Lady Gaga
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. Known for her image reinventions and versatility across the entertainment industry, she is an influential figure in popular music. With estimated sales of 124million records, she is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Publications such as Billboard and Rolling Stone have ranked her among the greatest artists in history.
After signing with Interscope Records in 2007, Gaga achieved global recognition with her debut album, The Fame, and its reissue, The Fame Monster. The project yielded a string of successful singles, including "Just Dance", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance", which made her one of the few artists with at least three Diamond-certified songs in the US. Her second studio album, Born This Way, explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold 1.1 million copies first-week in the US. Its title track became the fastest-selling song on the iTunes Store, with over one million downloads in less than a week. Following her electronic dance music-influenced third album, Artpop, she pursued jazz on the album Cheek to Cheek with Tony Bennett, and delved into soft rock on the album Joanne.
Gaga also ventured into acting, gaining praise for her leading roles in the miniseries American Horror Story: Hotel and the films A Star Is Born and House of Gucci. Her contributions to the A Star Is Born soundtrack, which spawned the chart-topping single "Shallow", made her the first person to win an Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Grammy Award in one year. Gaga returned to her early sound with the pop-oriented albums Chromatica and Mayhem, which respectively included the number-one singles "Rain on Me" and "Die with a Smile". She also continued to explore jazz with Love for Sale, her second and final album with Bennett, and the soundtrack Harlequin.
Gaga has seven number-one albums and six number-one songs on the US Billboard 200 and Hot 100 charts, respectively. She is the only female artist with four singles that each sold at least 10million copies globally and holds the record for the most-attended concert by a woman. The highest-paid female musician in 2011, she has received 14 Grammy Awards, 22 MTV Video Music Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Sports Emmy Award, and a recognition from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Gaga's philanthropy and activism focus on mental health awareness and LGBTQ rights. Her business ventures include vegan cosmetics brand Haus Labs and the non-profit Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people.
Life and career
1986–2004: Early life
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born into an upper-middle-class Catholic family on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in the neighborhood of Lenox Hill, Manhattan, New York City, United States. Both of her parents have Italian ancestry. Her parents are Cynthia Louise, a philanthropist and business executive, and Internet entrepreneur Joseph Germanotta, and she has a younger sister named Natali. Brought up in the neighborhood of Upper West Side, Gaga said in an interview that her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. From age 11, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school. Gaga has described her high-school self as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure". She considered herself a misfit and was mocked for "being either too provocative or too eccentric".Gaga began playing the piano at age four when her mother insisted she become "a cultured young woman". She took piano lessons and practiced through her childhood. The lessons taught Gaga to learn music by ear, which she preferred over reading sheet music. Gaga's parents encouraged her to pursue music and enrolled her in Creative Arts Camp. As a teenager, she played at open mic nights. Gaga played the lead roles of Adelaide in the play Guys and Dolls and Philia in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School. She also studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years. Her screen debut was a background appearance in the 2000 music video for AC/DC's song "Stiff Upper Lip". Gaga auditioned unsuccessfully for New York shows, though did appear in a small background role as a high-school student in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos titled "The Telltale Moozadell". Fan interest in that episode increased when a clip of Gaga's scene surfaced online in 2010. She later said of her inclination towards music:
In 2003, Gaga gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University 's Tisch School of the Arts, and lived in an NYU dorm. She studied music there and improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues, and politics, including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. In 2005, Gaga withdrew from school during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career. That year, she also played an unsuspecting diner customer for MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show.
In a 2014 interview, Gaga discussed being raped at age 19 by her producer, and later undergoing mental and physical therapy for this. She has post-traumatic stress disorder and attributes it to the incident, stating that the trauma had changed her as a person, and would never leave her. She has credited support from doctors, family, and friends with helping her. Gaga later gave additional details about the rape, including that "the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner at my parents' house because I was vomiting and sick. Because I'd been abused. I was locked away in a studio for months."
2005–2007: Career beginnings
In 2005, Gaga recorded two songs with rapper Melle Mel for an audio book accompanying Cricket Casey's children's novel The Portal in the Park. She also formed a band called the SGBand with some friends from NYU. They played gigs around New York and became a fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene. After the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at the Cutting Room in June, talent scout Wendy Starland recommended her to music producer Rob Fusari. Fusari collaborated with Gaga, who traveled daily to New Jersey, helping to develop her songs and compose new material. The producer said they began dating in May 2006, and claimed to have been the first person to call her "Lady Gaga", which was derived from Queen's song "Radio Ga Ga". According to his account, the name was coined when on one occasion he attempted to call her "Radio Ga Ga" via text message, but the spell checker autocorrected "Radio" to "Lady". Their relationship lasted until January 2007.Fusari and Gaga established a company called Team Lovechild, LLC to promote her career. They recorded and produced electropop tracks, sending them to music industry executives. Joshua Sarubin, the head of Artists and repertoire at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and, after approval from Sarubin's boss Antonio "L.A." Reid, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September2006. She was dropped from the label three months later and returned to her family home for Christmas. Gaga began performing at neo-burlesque shows, and said these represented freedom to her. During this time, she met performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped mold her onstage persona. The pair began performing at downtown club venues like the Mercury Lounge, the Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall. Their live performance art piece, known as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue" and billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow", was a tribute to 1970s variety acts. They performed at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival.
Having initially focused on avant-garde electronic dance music, Gaga began to incorporate pop melodies and the glam rock style of David Bowie and Queen into her songs. While Gaga and Starlight were performing, Fusari continued to develop the songs he had created with her, sending them to the producer and record executive Vincent Herbert. In November 2007, Herbert signed Gaga to his label Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records, established that month. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her. Having served as an apprentice songwriter during an internship at Famous Music Publishing, Gaga struck a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing. As a result, she was hired to write songs for Britney Spears, New Kids on the Block, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls. At Interscope, musician Akon was impressed with her singing abilities when she sang a reference vocal for one of his tracks in studio. Akon convinced Jimmy Iovine, chairman and CEO of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, to form a joint deal by having Gaga also sign with his own label KonLive Distribution, making her his "franchise player".
In late 2007, Gaga met with songwriter and producer RedOne. She collaborated with him in the recording studio for a week on her debut album, signing with Cherrytree Records, an Interscope imprint established by producer and songwriter Martin Kierszenbaum; she also wrote four songs with Kierszenbaum. Despite securing a record deal, she said that some radio stations found her music too "racy", "dance-oriented", and "underground" for the mainstream market, to which she replied: "My name is Lady Gaga, I've been on the music scene for years, and I'm telling you, this is what's next."
2008–2010: Breakthrough with ''The Fame'' and ''The Fame Monster''
By 2008, Gaga had relocated to Los Angeles to work extensively with her record label to complete her debut album, The Fame, and to set up her own creative team called the Haus of Gaga, modeled on Andy Warhol's The Factory. The Fame was released on August 19, 2008, and reached number one in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, as well as the top five in Australia and the US. Its first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", reached number one in the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK. The latter was also the world's best-selling single of 2009, with 9.8 million copies sold that year, and spent a record 83 weeks on Billboard magazine's Digital Songs chart. Three other singles, "Eh, Eh ", "LoveGame" and "Paparazzi", were released from the album; the lattermost reached number one in Germany. Remixed versions of the singles from The Fame, except "Eh, Eh ", were included on Hitmixes in August 2009. At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, The Fame and "Poker Face" won Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Recording, respectively.Following her opening act on the Pussycat Dolls' 2009 Doll Domination Tour in Europe and Oceania, Gaga headlined her worldwide The Fame Ball Tour, which ran from March to September 2009. While traveling the globe, she wrote eight songs for The Fame Monster, a reissue of The Fame. Those new songs were also released as a standalone EP on November 18, 2009. Its first single, "Bad Romance", was released one month earlier and went number one in Canada and the UK, and number two in the US, Australia and New Zealand. "Telephone", with Beyoncé, followed as the second single from the EP and became Gaga's fourth UK number one. Its third single was "Alejandro", which reached number one in Finland and attracted controversy when its music video was deemed blasphemous by the Catholic League. Both tracks reached the top five in the US. The video for "Bad Romance" became the most watched on YouTube in April 2010, and that October, Gaga became the first person with more than one billion combined views.
At the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, she won eight awards from 13 nominations, including Video of the Year for "Bad Romance". She was the most nominated artist for a single year, and the first woman to receive two nominations for Video of the Year at the same ceremony. The Fame Monster won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album, and "Bad Romance" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. Rolling Stone featured "Bad Romance" and its music video on their respective lists of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and "100 Greatest Music Videos of All Time" in 2021.
In 2009, Gaga spent a record 150 weeks on the UK Singles Chart and became the most downloaded female act in a year in the US, with 11.1 million downloads sold, earning an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. Worldwide, The Fame and The Fame Monster together have sold more than 15 million copies, and the latter was 2010's second best-selling album. Its success allowed Gaga to start her second worldwide concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, and release The Remix, her final record with Cherrytree Records and among the best-selling remix albums of all time. The Monster Ball Tour ran from November 2009 to May 2011 and grossed $227.4 million, making it the highest-grossing concert tour for a debut headlining artist. Concerts performed at Madison Square Garden in New York City were filmed for an HBO television special, Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden. Gaga also performed songs from her albums at the 2009 Royal Variety Performance, the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, and the 2010 Brit Awards. Before Michael Jackson's death, Gaga was set to take part in his canceled This Is It concert series at the O2 Arena in the UK.
During this era, Gaga ventured into business, collaborating with consumer electronics company Monster Cable Products to create in-ear, jewel-encrusted headphones called Heartbeats by Lady Gaga. She also partnered with Polaroid in January 2010 as their creative director and announced a suite of photo-capture products called Grey Label. Her collaboration with her past record producer and ex-boyfriend Rob Fusari led to a lawsuit against her production team, Mermaid Music LLC. At this time, Gaga was tested borderline positive for lupus but claimed not to be affected by the symptoms and hoped to maintain a healthy lifestyle.