Lady Gaga's roaring retort

Even for a rehearsal, Lady Gaga dresses up. She was preparing to headline the annual gala for the Robin Hood Foundation, a gathering of 4,000 of New York City’s richest people to benefit antipoverty programmes, in a ballroom at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center recently.

Her lipstick was a perfect cupid’s bow, and her eyes, big as headlights, were elaborately lined and lashed. Her fingernails were blood red with little golden studs. She wore a short, angular jacket that barely reached her thighs, olive-green tights and shiny, elaborately laced knee-high boots with towering high heels. It wasn’t the outsize, shoulder-padded outfits she’d be wearing later as she performed, but it was a long way from the warm-up clothes of the dancers around her. By the end of rehearsal, the tights would be ripped from dancing and a fingernail would be gone, knocked off as she pounded a Latin vamp on the piano.

It was less than two weeks after the final show of the Monster Ball, her arena extravaganza that toured the world for two years and ended this year in Cleveland. “I laid in the centre of the stage, and I bawled my eyes out when the curtain went closed,” Lady Gaga said backstage after a rehearsal. “It’s emotional for me as a performer. How many nights have I left my heart on that 8-by-8-foot square on the floor?”

But she wasn’t giving herself any decompression time. Her show at the gala — to be followed by a guest spot as a mentor on “American Idol,” performances in London and endless rounds of media appearances — led to the release of her new album, Born This Way. The album is as catchy and euphorically overblown as the music that made her a sensation. It also adds an additional dimension to her songs: her cherished relationship with a mass audience — fans who call themselves Little Monsters and dress up with gender-bending zeal — to whom she is a goddess, a big sister, a mouthpiece, a counsellor and a cheerleader. “I can be the queen you need me to be,” she sings.

Born This Way follows through on Lady Gaga’s multimillion-selling album, The Fame, released in 2008, which has sold more than four million copies in the United States alone, and the million-selling EP The Fame Monster, released in 2009. Together, they generated seven Top 10 singles and stoked ever larger concert audiences. Lady Gaga, 25, who was born Stefani Germanotta and was still playing small clubs as late as 2007, has become the flashiest and most ubiquitous pop star of the 21st century so far. “I’m a show without an intermission,” she said.

She refreshes her image at Internet speed. David Bowie developed a new guise for each album, Madonna for each single; Lady Gaga seems to have one for every news cycle. The cavalcade of outfits churned out by her Haus of Gaga, to be strutted before ever-attentive cameras, splashes across magazine covers, television, YouTube and social media. There’s always a new Gaga look to praise, mock and, above all, repost. Yet onstage, amid all the artifice of costumes, wigs and dance steps, Lady Gaga keeps one important thing natural: She doesn’t lip-sync. Behind the fashion plate is a diligent music wonk.

Whether she’s wearing vinyl, silk, leather, hair or raw beef — that was the “meat dress” she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, which will be on exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame  — she draws attention to her brash, insistent songs, with their stuttering choruses (“pa-pa-pa-pa-paparazzi”) and booming dance beats. The title track of Born This Way, released in February, reached No 1 and remains in the Top 20 alongside its slightly less commercial sequel, “Judas.”

Unlike much of her competition on the pop charts, Lady Gaga is, by all accounts, a self-guided creation.  While she collaborates with producers, designers and directors, her pop-culture juggernaut is not devised by committees or consultants. “No matter what it is, she is giving the direction,” said Paul Blair aka DJ White Shadow, a co-producer of Born This Way. “She is 100 per cent in charge, 100 per cent of everything.”

Backstage, Lady Gaga sent a Tweet with one of her many thank-yous to fans — she has 10 million Twitter followers —and pored over a laptop display of potential costume designs before eventually sitting down for an interview. She is not shy. In her three years of celebrity, she has simultaneously proclaimed that “every moment of my life is a performance piece” and shrugged off any mystique. She is still, she said, “an Italian New Yorker at heart, and I just want to make music and do this forever because I love it.”
She’s used to parsing questions about art and artifice. “It’s always very strange when people say, ‘Is this the real you?,’ or ‘Is this really who you are? Is this an act?,’” she said. “Born This Way is sort of the answer to all of the questions I’ve been asked for the last three years,” she went on. “This is who I am.”

In ‘Marry the Night’, the first song on the album, churchy organ chords and a dance beat surge as she sings “I’m a warrior queen/Live passionately tonight.”

Lady Gaga stretched out a leg to show the unicorn she had tattooed on her left thigh in September. “The unicorn for me is a mythical creature and magic, and I believe this album in a lot of ways attempts to annihilate the idea that magic is not real. I believe magic is real. I believe fantasy is real. I live halfway between reality and fantasy all the time.”
Her pace is relentless. “No one works like this girl,” said Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, her label. “This is the first artist I’ve ever asked to stop. You really beg her to stop, and she doesn’t stop. She just goes.”

Most hitmakers separate touring and recording; Lady Gaga multitasks. She made Born This Way while on the road, recording songs after belting for more than two hours onstage for the Monster Ball.

Studio Bus, as it’s credited on the album, was an extra tour bus holding a recording studio. Her engineer, Dave Russell, and two producers, Blair and Fernando Garibay, travelled with her for a year. “Basically, after the shows, I would go on the bus, and I would work all night,” she said. “Then we would pull the buses over and then I would get back on my bus and go to sleep.”

“They would argue with me, and say, ‘Gaga, we can’t do your vocals right now,’ with the sound of the bus and the reverberation.” Swearing, she would say, “turn the mike on and let’s do this.” She continued, “I get so inspired and ready to go, and I’m not the kind of person that can hold in my creativity; I always have to just do it right away.”

Lady Gaga wasn’t exactly an overnight sensation, and her early rejection still smarts.
“There were a lot of people that didn’t believe in me,” she said. Before The Fame was released, she had been signed and dropped by Def Jam Records and had worked as a songwriter for Britney Spears and Pussycat Dolls while honing her stage persona — glam-rock merged with dance-music beats and burlesque flamboyance at clubs in New York.

The Fame ignored mid-decade trends, using an unsubtle beat, four-on-the-floor rather than the funk syncopations of hip-hop and R&B. Her lyrics twisted the straightforward come-ons and affirmations of most dance music; they held humour, sleaze, defiance and thoughts about ambition and celebrity. “Something that carries through all my songwriting is this undertone of grit and darkness and melancholy,” she said. “The bitterness is hidden inside of these really soaring, joyful melodies.”

When Lady Gaga started making videos, she was literally offbeat; her choreographer, Laurieann Gibson, explained that she moves on the one and three, not the usual two and four, a quirk that’s now a trademark. Early on, Lady Gaga said, “People would really try to push me around, because the sentiment was always: ‘She can’t possibly be for real. This must be fake.’ And always kind of bossing me around and treating me like some kind of pop tart little Twinkie that just rolled in and has a deal.”

The four-on-the-floor beat had long driven hits in Europe, but American radio stations resisted it. Iovine said it took six months of promotion to get Lady Gaga’s first single, “Just Dance,” on the air; it went on to No 1. “The masses will accept something new,” Iovine said. “It’s the people in between who will fight you.” Lady Gaga has been in the pop charts ever since, her Little Monsters multiplying.

“The music takes on a completely different life once it enters the universe,” she said. “The fans and myself begin to dictate the sentiment around the song, and how it’s going to look and how it’s going to feel and where it’s going to be. It’s wonderful. It’s never finished. Pop culture is my religion, so to say pop culture is your religion you’d better believe your work is never finished, and that art is something that transcends, and it transforms.” The music on Born This Way is inseparable from its arena-tour backdrop; Lady Gaga sings to, about and for the fans. “I can’t imagine writing not on the road, in a way,” she said. “Because of the thrill of the show and their energy. I got so many ideas looking out into the crowd, like: ‘I know what you want to hear’. ” She preaches self-realisation, community and empowerment; in another, with a scatological title, she calls herself a “blond high-heeled feminist.”

By design, she said, her new songs are “even bigger and more grand and more epic and theatrical.” Born This Way is an album of bangers. Every song, give or take an introduction, picks up and roars. “It’s like getting hit with a truck,” Lady Gaga said. “I think the album’s very intimate in my kind of way. I’m an intense female.”

She draws on club beats like trance and techno but never settles for the repetitiveness of much dance music; it’s a funhouse of an album, with sonic jolts and gimmicks that she spent months on.

The album has abundant echoes of the 1980s, not just Madonna, Lady Gaga’s obvious predecessor in many things, but also the heft and piano pounding of ’80s heartland rock. Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band plays saxophone on two songs, and for the rafter-raising power ballad “You and I,” Lady Gaga turned to Mutt Lange, who produced thickly layered tracks for Def Leppard in the 1980s. Lange brought in Brian May, the Queen guitarist whose song “Radio Ga Ga” gave her a name.

“I told him that I wanted him to work me into the ground for my vocals,” Lady Gaga said. While she was on the road, he asked her to record a rough lead vocal for the song. “I had about 30 cigarettes and a couple of glasses of Jameson and just put on a click track and sang my face off, thinking we’d redo the vocals,” she said. Lange loved what she sent.

“I think it’s wonderful to be confident about what you create,” she said. “I think you have to be. I say that with the humbleness of the fans being so wonderful.”

But it’s not the kind of confidence that lets her relax or even slow down. “Every day, in the mirror, on the stage, in interviews, to go to sleep, to finish that chorus, I’m always in the boxing ring,” she said. “But I have a one-two punch: ambition and drive.”