in 2007. It has sold 4m copies worldwide and spawned two No 1 singles — Just Dance and Poker Face.

Now it is being re-released with eight new tracks (including a duet with Beyoncé) as a two-disc set called The Fame Monster. She is currently on a tour called the Monster Ball, and coming to the UK in February and March, playing the O2 Arena on February 26 and 27. Whether or not she will prove to be “the next Madonna”, as frequently promised, she is more than happy with the idea: “I love and appreciate Madonna comparisons. I know her and I think she’s wonderful. And I love pop music done the right way.” Her ambitions are actually limitless: “I don’t wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music.”

She is here in London to work on the visuals for her new show with the photographer Nick Knight and is wildly excited. “I love Nick Knight’s work, I’m such a fan — he’s like God. I was in America, shooting another video, and the whole Haus of Gaga [her retinue] was, like, sitting round talking about video, and I was saying I hate just hiring these hack photographers — it’s meaningless. So they said, ‘Who do you want?’

I said, ‘Well, Nick Knight is God.’ And they all go, ‘Yes, Nick Knight is God. Why don’t we just give God a call?’ So we called him and he was up for it — he knew my work and liked it, or I hope he liked it. I don’t know much about the enigma of Nick Knight, but I know I love his work.”

“What are visuals?” I ask casually, and then regret it as she spends the next half-hour showing me designs for sets and costumes on her manager’s computer. Every time she hits the wrong button, we revert to a screensaver of the manager’s dog. Gaga insists on explaining the concept of her show, which is on the wildly original theme of evolution. “It’s part pop show, part performance art, part fashion installation. It came about because as an artist, as a writer, as a woman, I feel I’ve evolved so much.”

So far so predictable, but then she goes on: “My evolution is from the beginning of time, so I start as a cell [she shows me a costume like a geodesic dome], and then I become a vertebrate, and then I become a full animal, and there’s the birth of the economy, and trade and war, and then it’s the Apocalypse. Because we as a society are taught politically and religiously that the Apocalypse is coming, it’s on its way. But what I’m saying with my show is, ‘We’re there right now: this is the Apocalypse.’ The fact that we’re surrounded by cement and we’ve already killed everything means the Apocalypse has happened.

So the idea for me is to give a sense of repose and solace to my fans, that we’re here, we did it already, and now it’s about accepting where we are and looking more joyfully into the future. And then the Apocalypse is over and the stage becomes very minimal and all that’s left is me with a piano, in the middle of the destruction.”

Hope that’s clear. I’m not absolutely sure I followed the plot, but I enjoyed the costumes — especially one that seemed simultaneously to convey both Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. She says she would have liked the set to be even more ambitious, but everyone kept reminding her that they only had 80 men to erect it. “Like, I tell everybody about my dreams, and they say, ‘Gaga, we love it, but how the f*** are we going to build it?’ ” Moreover, the whole show has been put together at speed, because she was meant to be touring with Kanye West, but that tour was cancelled so she had to organise her own show very quickly — her band and dancers are currently rehearsing in New York, while she commutes between them and Nick Knight.

“I have resigned myself to this ridiculous schedule,” she says grandly, “because I feel that it is my destiny to provide for my fans.”

Her life, she says in every interview, is dedicated to her fans. She is married to her work, she has no time for any personal distractions. She will take Christmas Day off — and spend it with her parents — but otherwise she works nonstop. When I ask where she lives, she says flatly: “The May Fair hotel.” But she must have a home somewhere? “My home is onstage.” Where does she keep her things? “I have storage.” Not even an apartment? “No. I don’t care about those things. I tell my fans this little poem I wrote:

For every minute of the day,

The truth is that I’m dead,

Until I’m here onstage with you —

Then I’m alive instead.”

That’s kind of sad, surely? Can’t she ever do normal things? Walk in the park, go to galleries? No, she says, because of paparazzi, though it’s better in New York than here. “I find that when I don’t think about it, it goes better. When I’m worried about not having a normal evening, it’s not normal, but if I allow myself to just go out with some friends and have a drink, it’s okay. I had a great Hallowe’en in New York because I was with lots of friends and nobody noticed me.”

She has no time to meet, or even think about, boyfriends. She had one a few years ago, a heavy-metal drummer, but she has not had one since he left her. “I don’t know enough men and I’m quite isolated. I have basically no friends in the music industry. I’ve stayed away from that life. I don’t go out with celebs, I don’t go to many award shows. I’m sort of in a purgatory right now, and that’s what the album’s about. But to be honest I’m not obsessed with that portion of my life just yet. I’m 23, I’ve got time?”

A line on Poker Face — “I’m bluffin with my muffin”— has been interpreted to mean she is bisexual, but she says she’s never been in love with a girl. And she hopes she’ll marry eventually: ‘I’m a very traditional person in that my mother and father never got divorced and I had a lovely family growing up, so I believe that is in the cards for me for sure, but at this moment my destiny is to be a storyteller.”

She says the habit of working hard comes from her parents. “They both came from lower-class families, so we’ve worked for everything — my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father. I had jobs when I was 16, I had tons of jobs when I dropped out of school, I come from this hustling background so for me it was just normal to do it this way.” Did they talk about money much at home? “No. The one time we talk about money is when my dad’s screaming at me on the phone to save, whereas I want to spend everything on my show. Because I don’t really care about money. I don’t care about having a big fancy car, or going to fancy parties. But this album is about being in the midst of the hustle, grinding for the dreams, and now that the dream is on my finger, I’m a bit more relaxed.”

Whereas at school she felt like a freak. She had jet-black hair when all the other girls were blonde, and “I was kind of darker, theatre-obsessed, always doing music, whereas other girls were kind of having a nice time and enjoying their high-school years. But I was in the grind already, and never really fitted in. I’d see, say, a photo of Boy George and go, ‘I feel like that.’” She had a weird habit, in the evenings, of locking herself in the bathroom with a book of film-star photos and trying to copy their look. When her mother came home she would say: “I did Judy [Garland] today, Mom.” Or Marilyn. And her mother would say: “You look great, but now you should wash your face.”

Her parents never stifled her. When, at four, she started playing her grandmother’s piano, they sent her to piano lessons. When she announced, aged 14, that she wanted to perform in clubs, her mother accompanied her. “She’d say to the manager, ‘Listen, I know she’s too young to be in here, and I’m too old to be in here, but she’s incredibly talented and she’s a singer-songwriter and can she sign up on your open-mic list?’ And we just sat and waited round for them to call my name.” At the beginning she was more of a folk singer — “I was vomiting out emotions, but I didn’t want music to be therapy” — so then she got into pop, and, like Madonna, first made a name for herself in New York’s gay clubs.

When she left school, she got quite heavily into drugs. She says she’s glad she did all that so young, “Because now I’m done with it. But at the time it was like self-discovery and a way for me to feel good about myself. But I don’t want my fans to think that way, I want them to listen to my music. That’s kind of what the Monster Ball is all about — for those who feel like a freak inside, come to my show. I know just how you feel because I used to feel it even more, and I want them to come dressed up and wearing whatever they really want to wear, and coming with their boyfriends and girlfriends and making out and hugging and screaming and crying and it’s like this exorcism. It’s almost like replacement for all the things I did wrong — I just want to give to my fans the music that will be the escape for them.”

Last month she took a rare week off because her father was having heart surgery. “I didn’t want to work, I didn’t care about anything except my father. It was an aortic-valve transplant, but it was really late in the game. He was supposed to have surgery years ago and then he just didn’t, and he was resigned that he wasn’t going to have it, he kept saying, ‘But I feel fine.’ But then all of a sudden he didn’t feel so good and I dropped everything I was doing and went home and just stood over him and said, ‘You. Do. It. Now.’”

She says the theme of death pervades her new album because she’s been worrying about her father for so long. “I wrote this song, Speechless, about the phone calls he would make when I was on the road, and I never knew what to say because I was so sad, and so angry, because I thought he was resigned to dying. So the song is about the things we never say. And is it harder to say these hurtful things, or is it better to say them with the possibility that it could change a life?

It’s very loving in one sense, but in another sense it’s quite ruthless. I think my favourite lines on the whole album are —

And I know that it’s complicated

But I’m a loser in love

So baby, raise a glass to mend

All the broken hearts

Of all my wrecked-up friends.

“So I’m writing about my dad, but not only from my perspective, from the perspective of my mother, and women and men all over the world whose hearts are broken for whatever reason. For me, the whole album lives in that lyric.”

Is she a Daddy’s girl? “Right now I am.” Perhaps that’s why she finds it hard to form relationships — because no man can compete?

“Oh, now you’re trying to analyse me!” she laughs, and shakes her head.

Her closest friends, possibly her only friends, are the seven or so creative assistants who make up the Haus of Gaga. “They’re all young kids who dropped out of school, and most of them were with me from the beginning. Everyone around me knew what I wanted to do, but nobody thought it would become as big as it has become, or as big as they tell me it’s become.

I think we all wondered about the commercial success, based on what I am really trying to do. And for the record company it was a stressful beginning because the music was so pop and I think they didn’t quite see the medicine — the music is the sugar and they couldn’t see the medicine inside it.”

They thought she was just a simple airhead pop singer? “Exactly. Right. But I guess it’s because at this point we don’t expect much of blonde pop singers. And when I came out it was, ‘Oh, she’s attention-seeking!’ Or, ‘She’s trying too hard’, or ‘She wants to be noticed’, whereas the very nature of performance art is that it wants to be noticed, so everyone’s kind of missing the point. But now I actually feel that I’m in a space where they’re not missing the point, because I’ve never let up and I’ve never sold out. There is never a moment that you see me that I’m not working towards something creatively. For me, it’s very simple: I’m not going to allow you to portray me in a way that is your idea of what you think I am. I know who I am and — praise the Lord! — I’m a real artist. Why is this a bad thing? But now I have a lot of fans and they’re spreading the book of Gaga around the world.”</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6940885.ece</font></b></span></p>

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Why we are gaga for Lady Gaga</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">As the Monster Ball tour heads our way, we get to the bottom (and flame-throwing top) of the Madonna of the 21st century</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Caitlin Moran</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><font face="Georgia">Friday at the Glastonbury Festival, 2009, 6.30pm. It is not, let’s be clear, a glamorous time or place. The field is a skidpan of flattened grass and crushed plastic. The weather is lukewarm. The sky is chrome-coloured. It’s fair to say that no one is really expecting the best Glastonbury performance of a decade to go off right now.

Lady Gaga might have already clocked up two No 1 singles — Just Dance and Poker Face — but American girls with No 1 pop singles count for very little at a rock festival in the middle of Somerset. It’s usually your sweaty guitar icons — Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead — who galvanise a crowd. Or a stall selling particularly good pies.

But as Gaga arrives on stage, preceded by a storm front of dry ice and dancers in black, studded PVC kilts, the crowd begins the chant: “Gaga! Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!”

“I am Lady Gaga!” her voice booms from behind a wall of glitterball riot shields. “And you deserve — the future!”

It’s quite a statement. But then, in the event, it’s quite an act. Over the next 40 minutes Lady Gaga handles five costume changes, ten backing dancers, an admission of bisexuality, two No 1 singles and a come-on — “Do you fancy me, Glastonbury? Because I fancy you” — to an entire festival, all conducted with an attitude pitched somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and a Valkyrie. At one point in the set, arching back like a ballerina, Gaga triggers some manner of “tit pyrotechnics” button and shoots fireworks out of her breasts.

Later she performs a bluesy version of Poker Face while standing on one leg, in 5in heels, playing the high notes with her foot and, later on, her face. Despite this uncompromising position it sounds really, really beautiful. Gaga has been playing the piano since she was 4. It shows.

During the set, it should be noted, the audience practically doubles in size, with people pouring off the hillsides and down into the arena. When she finally leaves the stage the roar is tremendous.

In the18 years I’ve been going to the festival I have never seen an act arrive there so magnificently or so confidently impose its own agenda — sex, neurosis, fetish, heels, clubbing, fashion — on such an ostensibly unpromising setting. Just to remind you — there is a field of cows some 800 yards to our right. The principal exports of this location are hay and cheese. And yet Gaga is making Glastonbury feel like a club in New York at 3am. You can practically hear the sirens outside and taste the amyl nitrate. I start to worry about the possibility of getting a cab back over the bridge, to Brooklyn.

When the Glastonbury promoters booked Gaga four months earlier she would just have been some up-and-coming, hotly tipped thing on the New York gay scene. By the end of the year, Gaga had sold more than 8 million albums, 35 million singles, been nominated for six Grammys and three Brits and been the first artist to have four No 1 singles taken off her debut album. At her New Year Party in Miami tables sold for $20,000 (£12,000) a pop. She’s been compared to Madonna so many times that she and Madonna ended up doing a skit together on Saturday Night Live: Gaga’s opening line was “Madonna? I’m totally hotter than you.” Madonna has said: “I see myself in her.”

By last week, Gaga had made it to that bastion of Middle America, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and spent her time cheerfully explaining the kind of arguments she has with her creative team: “If I want to [pretend to] bleed to death on national television, I will.”

Of course, this is pop music: who can say how it will all ultimately pan out? This time next year Gaga could have gone nuts, shaved off all her hair and be attacking a car with a furled umbrella, like Britney Spears. But as things stand The Wall Street Journal nailed it when it said: “Gaga ... really understands spectacle, fashion, shock, choreography — all the things Madonna and Michael Jackson were masters of in the 1980s.”

“I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but I’ve made it my goal to revolutionise pop music,” she said, when asked about her plans. When Simon Cowell was asked what he’s looking for this year, he said, simply: “The next Lady Gaga.”

Of course, the irony is that the next Lady Gaga would eat Cowell for breakfast and then cough up his gorilla flat-top like a hairball. When the current Gaga tour reaches the UK next month I am very much hoping that this event will be part of the show.

Do you know why I love Lady Gaga? That is aside from that, fairly regularly during 2009, I would find myself endangering the goodwill of my osteopath by vaulting on to the dancefloor every time I heard one of her songs? (There are, after all, few greater clarion-calls to woozily busting some moves than a woman who looks like a transvestite singing, “I love this record, baby/ But I can’t see straight any more/ Just dance,” over a cavalcade of glam-rock synths.)

It’s because in the 21st century what women need — second only to some watertight equal-pay legislation and, possibly, slightly wider parking spaces — is other women who are involved in popular culture but don’t give a toss what anyone else thinks of them. I don’t mean the faux-attitude of, say, the Pussycat Dolls or Fearne Cotton, who manifestly do care what people think, what with their carefully shot publicity material, alluring, non-scary outfits and auras of constantly available, non-threatening, mainstream sexuality. These women are little more liberated than cigarette girls in 1950s nightclubs.

No. I mean women who are right out there, doing what the hell they want, and who would clearly greet any attempt to criticise their appearance or attitude with wildly disbelieving laughter. Women who are unafraid to express aspects of themselves that seem alarming, unpalatable, uncontrollable or just plain horsescaringly bizarre. We need more rolemodels such as this. After all, it’s hard to oppress a generation of women who, under the influences of their new heroes, are intent on dressing like hermaphrodite robots with fireworks coming out of their breasts.

Gaga is that very best of things: a selfinvented creature. Consider what she actually is: diminutive, dark-haired Italian-American Stefani Germanotta, born into one of the poshest bits of New York. For a while, her schoolmate was the heiress Paris Hilton.

“I felt like a freak,” she said. “Everyone was blonde. I was dark and theatreobsessed. I remember seeing a picture of Boy George and thinking: ‘I feel like that’.”

By the the time she was 14 Gaga was auditioning for residencies in nightclubs, accompanied by her mother. “My parents were supportive of everything I did.”

Dropping out of school at 17, she spent the next five years immersing herself in some manner of high-school diploma in the counter-culture: deejaying in gay clubs and working as a go-go dancer (“I stripped in black leather to Guns N’ Roses”). Her heroes were David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Freddie Mercury, Madonna. She got a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Artist tattoed up her arm: “Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

Having picked up the nickname Lady Gaga from her love of Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, by the time she came to the attention of record company talent scouts her influences had her dismissed as “too theatre”. But when she auditioned for plays, casting directors found her “too pop”. Obviously that was the entire point, but Gaga was limited to writing album tracks for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls until Just Dance, written when Gaga was 21 in “ten minutes” as a “happy song”. She made her own costume for the video. It included a bra covered with tiny mirrors, to look like a glitterball.

The song was No 1 around the world by the time she was 22. By the age of 23 Gaga was making videos such as the one for Bad Romance, in which she hatches out of a white plastic egg, gets waterboarded by supermodels, has her pupils dilate to take up half her face and wears a cape made of a living polar bear. Meanwhile the song pounds away with a nagging euphoria, like Erasure trying to convince Depeche Mode to come out for a night on the beers.

The video ends, as Wikipedia puts it in one of my favourite entries, “with Gaga lying beside a smouldering skeleton on top of a destroyed bed. She smokes a cigarette, while her pyrotechnic bra activates.”

Gaga now operates within her own collective, the Haus of Gaga. They are into design, fashion, construction and production. So when Gaga has the idea — as she did for her appearance on The X Factor — of performing in a 14ft-long bathtub, then playing a solo on a piano hidden in a basin, it can be turned around in 48 hours.

Two days after The X Factor Gaga performed in front of the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance, sitting at a 16ft-high piano with spindly, etiolated legs, inspired by Dalí’s spider-legged elephants in Space Elephant. Yeeeeah. Essentially, she travels with a pop version of the A-Team, able to burst out of any shed in a hastily constructed disco tank, firing remixes and headdresses shaped like the Pompidou Centre at will. To put all this into perspective, when Madonna was 23 she was still working in Dunkin’ Donuts in New York.

As soon as Just Dance went to No 1, in January 2009, Gaga began a notable second-string career of “being an incident”. She has that admirably retro notion that a pop star should look like something that has just escaped from some manner of space zoo and is stalking the streets, looking for humans to mate with and/or eat.

Monday would have her papped on the pavement dressed in a flesh-coloured leotard, tights and with a 2ft-wide bow made of hair balanced on her head. On Tuesday she would be tottering to the shops in 5in heels and a dress made out of 50 Kermit heads as a protest against fur, “which I hate”. Wednesday, and she’d be out at an awards ceremony in a red lace veil that covered her entire face, looking like someone who’d decided, despite all the evidence, to invent a “sexy Friday night burqa”.

She cultivated a “pet” teacup and saucer, flowered and bone-china, and took them to nightclubs with her, as well as for her appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. If Ross was thrown by the teacup — which he was — he was even more thrown by her explanation of how, when she worked as a stripper, she kept a tiny fog machine in her handbag, “so I could fog myself”.

At the same time a rumour went around that Gaga was, in fact, either a drag-queen or an hermaphrodite, all fuelled by her pop rival Christina Aguilera’s bitchy comment: “Lady Gaga? I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.” Subsequently the British and American tabloids periodically play a game called “Spot Lady Gaga’s Putative Penis”, in which blurry shots of her on stage in short skirts appear with a huge circle around the crotch and headlines reading “Lady Gaga????”

Even this week, Barbara Walters, the grande dame of TV interrogation, felt she needed to asked Gaga if she was male or female. Gaga, bless her, graciously acknowledged the rumours but refused to confirm her sex: possibly under the lifelong influence of the lyrics to David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel (“You’ve got the world in a whirl/ Cos they’re not sure if you’re a boy or a girl”).

“Lady Gaga, I have to say you surprise me,” Walters concluded in her Katharine-Hepburn-of-chat manner. “I didn’t expect to meet such a serious, articulate young woman. You’re not at all what I expected. You’re much, much more.”

Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour begins at the MEN Arena, Manchester, on Feb 18

</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7006625.ece</font></b></span></p>

I am so pissed I missed her in New York a few days ago....

Interesting she's apparently redoing her whole show for Europe. Anyway you should be pissed--it was a spectacular concert (especially considering tickets were 1/5 of what Madonna cost LOL)

Lady Gaga's Lessons for the Music Business

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029621644867154.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

I bet she'll be a flash in the pan, everything about her seems so forced and calculated.

She apparently comes from a very wealthy Italian-American family, I recently saw some pics of her with her high school friends all dolled up going to her high school prom. So much for "not fitting in" and "always dressing different" and "being the total misfit" crap she likes to spew in interview after interview.

There's no real message or humour to anything she does, and I've yet to see what she's doing that's so "unique."

There's no real message or humour to anything she does, and I've yet to see what she's doing that's so "unique."

Have you seen her performances? They are and amazing - the costumes, the sets...like the VMA set, or when she's on this huge ass/tall piano at some British TV award, the AMA's when she's smashing the liquor bottles on the piano while continuing to play on it. And those are the only ones I've seen. I really appreciate all the effort she gives in her performaces. She's just not on a stage singing....She puts on a show and a damn good one.

Interesting she's apparently redoing her whole show for Europe.

When she was making all the talk show/tv shows rounds, she did so many different "Bad Romance" routines. She loves to do something new each time! I wish I had gone to see her in concert.

Have you seen her performances? They are and amazing - the costumes, the sets...like the VMA set, or when she's on this huge ass/tall piano at some British TV award, the AMA's when she's smashing the liquor bottles on the piano while continuing to play on it. And those are the only ones I've seen. I really appreciate all the effort she gives in her performaces. She's just not on a stage singing....She puts on a show and a damn good one.

Oh, her presentation and performances are good, but talking strictly about the music, the stuff she does has been done a million times and perfected by a variety of artists who aren't getting any mainstream exposure. I hate when people act as if her music is anything new or daring, because it's not.

There's something I find very contrived about trying too hard to be be "different" and I think it definitely shows with her. I end up more on the rolling my eyes side than on the impressed side. But I've always been too critical when it comes to things.

And I don't get all the "new Madonna" comparisons. Madonna had a lot of humour and defined messages at her peak, even if she did take existing underground trends and package them for the mainstream (which I guess GaGa is doing these days). However, I find GaGa to take herself and her "art" a little too seriously, when she knows her music isn't anything new. But that's just my impression.