About Lady Gaga:

Born on 28^th March, 1986 in the city of New York, is an American songwriter and singer. Some of her achievements include five Grammy Awards, four Guinness World Records and 13 MTV Video Music Awards. She has also consecutively appeared in the Billboard magazine for the Artist of the Year and was listed as the most influential person in the world by the Time magazine.

Quick Facts:

• Nick name: Gaga
• Date of birth: 28^th March 1986
• Place of birth: New York, United States
• Origin: United States
• Profession: Singer and Songwriter
• Known for: Her singles “Poker Face” and “Just Dance
• Website: http://www.ladygaga.com/

Childhood and growing up years:

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta commonly recognized by her stage name Lady Gaga was born on 28^th March 1986 in New York and was brought up in the family home which was located in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Lady Gaga is basically an Italian is a descent of a French-Canadian family. She is the daughter of Cynthia and Joseph Germanotta who is an internet entrepreneur. Lady Gaga has one younger sister who was born in the 1992 and was named Natali, who is now a fashion student. She was a girl from a middle-class family in which both the parents worked to run the house and Lady Gaga describes her upbringing as not as from a wealthy background.

Lady Gaga was raised as a Roman Catholic and at the age of 11 she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart which was a private all-girl Roman Catholic school located in the Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As her academic life was concerned, she was a very dedicated, disciplined and studious child, although she did not fit into that school was treated as an eccentric or either provocative by her acquaintances. She was always stuck to one group of friends and liked boys and always stood at the number one position in singing while her high school education days.

Lady Gaga is known to be playing the piano since the age of four and went on to give her first piano ballad when she was 13 years of age and by the time she was fourteen she started performing open mike nights. Her keen passion for making big in the musical career brought her some very important lead roles at a very small age, such as the role of Philia in the film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and also in the film Adelaide. She was also given a very small role of a mischievous classmate in the television drama series of The Sopranos in the year 2001 which was titled as The Telltale Moozadell. She also attended a number of auditions for popular New York shows but they are unsuccessful. After the completion of her high school education from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, with the encouragement from her mother, she applied for the Collaborative Arts project 21?(CAP21), which was a musical theatre training place located in the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Lady Gaga was given early admission at the age of 17 and after this she started living in the New York University Dorm which was situated in the 11^th Street. This prestigious course, helped Gaga sharpened her songwriting skills and now she was able to compose essays and write analytical papers on politics, social issues and also art. She composed a thesis on pop artists like the Damien Hirst and also Spencer Tunick. Such kinds of research projects prepared her for her future career which focuses on sex celebrity, art and music. As part of her performance course at CAP21 she tried her luck by auditioning for an MTV prank reality show which was being filmed and unexpectedly she won the auditions and was given an unsuspecting diner customer role. All these achievements, made her feel more creative when compared to other classmates of her age and this gave her confidence to reach great levels in life. However, in the second semester of her studies, she withdrew from the school so that she could focus more on her musical career on the condition that her father agreed to pay the rent for a year she re-enrolled to Tisch if her musical career is unsuccessful. She accepted the condition left her family for the love of music where she spent her days living in a cheapest apartment and ate cheap food until somebody made the effort to listen to her.

It was towards the end of summer of 2005 that her career began when he settled in a small apartment located in the Rivington Street and recorded a couple of songs along with the grandmaster hip-hop singer Melle Mel for an audio book which was accompanied by a children’s book named The Portal in the Park written by Cricket Casey. At the same time, she also started a band which was known as Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand) along with some of her New York University friends. Calvin Pia took the guitarist position while the bassist was Eli Silverman and drummer Alex Beckham under the booking manager Frank Fredericks in month of September. The band played mixture of songs in bars like the Greenwich Village’s, Mercury Lounge and The Bitter End. At these places it made a small recognition that developed a fan base which caught the eye of the music producer Joe Vulpis who called them to their studio to record a few songs. SGB attained success in the year 2006 when Wendy Starland who was a model and a singer who generally appeared as a talent source suggested to Fusari who was in search of a female singer and she suggested to Fusari Lady Gaga’s name because she had the ability to front as a female singer in a new band. By now SGB was disbanded and Lady Gaga made regular travels to New Jersey in order to work on songs that were written and composed with certain music producers. While working with Fusari, some of Lady Gaga’s vocal harmonies where compared to the great Freddie Mercury who was the lead singer of Queen. It was Fusari who gave Stefani her stage name “Lady Gaga” after her Queen song “Radio Ga Ga”. Although, at the beginning that musical relationship of Lady Gaga and Fusari was unsuccessful, the pair soon established a company which was titled as Team Lovechild and they recorded and produced their first electropop track which was sent to many music industry bosses such as the Joshua Sarubin who is the head of A&R at the Def Jam Recordings who responded positively for the recording and gave credits to Gaga as a unusual and provocative performance. Lady Gaga now signed with the Def Jam in the month of September of 2006 who intended to have an album prepared by nine months. Sadly, she was dropped out of the contract within a period of three months. Lady Gaga was devasted with his incident and she returned to the family home for Christmas in order to obtain solace. After this incident, Gaga became extremely experimental and she started fascinating herself with the emerging neo-burlesque and go-go dancing at bars where she was dressed in little more than a bikini apart from using drugs. Her father did not understand the reason behind Lady Gaga consuming drugs and he did not even look at her daughter for several months. During this time she came in contact with performance artist Lady Starlight who helped her and supported her to mold her on-stage persona. No sooner than their meeting, Lady Gaga and Starlight began performing together the songs she recorded with Fusari and also her SGBand in many downtown clubs such as The Bitter End, Mercury Lounge and also the Rockwood Music Hall. Their live performances were called as “Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue”. The two were also invited to perform at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival which was held in the month of August of that year. There performance received critical fame and received positive reviews from a number of people. Lady Gaga, by now had found her musical genre and she began to incorporate glam rock and pop melodies into her music. While Lady Starlight and Lady Gaga were busy with their performances, side-by-side Fusari was working on the songs that he had made with Lady Gaga and after the completion of the songs, Fusari sent these songs to his close friend who was a producer and a record executive at the Vincent Herbert. He quickly signed Lady Gaga to his label which was known as Streamline Records when it was established in the year 2007. Vincent Herbert is credited for the success of Lady Gaga as it was him who truly discovered the talent of Gaga and helped her in creating a pop history. Later, Lady Gaga also signed a music publishing deal with Song/ATV Music publishing house where she completed her internship while her studying at the Famous Music Publishing. As part of this deal she was recruited to write songs for Britney Spears and also a few other label mates such as the Pussycats Dolls. While her employment with the Interscope, the company for whom she wrote for, a singer and a songwriter Akon recognized her vocal abilities and when Gaga sang one of the vocal references for his tracks in a studio. Akon convinced Interscope Chairman to form a combined deal by having Lady Gaga signed with his own label Kon Live Distribution which made her the franchise player for Akon.

Towards the end of 2007, her earlier management company introduced her to producer and songwriter RedOne and she then produced her first song with RedOne “Boys Boys Boys” which was a smash hit and was inspired by Motley Crue’s “Girls Girls Girls”. Lady Gaga continued her contract with RedOne and after a week recorded her debut album singles entitled “Poker Face”, “Just Dance” and “Love Game” which were made to the chart-topping list. Part from this she also joined the Cherrytree Records which was established by the producer and songwriter of Interscope Martin Kierszenbaum for whom she was doing the work of co-writing for four songs that includes her singles “Christmas Tree” and also “Eh Eh”. Despite a number of secured deals in her hand, Lady Gaga had to admit that she had always been racy, underground and dance-oriented in order to be marketed in the mainstream.

Claim to fame:

In the year Lady Gaga relocated her house to Los Angeles where she worked extensively with her own record label in order to complete her debut album. For this purpose she set-up a creative team for which she modeled on Andy Warhol’s Factory – Haus of Gaga. Her debut album consisted of varied genres from the hand claps and drums of Def Leppard to the metal drums of the urban tracks which were inspired from the 1980’s synthpop and she also incorporated dance music which had clear hooks. “The Fame” was the debut studio album of Lady Gaga which described the exploration of her obsession with fame and also the intricacies of a famous and rich lifestyle. This album was released on August 19^th 2008 and was followed by her lead single “Just dance” which was released four months later. At these times, the radio play was slow and for this purpose Lady Gaga supported the releases of performing at the backwaters of Vietnam and Malta apart from playing a number of small gay clubs situated around the United States. She was titled as the supporting artist on the North America leg of the New Kids on the Block’s reunion concert tour.

Her sleeper hit “Just Dance” hit the success charts in as many as six countries such as Australia, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and also the United States in the year 2009 of January. But it was the Grammy Awards that provoked the success of the album The Fame as it was nominated in a few categories and it the album was receiving positive response by a number of contemporary critics who commented that Lady Gaga had the ability to discover a melodious hook when compared to her vocal abilities of Gwen Stefani. This album was spotted in 106^th position of the Billboard charts and since its release; 12 million copies of the album were sold worldwide. Lady Gaga achieved an unexpected success with the release of “Poker Face” and even this reached the No.1 position in almost all major music markets across the world in the early 2009’s. She was then showered with a number of awards as she received another Grammy Award for her performance in the song “Poker Face” and at the same time “The Fame” which was nominated in the category of Album of the Year also won her a Grammy Award. The same year saw her being the recipient for many other honors including the NTV Video Music Awards and the Billboard magazine gave her the award of being the “Rising Star”. She appeared in the opening act of Pussy cat Dolls Domination tour in the first half of the year 2009 in Oceania and Europe and also was embarked in her own six-months critically acclaimed success worldwide concert tour to mark the success of her album which was named as The Fame Ball Tour and started in the month of March and ended in September in the year of 2009. During this tour, she wrote “The Fame Monster” which comprises of eight songs and was released in the month of November in the year 2009. Every song in this album dealt with the dark side of fame which was the outcome of personal experiences and expressed with the metaphor ’monster’. Its first single which was titled as “Bad Romance” topped the charts in almost 18 countries and reached at the top two positions in New Zealand, United States and also Australia. This made Lady Gaga the first ever artist in the digital world to have three singles that comprises of “Just Dance” and also “Poker Face” to pass the fourth millionth mark in the digital sales while it secured a Grammy Award for the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. This song was also accompanied with another Grammy Award which was for the best video. The second single of the album, known as “Telephone” that features singer Beyonce was also nominated in the category for Grammy Awards.

No sooner, Lady gaga became the fourth UK number-one single. Although her album was considered controversial, it received positive responses from a number of critics and was also praised for her musical and showmanship equal to Michael Jackson while having the provocative instincts and powerful sexuality of Madonna.

This album was followed by single “Alejandro” in which she was paired along with Steven Klein who is a fashion photographer to star in a music video which was as equally controversial and critics complimented as being dark nature with its ideas. By this time, Lady Gaga was the first artist to have gained over more than one million views on the internet world on a video-sharing website: YouTube. Even musically, The Fame Monster acquired abundant success. The success of this album urged Lady Gaga to start her second success worldwide concert tour which was titled The Monster Ball Your and began just weeks after the release of The Fame Monster. The tour was completed in the month of May 2011 and was both critically and commercially appreciated. The tour ran over one and a half years and $227.4 expenditure which makes it as one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time. As part of this tour, Lady Gaga also performed songs from the album at various international events such the Royal Variety Performance which was held in 2009 and in which she sang the song “Speechless” which is a power ballad in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II. Further, collaboration with Polaroid was started in the month of January 2010 which excited about combing the company with the digital period and in which Lady Gaga was given the post of the Chief Creative Officer for an international optic company with the intention of creating technology, photography and fashion products. Despite her success, the Mermaid Music LLC which is Lady Gaga’s production team was sued in the month of March of 2010 by the past producer Fusari who claimed that he was assured to receive 20 percent of the shares of the company’s earnings. To fight the case, Lady Gaga hired a lawyer, Charles Ortner who then described the agreement as “unlawful and them declined to comment further.

Presently:

Lady Gaga released her second studio album which was her third major release “Born This Way” in the year 2011 on 23^rd May. This album was described as a combination of electronic music with metal or rock n roll while having anthemic melodic styles. Lady Gaga’s new song was characterized as something which was much deeper than a lipstick and Akon commented that she was taking music to its next level. This single lead was performed live at the prestigious 53^rd Grammy Awards and two days later it became the debuted atop in the Billboard Hot 100 where this stood at the 19^th position. The album made sales of 3 million digital copies only in United Stated by the month of October 2011 and this became her eight consecutive single that exceeded in its sales.

Later, a music video for this song was released that depicted Lady Gaga giving birth to a new race among the surrealistic images and critics pointed this to be cultural and artistic reference and the concept was widely praise. She lent her vocals while being paired with Elton John to record the original duet for an animated feature film entitled Gnomeo & Juliet. The song that they recorded was known as “Hello Hello” which was released in 2011 in the month of February which did not have Lady Gaga’s voice but the duet version that appears in the film had her voice. In the same year, Lady Gaga’s tours were telecasted in month of May in HBO special as special episodes. These specials were nominated for a total of five Emmy Awards. Another two singles “The Edge of Glory” and “Judas” were released just before this album.

Lady Gaga’s performance style and musical notes has always been a subject of analysis and scrutiny for the critics and she confesses that she liberated in herself by constantly experimenting and reinventing her sound and image, insisting that she is inspired by the practices of her childhood. In short, her career is experimentation with new musical images and ideas that are in a quest for reaching new heights, acclaim and fame. Rolling Stone gave Lady Gaga the title of being the “Queen of Pop” in the year 2011 and Lady Gaga stands as public reception for fashion, persona and most importantly her music. She stands as a role-model for many and her self-esteem boost her fans to breathe a new life that creates a fashion statement. Her music is received positively and critics see her as taking a unique place in the pop music industry as she creates new movements as popular culture. Besides her music career, Lady Gaga has made immense contributions to charities and has also been a part of a number of humanitarian programs. In the year 2011, she established her own non-profit organization which was named Born This Way Foundation. This organization focuses on the empowerment of youth and aims at the issues of well-being, self-confidence, career development, mentoring and also anti-bullying. This foundation works in collaboration with a number of partners such as The California Endowment, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard University.

Awards and Nominations Received:

Lady Gaga has won a number of awards and nominations for her immense contributions to the music industry. She has to her credit the American Music Awards that she won in the year 2010.

She also has 16 Billboard Year-End Chart Awards starting from the year 2009 till 2011 for her albums “The Fame”, “Poker Face”, “Bad Romance” and also “Born This Way”.

Gaga has five Grammy Awards to her credits list for her works “Poker Face”, “The Fame Monster” and “Bad Romance”. She has also been nominated in a number of awards such as the MTV Video Music Brazil Awards, MOBO Awards, and MTV Awards.

Personal Quotes:

“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”

“I had a boyfriend who told me I’d never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped I’d fail. I said to him, ‘Someday, when we’re not together, you won’t be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me.”

“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condom less sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.”

“I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star… I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be – and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.”

“I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”