Lady Gaga: New York Doll

Below is an excerpt of an article that originally appeared in RS 1080 from June 11, 2009. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via Rolling Stone Plus, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about Rolling Stone Plus.

For a young woman who's dressed like an alien empress, Lady Gaga is acting strangely human. She's curled up with her ex-model boyfriend, Speedy, on a tour-van seat, looking as cozy as anyone in a sparkly, curve-clutching cat suit with spiked, winglike shoulders could possibly get. "He thinks I'm pretty," Gaga purrs, batting huge false eyelashes as she rests her platinum-blond head on Speedy's shoulder, nearly poking his eye out with a shoulder spike.

As the van cruises along California's 405 freeway, heading from an Irvine amphitheater to a Burbank soundstage, fireworks bloom in the distant sky over Disneyland. Gaga, who's been munching handfuls of kettle corn and sipping from a can of Diet Coke, turns pensive. "What am I doing right now?" she asks, sounding sleepy and uncharacteristically vulnerable. "Who am I?"

With theatrical timing, an interloper chirps an answer from the back seat: "You're the new princess of pop!"

The voice belongs to the gossip blogger Perez Hilton, an early and fervent Gaga supporter. He's been hanging around all day in his leopard-print Adidas T-shirt, offering compliments and toothy smiles. Gaga laughs, shocked at the near-scripted perfection of the moment. "You are," Hilton drawls, flashing the teeth.

Less than an hour ago, in front of 15,000 shrieking teens at the radio concert Wango Tango, Gaga sang a set that included both "Just Dance" and "Poker Face" — the synthed-up, Eighties-flavored dance-pop hits that, along with her art-damaged, Euro-futuristic fashion sense, have made her the defining pop star of 2009: She reigns over a self-created, plasticized aesthetic universe with Madonna-esque assurance — and offsets her oddness with shamelessly ingratiating pop hooks. With its refrain of "Just dance/Gonna be OK" (the narrator is so wasted at the club that she's lost her keys and phone), Gaga's first hit could be heard as a keep-on-pushing anthem or an endorsement of total denial — either way, perfect recession fodder. "Poker Face," in its way, has more layers — it's about Gaga wanting to sleep with a woman while she's dating a guy (hence the line "I'm bluffin' with my muffin"). The two hits have led to a platinum album — an increasingly rare feat — and nearly 10 million digital singles sold, per Nielsen SoundScan.

A few days earlier, the 23-year-old singer played a concert in New York that felt like a coronation: Madonna (with daughter Lourdes in tow) and Cyndi Lauper both turned up. And on tonight's new episode of Saturday Night Live, Justin Timberlake gives his own endorsement, singing loving, dead-on parody versions of both singles. (A week later, Rivers Cuomo will sing part of "Poker Face" at a Weezer show.)

In the face of tween pop's relentless cuteness assault, Gaga — who worships Andy Warhol and Grace Jones, and thanks David Bowie and Madonna for inspiration in her liner notes — is a pop star for misfits and outcasts. She would rather look interesting than pretty. "I don't feel that I look like the other perfect little pop singers," says Gaga, who has a still — unreleased song called "Ugly Sexy." "I think I look new. I think I'm changing what people think is sexy."

In the van, Gaga laughs as she watches for the first time a video for "Butterface," a vicious "Poker Face" parody (sample lyric: "You were thinking that I'm a 10/But my body's like a Barbie/And my face is like a Ken"). In truth, Gaga's attractive, slightly off-kilter features — ethnic nose, prominent front teeth — seem almost infinitely mutable: One day she looks like Debbie Harry, the next, Donatella Versace. But up close, she's always softer, prettier and younger-looking than her ultrastylized photos might suggest.

Gaga is fully Gaga at all times. Onstage or off, she's dressed in her future-shock style, often in clothes she designs with her 23-year-old creative director, Matthew Williams, whom she calls Matty Dada — he's part of the team she has dubbed Haus of Gaga, which she envisions as a modern-day version of Warhol's Factory. She was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, but no one has called her that in years. (Her first producer, Rob Fusari, inspired the nickname — he was struck by some Freddie Mercury-like harmonies she recorded, and started singing Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" to her as a running joke. One day, she texted him her new name, and she never answered to "Stef" again.)

Backstage at the radio show, Gaga strolled around wearing a geometrically patterned vintage Gareth Pugh jacket over a leotard that barely covered her robust but toned bottom. But the price of her no-pants look is eternal vigilance: At all times, her ex-Marine bodyguard and three backup dancers took turns standing behind her — they were guarding her ass against paparazzi. Earlier in the week, she caused a ruckus in a Queens Stop & Shop after showing up in a transparent bodysuit (with only a bra and G-string underneath) to shop for tortelloni. "Why don't you have a fuckin' meet-and-greet in the frozen-foods aisle?" Speedy suggested. She then cooked a meal for Speedy's parents, rear end presumably still showing.

Now, ass firmly encased in cat suit, she's heading to her second gig of the night: a six-song taped performance for Walmart.com that will end sometime after 2 a.m. The next night will bring another radio concert; the day after that, a performance on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show and a photo shoot where her pal Marilyn Manson will turn up; the following day, a taping of Dancing With the Stars and a flight back to New York. There, she'll shoot a M.A.C Cosmetics campaign with Lauper, return to L.A. for another photo shoot, then jet off to New Zealand and Australia for a tour. "Welcome to my life," Gaga says. "They can't say I didn't work for it."

But this life — art, music, fashion, celebrity cameos — is all she ever wanted, even before she dropped out of New York University after her freshman year to pursue music full time. "I don't have the same priorities as other people," she continues softly, glancing warily at Speedy, who's not listening, distracted by his cellphone. She doesn't necessarily want him to hear this part. "I just don't. I like doing this all the time. It's my passion. When I'm not doing a show, I'm writing a song, or I'm on the phone with Dada yapping about a hemline. The truth is, the psychotic woman that I truly am comes out when I'm not working. When I'm not working, I go crazy."

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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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