Author Archive

Lady Gaga was recently announced as the face of Apple’s music social networking application Ping. Check out her welcome video above.

She cut a direct path up to Lady Starlight and put a dollar bill in her underwear. Stefani Germanotta, an NYU dropout celebrating her 20th birthday at her much-older boyfriend’s Lower East Side rock club, St. Jerome’s, was transfixed by this leather-studded hottie shaking her ass in the skimpiest leather thong in history.

Germanotta’s eyes lit up with fascination. Who is this girl?

It was as if Lady Starlight had been transported from a sleezy-hot, mid-1980s David Lee Roth video to this downtown rock club in 2007. But as perfectly as she had the whole pole-dancing, hair-metal video vixen thing down, who Lady Starlight was really channeling was the lurid, swaggering frontman.

“I just loved to dance,” Starlight (born Colleen Martin) tells PopEater. “There was an aggressive thing about what I was doing on stage. I captured Axl Rose and David Lee Roth. I mixed c**k rock frontman with feminine go-go dancing. It just came from within.”

Lady Starlight would serve as Gaga’s DJ, but it was her encyclopedic knowledge of music and fashion subcultures, which came from her countless years as a dedicated scenester, that Gaga found the most useful. Starlight’s been through more incarnations than the Dali Lama, from British psychedelic ’60s mod to NYC club kid (“I was a dead ringer for Amanda Lepore”) to Sunset Strip ’80s sleaze/metal. It also didn’t hurt that she was a master costume designer and makeup artist.

“All the stuff you see Lady Gaga do now — the fire and fog and the elaborate outfits — were things we wanted to do, but we didn’t have any money. We tried to give our outfits as much visual impact as possible for the least amount of cash. That usually involved going to the fabric store and buying mirrors, sequins, fringe and then gluing it on to our underwear.”

“It was really more of my attitude towards art that was influential to her, rather than any specific look or style,” Starlight says. “Do it as big as you can, as loud as you can. Whatever it is. The more shocking the better.”

Whereas Gaga’s parents and classmates had been asking her to tone it down, Starlight encouraged Gaga to push things to the limit. To push them past the limit.

“The people from her upbringing were more conservative. She was finally connected to a group of artists who encouraged her to just go for it. Before that, I don’t think she had found that crew where she could really be herself.”

She also showed her that the one thing a performer must be, above everything else, is committed to the role.

“That’s what makes me stand out, especially to people who are a bit younger than me, like Gaga, that grew up in this alternative culture being a mash-up of things. She saw how specific, focused and disciplined I was to my look and style, and she admired that.”

Lady Gaga talked to New York Magazine about her total commitment to living the heavy metal ethos. “In those days, I’d wake up at noon in my apartment with my boyfriend and his loud Nikki Sixx hair, jeans on the floor, his stinky sneakers. He’d have his T-shirt on, no boxers. Then he would go do the books at St. Jerome’s. I’d spin vinyl of David Bowie and New York Dolls in my kitchen, then write music with Lady Starlight.”

It’s during this time that Lady Starlight became something of an Obi Wan Kenobi to Gaga’s Luke Skywalker, encouraging her to unleash her wild side, to become one with her sexual force.

Which brings us to the final lesson: take off your clothes. “I was the one who told her to take her trousers off because I rarely wore any myself,” says Lady Starlight. “The attitude of that scene was to shock people and make them pay attention. Not just in a sexual way, which often happens. It was more, like, let’s freak people out. It was very basic. Let’s freak people out.”

Was it hard for Lady Gaga, a Catholic girl, to come out on stage with her arse hanging out?

“She was never, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’” says Starlight. “She was down. She was excited. And I was like, ‘More, more, more, more, more!’ She never put on the breaks. We were encouraging each other to go bigger and bigger. More and more outrageous. And it did get more outrageous.”

And the response of the crowd?

“People would just sit there and stare. Sometimes I would think that they hated us. But they would come up to me after the show and say, “Oh, my God. That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

While their burlesque act lasted less than two years, it’s impact on Lady Gaga was immeasurable. She always had the musical chops to be a rock star, but she lacked the laser-focused commitment to the role. Lady Starlight is the reason Lady Gaga is never not Lady Gaga, even when walking through an airport or attending a Yankees game.

“It was a call to arms,” says Starlight, recalling how their burlesque show was about challenging societal norms. “What Lady Gaga was doing was not pop. It really was performance art. We weren’t referencing a certain look or time period. That’s what’s so cool about Gaga. She’s never lost that attitude from those days in the scene.”

So, is Lady Starlight bitter that her friend and creative partner has gone on to unfathomable stardom while she’s still getting by performing her go-go dancing DJ routine, mostly in small clubs? Not at all — Starlight is proud of her young Jedi student. She even designed an outfit for Gaga to wear on her current tour.

Starlight, 34, is performing these days as the opening act for Semi Precious Weapons. Back in their early days, she and Gaga would open for SPW at tiny downtown venues like Pianos and St. Jerome’s.

“It’s a DJ performance with go-go dancing. Everyone will see what made Lady Gaga stop and say, ‘Who is that girl?’ I’m showing the world that now. Every night, I’m retelling the whole New York story.”

Source: PopEater

Remember when Lady Gaga appeared on the cover of V magazine all that time ago? Well, we’re one year on and how things have changed – namely her hair on at least 300 of those 365 days, though we failed to keep an actual count.

To celebrate how Gaga’s grown over the past 12 months, Nicola Formichetti, the singer’s stylist and best friend, has picked his favourite fashion looks from the Lady in the latest issue of V magazine that chart her rise to pop super-star, style icon and avant garde princess.

The new issue’s out tomorrow, September 2nd, but you can head to vmagazine.com to take a sneak peek

-Source: MyFashionLife / V Magazine

Madame Tussauds is reportedly creating a waxwork of Lady GaGa and is allowing fans to suggest what the model will wear.

According to MTV, the figure should be ready by the end of the year in museums around the world.

A spokesperson encouraged “little monsters” to visit NYCwax.com in order to have their say on the waxwork’s clothes.

The representative said: “We’re open to hearing from fans about which looks they want.”

It was previously reported that GaGa’s model would be in every Madame Tussauds but it has since emerged that it will be in “many” of them rather than all.

-Source: DigitalSpy

Lady Gaga will become the first person in history to have a waxwork in all 10 Madame Tussauds museums.

The 24-year-old Poker Face singer will be immortalised in wax 10 times over as the models all go on display at museums across the world at exactly the same time.

The cost of the 10 models reportedly comes to £1million as they recreate her signature look several times over.

A source said: ‘This is definitely one of the most ambitious projects in our history.’

There are Madame Tussauds museums now in ten different countries – Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, Hollywood, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, London, New York, Shanghai and Washington D.C.

She may have exploded into international infamy with her debut record, The Fame, but Lady Gaga never forgot where she came from — which couldn’t have worked out better for her favourite New York band, Semi Precious Weapons, opening act on Gaga’s gargantuan Monster Ball.

“She kicked and screamed and put her foot down until everyone that works with her and for her let us open her tour. And here we are,” says SPW frontman Justin Tranter over the phone from a stop in San Jose, Calif., six months into an insane world arena tour that will keep him and his band on the go until next May.

Formed in New York in 2006 by four stylish music school grads looking to inject a little glamour and filth back into rock ’n’ roll, SPW quickly attracted the devotion of Gaga, then a young singer-songwriter.

“She was a big fan of ours, luckily, thank God,” says Tranter. “Probably one of our first fans we had that wasn’t related to me.”
When Gaga began collaborating with Lady Starlight in what Tranter — an emerging style icon in his own right — describes as “over-the-top, Hairspray sort of disco-ball breaking insanity,” SPW knew they’d found their perfect match and asked the pair to open a show for them.

“[Gaga] became our permanent opener in New York; every time we played, she’d open. And then she moved to L.A. to make the biggest record of the decade,” Tranter says. “The first time [SPW] heard ‘Just Dance,’ we were driving through Minnesota to play a show to like 15 people and we heard it on the radio. We always stayed in touch with her, so it was just kind of really surreal and insane.”

Obviously, when its newly successful longtime admirer hand-plucked SPW from the world of dingy bars and danger vans, taking it to a promised land of stadium seating and climate-controlled tour buses, everything changed, says Tranter. Oh, except the most important thing: “Our show is exactly the same. Whether we’re playing in a bar to 30 people or whether we’re playing in an arena, we do the exact same show.”

The hardworking band’s crazy workload hasn’t lessened since graduating from DIY to Monster Ball — it’s just shifted. “There is still some filth and some glamour and some rock ’n’ roll debauchery,” says Tranter, “[But] both situations are tons of work, just in different ways. The smaller bars, we’re driving ourselves from venue to venue, we’re selling our own merch, we’re making our own merch. But there aren’t 200 kids who want to meet you and have their CD signed.”

There are also the daily on-location concert ticket giveaways, the interviews, the soundchecks, the shows, and the inevitable after-parties, which typically feature DJ slots or live SPW sets, to think about. And as Tranter mentions, each gig is followed by a meet-and-greet where fans can get their copy of SPW’s debut record, You Love You, signed.

SPW’s work won’t stop with the Monster Ball: expect the band’s follow-up record early in 2011, as well as a headlining tour though Canada during its off-time this autumn.

-Source: SeeMagazine

Check out these two alternative Vanity Fair covers, shot by the incredible Nick Knight and styled by Nicola Formichetti. Gaga looks amazing as always! have you purchased your copy of Vanity Fair yet?

Earlier this year, T.I. had jaws dropping when he announced that he’d recorded some 80 songs for his upcoming album King Uncaged, and that at least one of them was a collaboration with Lady Gaga.

“[She's a] phenomenal talent. Extremely proud [to work with her]. She’s definitely that good. She knows what she’s doing. She knows exactly what she wants people to think and say,” Tip said of Gaga. “She does everything that she needs to be done to ensure it happens. I think she’s an entertainer, in all aspects of the word … a classic, all-around entertainer. A global star.”

A few months later, he continued to heap praise on LG, calling her “a phenomenal talent … that transcends through all genres, all races, all religions.”

But while T.I. was clearly enthused about the collaboration, he also stopped short of saying whether or not his song with Gaga would actually end up on Uncaged, joking, “I’m not gonna let no cats out of no bags.” And now, we know the reason why.

In a new interview with Rap-Up.com, TIP revealed that the song would more than likely be re-worked … or scrapped entirely. Why? Gaga insisted that she could make something even better.

“[Gaga] brought it to my knowledge that she would like to top what we already have,” he said. “That being said, I don’t know if that’s going to be a keeper or if that’s going to be one-upped or what not.”

So at the moment, the fate of the collaboration seems to be up in the air. But T.I. doesn’t seem to be all that upset … after all, he was thrilled just to work with the Mother Monster on a track.

“I begged on hands and knees [to work with her], ‘Please!’” he joked. “I worked with the producer RedOne and made it known that I was interested in working with her, and the enthusiasm was shared, and we were able to get it done.”

-Source: MTV