During the last week of January 2010, Gaga shot the video for “Telephone” with Beyoncé; Jonas Åkerlund, who’d done the “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” videos, also directed this one. The vision: a high-fashion mash-up of American film genres, from women-in-prison-sexploitation to grindhouse to whimsically homicidal set pieces lifted from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Tarantino loaned her the “Pussy Wagon” from that film), and a denouement swiped from Thelma and Louise. The plot: Gaga’s thrown in jail; she gets a call from Beyoncé, who gets her out; the two take off on the open road, making lots of double entendres; they pull into a diner, where Gaga pretends to be a waitress and poisons everyone in the place, except Beyoncé. Then there’s a dance number. She and Beyoncé, wanted by the police, engage in a high-speed chase before probably driving off a cliff.
With that video, Gaga made Beyoncé seem cooler than even marriage to Jay-Z could; here’s one of the most wholesome, clean-living R&B superstars on the planet playing lover to Gaga’s jailbird and a homicidal maniac herself. As importantly, Gaga is seen wearing a pair of sunglasses built out of smoking cigarettes. The glasses now have their own Facebook page.
Gaga also continued to make fun of the hermaphrodite rumors that had never quite died down, having one prison guard say to another, after stripping Gaga down and throwing her in a cell, “I told you she didn’t have a dick.”
“It’s her vision, pretty much,” says a “Telephone” extra named Alektra Blue, who works as a porn star; Åkerlund put out a casting call through the adult-entertainment company Wicked Pictures. “She was basically co-directing it. She makes her own rules; she’s very fierce. She was saying, ‘OK, I want to do this, and I want to get this shot, and can we do it over again? Because I don’t feel like I nailed it.’ She was very adamant [about] getting the right shots.”
“The way people were talking,” says porn star Jessica Drake, another prison-scene extra, “[the concept] was largely hers, but Jonas was structuring it for her.” Like Blue, Drake was struck by Gaga’s attention to detail, staying on-set to monitor every shot, every setup, to make her opinions heard.
She has always been about control: During a 2008 interview with a journalist who wishes to remain unnamed, she gave direction, too: “I don’t want to [come across] as too quirky or smart,” Gaga said. It was OK to mention that “I’ve done a lot, [but] I don’t want, ‘prodigy at [age] seven.’ ”
“On the set,” says Drake, “she had the most in control—I don’t want to say commanding. . . .” She pauses. “She was very much a commanding presence, without being demanding or diva-like. She put every ounce of herself into making that video. She’ll do something again and again and again. She gives until it hurts.”
Alektra recalls Gaga asking for another take for a close-up in which she forgot to wear a chunky ring—a key piece that would show up later, when she opens it up and dumps the poison powder inside into diner food. (It’s a reference to the scene in “Bad Romance” in which she kills her boyfriend the same way.)
“She takes her art very seriously,” says Alektra, adding that she was bummed when Gaga, due to unforeseen time constraints, couldn’t take part in the naked jailhouse shower scene. She’s still not over it: “I was so excited,” she says.
With “Telephone,” Lady Gaga produced something profoundly silly yet deeply resonant. The video itself prompted debate about the viability of the medium—is there a future for the music video, or is Gaga’s stuff an exception?—and whether the clip, with its mix of sex, murder, and unapologetic product placement, was shrewd or merely salacious.
Blogs and media outlets went crazy trying to divine all the products on display: Miracle Whip, Wonder bread, the Virgin cell phone, a Polaroid camera (she is also the new creative director of a specialty line for the company). The Chanel sunglasses, the HP laptop that also showed up in “Bad Romance,” the Heartbeats by Gaga headphones, the dating website PlentyOfFish.com, the Honey Bun pastry she and Beyoncé share. And, of course, the Diet Coke cans that indelibly doubled as Gaga’s hair curlers, a look she replicated for her walk through the airport in Sydney, Australia, two months later.
According to Adam Kluger, president of the Kluger Agency, who placed the PlentyOfFish site in “Telephone,” product placement “has been going on forever, especially in lyrics. It dates back to the seventh-inning stretch: ‘Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks.’ ” (He founded his agency in 2006, after seeing a spike in the stock of Abercrombie & Fitch after it was prominently featured in the lyrics and video for LFO’s “Summer Girls” and says he now does $60 million a year in business.)
Only Virgin Mobile, PlentyOfFish, and Miracle Whip paid for placement, Kluger says. Polaroid “was a favor,” given that she’s working with them; the Diet Coke curlers, “a personal tribute to someone in her past,” he says. (Her mother used to curl her hair that way in the seventies.)
The Hewlett-Packard and Heartbeats placements were, according to an Ad Age report, “extensions of Gaga’s marketing partnerships.”
“The absolute worst stuff revolves around the Virgin phone,” says Jeff Greenfield, branded entertainment expert at marketing firm 1st Approach. “I don’t think anyone believes Lady Gaga uses a phone that looks like that. And you think about her fan base—they don’t even speak on the phone.” He thinks the deliberate close-up of the product itself pulls the viewer out of the flow of the video, makes them hyperaware that they are being pitched a product. “It really sucks, because the video is called ‘Telephone’ and they could have done [something] really smart.”
Where it worked, and where the brands will see a spike in sales, Greenfield says, was “the scene where she’s making sandwiches with Wonder bread and Miracle Whip. It’s almost like she’s an actor; every shot makes sense. It’s very subtle. The key is to [integrate] the product and make it part of the scene.”
Gaga, of course, put a more high-minded, artistic spin on it: She would later tell Ryan Seacrest that the scene in which she, wearing a see-through latex dress and nipple tape, makes the sandwich with Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip, exists to serve as a “commentary on kind of being overfed communication and advertisements and food in this country.” She told E! Online—in her Madonna-style faux-British accent—that “Telephone” is really about “the idea that America’s full of young people that are inundated with information and technology. . . . [It’s] a commentary on the kind of country that we are.”
Critics didn’t really see it that way. “Gay Christmas,” said EW.com’s Tanner Stransky.
“Last night’s unveiling of the video for ‘Telephone’ was an important event in gay bars and coffeeshops worldwide, one that finally brought together two long-contentious fashionable tribes: fans of Lady Gaga and fans of Beyoncé,” said Interview.com.
Even her porn-star-veteran extras were wowed. “When she walked out of her trailer in the latex dress with the pasties and the thong, my jaw hit the floor,” says porn star Drake. “On camera it actually looks a bit tamer than it did in person.”
The “Telephone” video generated 17 million hits in its first four days online and went to number one around the world as tabloids in America and the UK ran ridiculous headlines and columns that can fairly be reduced to that evergreen of outrage: What about the children?
CNN reported that the clip was banned by MTV for being too explicit, which, noted Gawker, was deeply ironic: “MTV, through years of cultivation of reality programming that infested its schedule so deeply, barely even airs music videos anymore . . . yet still feels the need to issue a ban on one it deems too provocative. Even more ironic is the fact that the network is alienating probably the only artist out there who still actually cares about making a good music video.” (MTV News later reported that the MTV network had not banned the video and in fact had premiered it on Friday, March 12.)
Gaga’s management and label, however, premiered the video on the E! Network the night before, as E! gave them twenty minutes of airtime, an
d, as Troy Carter told Ad Age, aired the video unedited, “as it was intended to be shown.”
“ ‘Telephone’ is a masterpiece,” wrote EW.com’s Stransky. “True, I found myself confused during most of the video. . . . [But] it goes without saying that no one in the past decade has done more for the music video genre than this lady.”
“The ‘Telephone’ clip is a big-budget, pop masterwork from an artist clearly familiar with the discipline,” wrote William Goodman at Spin.com. “[It’s] a Whitman’s sampler of pop nuggets.”
“As Madonna and Michael Jackson were to MTV, Lady Gaga is to YouTube: the killer app,” said New York magazine. “She, more than anyone, has made music videos relevant for the industry again, proving indisputably that they drive up record sales and concert receipts.” Åkerlund, who had retired from directing music videos, agreed to come back for Gaga’s visions. “All of this reminds me of the big days of MTV, when every job you did made an impression,” Åkerlund says. “People would come up to me and say they saw my video. That didn’t happen for years, but now it’s happening again.”
Chapter Eleven
Big in Japan
In Osaka, Japan—where she was completely unknown just two years ago—Lady Gaga is playing to the sold-out Kobe World Kinen Hall arena, which, from the outside, could be mistaken for a very large redbrick elementary school; it sits amid office buildings on a freakishly clean, deathly quiet street. Rock shows in Japan start very early—sometimes six P.M., eight at the very latest—no alcohol is served, and all shows end by ten o’clock. Every single person in the audience stays within their circumscribed foot of space.
The crowd is as disparate as in Europe: middle-aged men and women, teenage boys and girls, little kids. Very few people in Japan speak English, yet when the lights go down and Gaga’s first short film comes up on the white scrim and on the two video screens bookending the stage—here she is, rotating in slow motion, black-and-white, face obscured, the robotic mantra “I’m a free bitch, baby,” echoing through the stadium, over and over—the crowd understands that, and erupts.
The show is, by now, a leaner, tighter production than it was when it kicked off in Manchester, but Gaga has truncated a lot of the dialogue, the “we’re lost on the way to the Monster Ball” stuff. Yet the crowd stays with her, and when she sits down at the piano to do her mid-show balladry, and an American fan yells out “Stefani!” she expertly plays to the crowd, speaking as much with her expressions as her words:
“What? What’d you say?” She widens her eyes, looks around, slightly chagrined, unnerved, eliciting laughter.
“What do you eat?” yells the fan. It’s such a weird exchange it almost seems scripted.
“I eat sushi,” she says, deadpan. A pause before she mentions the national dish: “shabu shabu.” She mimes flipping sushi with her hands; the crowd applauds, stops, is quiet, rapt, waiting to hear what she might say next, even though they can’t quite comprehend it.
The Lady pauses. She turns serious. She is talking about her walk, a few days ago, through Tokyo’s Narita Airport, where she was shot by paparazzi carrying her white Birkin bag (starting price: $6,500). She’d taken a black Magic Marker to it and written a message to her fans in pidgin Japanese. The translation, loosely: “I love small monster. Tokyo love.”
Her eyes well up, her voice trembles. “I brought my favorite pocketbook and I wanted all my Japanese fans to sign it, so I could always have you with me,” she says. “I really love fashion, but I don’t love fashion more than my fans.” She is not being ironic; she believes that this gesture is profound.
In fairness, so does the crowd. The cult of personality is undeniable and not a little shocking, not least because Lady Gaga, as smart and shrewd and witty as she is, seems to buy into it. Toward the end of every show, as she is offstage for her final costume change, her grave, prerecorded voice speaks this seemingly humble but actually self-aggrandizing message. She calls it “The Manifesto of the Little Monster”:
There is something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras so precisely, so intricately and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people, it is their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be perceived as the kingdom. So the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the Kings. They are the Queens. They write the history of the kingdom and I am something of a devoted Jester.
The beginning and the end of that thought are totally contradictory, but as she said upon learning that Elvis Presley had done a song called “Money Honey” first: Whatever. She goes on with another philosophically mangled thought:
It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather, to become, in the future.
It’s funny—and not a little poignant—to think of this sentiment juxtaposed with the Lady Gaga who, one week later, was back in L.A., hanging out at the ridiculously exclusive Soho House, a club so top-heavy with celebrities that Jane Fonda once walked across the room to Madonna during lunch and felt compelled to introduce herself without bothering to remove her sunglasses.
On this Wednesday night at the Soho House, Lady Gaga was just another twenty-four-year-old girl who, as she said to a member of her group that night, was “trying to get my life together,” who was drinking red wine and inhaling sliders and pizza and mac and cheese, making out with her boyfriend, blowing off steam.
She was not, however, fully off duty: “She was wearing a sheer black catsuit,” says the source, “encrusted with, like, a zillion crystals and rhinestones and all of these bracelets and a black thong with, like, chains off it, and eight-inch platform shoes. A big blond bouffant with a veil over it.” And, of course, she was causing a scene, sitting on a couch with her entourage, “frenching Matt the whole time, straddling him. . . . God, it was crazy,” says the source. “But I have to say, work it out. You are the biggest pop star in the world.”
In May, Gaga performed at the Costume Institute Gala at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Chaired by Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour, it’s considered fashion’s version of the Oscars. According to multiple reports, Gaga had a meltdown and refused to come out of her dressing room; it took none other than co-chair Oprah Winfrey to talk her down. Observers read her behavior as uncharacteristically erratic and intractable: She took the stage more than an hour late.
That month had been exceptionally grueling: She was on tour in Europe, but had flown back for a live performance on American Idol; she appeared listless, her voice weak. She did the Met Gala, went to MoMa with her friend, the artist Terence Koh, where she was shot waiting on line to sit with the performance artist Marina Abramovic´. Gaga then flew back to Europe for a week, then back to New York City for twenty-four hours, where she performed at Carnegie Hall for Sting’s Rainforest Benefit. In the midst of all this, she was also writing and recording her second full-length album.
When she’s back in New York, though, she takes every opportunity to be as normal as possible. She’ll dress up, but usually not to extremes (her sister’s June 2010 high-school graduation notwithstanding). “I remember once we went out after working,” says a colleague who asked not to be named. “She’s more toned down, way more street. We went to the old bars and stuff she used to hang out at, to see all these people in her past life. But still always wearing high heels.” She revisited her past life after the Met Gala in May, as well. The next night, she went over to the Royalton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where her friend Lady Starlight now DJs a rock ’n’ roll party in the ski lodge–like lobby every Tuesday. She wore her hair down, red lipstick, a jacket, and a bra. Almost no one recognized her. Then she went down to St. Jerome’s, where Lüc was bartending and hanging out with his new girlfriend. Gaga flirted with him anyway.
The reaction she elicits in Japan on this night in Ap
ril is exceptionally rare: The crowd stays on its feet the entire two hours; they wave glow sticks with abandon; they bob up and down from the knees and pump their right arms in unison. This almost never happens here; the crowd usually sits, polite, silent, immobile.
“It’s amazing, absolutely incredible,” says Tom Daniel, a thirty-five-year-old American who’s lived in Japan for years. “I’ve been to a lot of shows [here], and this is one of the liveliest. I saw Madonna here three or four years ago, and everyone was sitting through the entire concert.” (Madonna hates playing Japan and has famously called the crowds “Eskimos on ice.”)
“They’re responding to a physical sense,” says a twenty-seven-year-old Australian ex-pat named Natasha Cordele, who has shown up tonight in a black business suit, her head wrapped in black lace, a “Bad Romance”–inspired black crown on her head. (She made it after work, in half an hour, spent about $50 on fabric.) Lady Gaga, she says, is so “expressive with her materials” that who she is to the Japanese transcends language.
It’s a phenomenon made all the more compelling by the nation’s struggle with individuality vs. comformity, tradition vs. modernity, with the increasing socioeconomic power of women. The latter, especially, causes existential anxiety, even among young women.
“In the past decade, feminization has made great strides worldwide,” ran an editorial in the Japan Times the same week Lady Gaga was performing. “The situation is far from perfect, but many societies are now making much better use of the talents of the half of the population that happens to be female. One reason Japan is so far behind is that it is cut off from these global trends.”
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