Lady Gaga Launches Youth Empowerment Organization

Lady Gaga apears during a press conference

Mohd Zakir/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Lady Gaga launched the Born This Way Foundation yesterday to support anti-bullying programs and youth empowerment groups. The foundation is being organized by the singer along with her mother, Cynthia Germanotta.

"My mother and I have initiated a passion project," Gaga said in a statement. "Together we hope to establish a standard of bravery and kindness, as well as a community worldwide that protects and nurtures others in the face of bullying and abandonment."

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The Born This Way Foundation has already struck up key alliances with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the California Endowment for its youth empowerment initiatives. The organization will also work with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in its efforts to use the web as a means of promoting positive social change.

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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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