Lady Gaga Ends Deal With Target Over Its Support of Anti-Gay Groups

Marc Piasecki/WireImage

Lady Gaga has reportedly dissolved a deal with Target over the retail chain's political donations to MN Forward, a political action group that supported the anti-gay candidate Tom Emmer in a failed run for governor in Minnesota last year. Emmer had supported a Christian rock organization that advocated violence against gays and supported a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

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Gaga's deal with Target, which included giving the store an exclusive expanded edition of her forthcoming album Born This Way, was contingent upon the big box chain showing support to LGBT charity groups. In a recent interview, Gaga told Billboard that she was not comfortable with the Target partnership from the start, and that she had hoped to use her leverage in this deal to push the company to redeem themselves for having supported MN Forward and other anti-gay groups.

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The details of the broken deal have not yet been made public. Since Target has already given away free MP3s of "Born This Way" with internet pre-orders of the new album, the Target exclusive edition may not be scrapped.

Gaga Dissolves Deal With Target [Advocate]

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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