LMFAO's Redfoo Talks Madonna, Mitt Romney

Madonna performs with Redfoo of LMFAO during the Bridgestone Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show.

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Joining Madonna at her Super Bowl halftime show was a dream come true for LMFAO, the dance-pop duo formed by rapper-producer Redfoo (born Stefan Gordy) and his nephew Sky Blue (Skyler Gordy). "If Michael Jackson is our number one, Madonna is the number-two inspiration for everything LMFAO does," Redfoo tells Rolling Stone.

What went through your mind as Madonna was riding on your shoulders?
I don't know how many people were in the stadium, but they didn't exist. All that existed was me and Madonna. In rehearsal, she said, "If you were working out more, you could lift me a little easier." Her biceps were way more cut up than mine. She was like, "Get a jump-rope."

Redfoo also talked about the band's run-in with a presidential candidate.

Sky Blu once got into an altercation with Mitt Romney on a plane. What happened?
It was about how he reclined his seat. Romney was sitting behind him – he didn't know we were LMFAO, and we didn't know he was a governor. They talked it out. It's a sensitive situation, because he's running for president.

The pair blew up last summer with their Number One mega-hit "Party Rock Anthem," the year's second-best-selling single after Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." "Our mission," says Redfoo, "is to make the world a party planet."

This story is excerpted from Rolling Stone issue 1151, available on newsstands and through Rolling Stone All Access on February 17, 2012.

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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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