She was a genius when it came to the Web and knew she could control her message there. She was tweeting constantly. She solicited the friendship of controversial and snarky gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who has become a celebrity himself and who relentlessly promotes the people he likes. He can be equally tenacious when it comes to denigrating those he does not. Gaga quickly became not only a recurring character but a heroine, and he began calling her his “wife.”
“She saw him not only as a spokesman for the gay community, but as an ally to really help launch her career,” says David Ciemny. “So this was a calculated friendship and decision from Day One.” She invited him to dinner, talked to him on the phone; as her fame grew, she’d invite him to visit her on tour and take him out for mani-pedi dates, which he’d shoot and post to his site. For Halloween last year, he dressed up as Lady Gaga.
“She would send him videos and songs right after she finished them; she’d say, ‘This is going to Perez; I don’t want anyone else to have it,’ ” Ciemny says. “And he would give her good reviews; he would never bash Gaga.” His access, though, became exponentially less direct. “He would call me,” says Ciemny, “because he couldn’t get ahold of her.”
Hilton’s first Gaga post went up June 8, 2008; it was a link to her video for “Just Dance.” “Finally, a new artist that explodes onto the scene in America and embraces pop music, like old school Madonna!” he wrote. “ ‘Just Dance’ is the lead single off her new album and this shit be our summer anthem!!! You must CLICK HERE to check out the super stylin’ and ferosh video. It’s like LastNightsParty and The Cobrasnake come to life. The song is sooo damn catchy!”
“She had a very strong sense of how to use the Internet to market her record [before it] was on radio and video play and in public awareness,” says James Diener, CEO and president of A&M/Octone. “In 2008, she’s very mysterious. You’re not quite sure exactly what she looks like, where she is, what this is all about. What you have for her is at least a year of her starting to develop serious traction amongst a grassroots community via the Internet, clubs, DJs, various markets around the world before the United States. There’s very, very strong word-of-mouth buzzing about her in the blogosphere, the right people online saying something very important is coming. Then, when the records go on the radio, it’s like a match to kerosene—there’s so much enthusiasm it explodes immediately.”
By the end of June, she was making weekly, on-the-fly short films documenting her life on the road; she called the project Transmission Gagavision and uploaded them to her site. She kept up her MySpace page and Facebook wall. She cracked a code that’s ever-changing, specific to each person who tries: How to cut through the clutter of the Web and create an online presence that’s not just startling but that sticks, that keeps people coming back in ever-greater numbers, and that then translates into the real world, generating actual currency—be they votes for president or tickets to your rock show.
“With the Internet, everybody gets distribution, everybody gets eyeballed,” says MTV’s DiSanto. “But fame and stickiness? That depends on the content.” He points to the network’s most phenomenal success to date, the reality TV series Jersey Shore.
“That was the fastest success rate we’ve ever seen,” he says. “After Episode One, it’s on SNL’s ‘Weekend Update.’ And people said, ‘Oh, it’s probably because of the controversy. Snooki”—the sozzled, Smurf-like guidette—“got punched and it’s all over the Internet.’ That’s gonna draw people, but the stickiness of the show and the content is what made people stay with it. In terms of [Gaga], there are a million artists and a million kids out there putting stuff up on YouTube every day, so it’s a lot easier to get seen, but it’s much harder to get famous. Because with this much choice, things get lost in the middle.”
DiSanto believes that the sheer volume of content that lives online demands that any emerging artist has to “go broad right off the bat” by, counterintuitive as it sounds, “super-serving a niche. If you’re making a feature film, a giant director like a J. J. Abrams or a James Cameron will go to Comic-Con [America’s biggest annual comic book convention] and super-serve those niche fans and get them to come along with you. Then you use your niche to be your root and blow up from there. I think she did a brilliant job of super-serving her niche, the gay fan base. You know, Logo [the gay-themed cable channel] was her first official TV appearance. She allowed that to be a real die-hard solid fan base that allowed her to go broad.”
That first TV appearance on Logo was a performance of “Just Dance” during the channel’s NewNowNext Awards in May 2008. “Interscope was really pushing this girl,” says Logo’s Dave Mace, senior vice president of programming. He and his team didn’t know all that much about her. “She had the one video out, for ‘Just Dance,’ ” he says. Though it wasn’t getting much radio airplay, the clip was playing on Logo’s video countdown show. “At that point, we didn’t know if it was going to have any life beyond that, if it was a one-hit-wonder situation,” he says. “But we really liked her, and we felt it had the potential to be a hit song.” And she’d spent the better part of the year building a gay fan base. So they booked her.
“It was interesting when she came in to rehearse,” says Mace. “She was mysterious and in character, with the blond hair and the sunglasses and the cape over her head. And then, like, no pants. When she walked in, you were like, ‘Who is this girl? Who does she think she is?’ But not in a bad way. Kind of, like . . . interesting. For somebody her age, you wouldn’t expect that sort of thing. She reminded me of Grace Jones, that sort of mysteriousness.”
Interscope, says Mace, “had clearly given her more money to work with than most developing artists. They’d been kind enough to pay for a bunch of dancers that Lady Gaga wanted with her,” he says, “to kind of take over the room. And she had worked out this amazing choreographed number.”
The performance was shot at MTV’s studios, the same space where the now-defunct after-school countdown show TRL was broadcast. The space was retrofitted to look like a nightclub, to little effect. The production values were low, and the studio was small—so small that the bulk of the audience had to leave so she’d have room to perform; there were maybe fifteen people in the crowd.
As Gaga was introduced, the camera tracked her with her geometrically cut blond bangs and long hair; thick, angular black sunglasses; and cowl-like black hood drawn over her head, marching toward the stage with an unintentionally hilarious sense of purpose. She had two female backup dancers in tow, made up and dressed as to be barely noticeable, yet Gaga—in her tight leather pants, S&M chain belt, and aerodynamic shoulder pads—looked like she was leading a miniature army dedicated to the forcible spread of fabulousness.
Christian Siriano, the fashion designer and winner of the fourth season of Project Runway, met Gaga at the Logo taping; he was presenting an award. “I thought she was this weird little tranny,” he says. “She had that persona, and she was wearing that hooded thing, and you’re like, ‘Who’s this girl? She’s a nobody. She needs to slow her roll.’ ”
He changed his mind after watching her perform. “She was amazing,” Siriano says. They bonded at the after-party; she was very complimentary of Siriano, who was just finishing up on Project Runway.
“She said it was great to meet me; she was like, ‘Oh, I’m such a fan,’ ” he recalls. “It was a total little love moment.”
“The song was great, the number went amazingly well—but the rehearsal went better than the performance, and I think she was kind of disappointed,” says Mace. “It was because her disco stick”—her illuminated wand, already a favorite prop and a reference to her lyric “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”—“didn’t light up when she wanted it to. If you go back and look at the video from the show, you’d probably notice it, that she’s struggling a little bit.” (It’s unnoticeable.) “But she was a perfectionist,” he continues. “She wanted to do it again, but, being an almost-live show, we couldn’t.”
Even before she asked for a do-over, Mace was struck by her level of commitment to the performance: When the song ended, she struck a pose onstage, gloved palms open on either side of her cheeks, elbows askew, face—what was visible of it—frozen, expressionless. And not just for a few seconds, for at least a minute—through the host’s closing announcements, the thank-you for watching, the plug for one of her former compatriots: “We’re done here, but the fun continues online at the aftershow, featuring Cazwell, performing his new song ‘I Seen Beyoncé at Burger King!’ ” “Thank you so much for watching,” the host’s blond female sidekick drawls, languidly stretching an arm right in front of Gaga, who’s so still she looks like she’s turned into a biblical pillar of salt.
“Chris [Wiley, a Logo publicist] and I were just looking at each other, like, ‘What is she doing?’ ” says Mace, laughing. “It speaks to her as a performer—she was in character, and she was very conscious of it. But it’s just really funny.”
She also appeared, very briefly, on an episode of the MTV reality soap The Hills in September 2008, performing at a launch party for a jeans line. According to fashion publicist and reality star Kelly Cutrone, she almost didn’t get the gig: “I mean, it’s L.A., it’s one hundred degrees,” she told MTV News. “But she’s in this Alice Cooper [look]. I was like, ‘I’m so not into it . . . this is way too Marilyn Manson for me.’ ” But the event’s promoter overruled Cutrone; the word was that everyone at Interscope knew that this girl was going to be huge.
Gaga, meanwhile, was assiduously tracking how much radio airplay she was getting. It wasn’t much, so after every show, from about two or three A.M. until seven a.m., she’d go into a recording booth and rerecord the intro to “Just Dance” for about twenty radio stations, specifically singing out each one’s call letters until, finally, she’d recorded tailor-made singles for every radio outlet in the United States.
“She was very acutely aware of certain program directors,” ex–tour manager David Ciemny says. “And if they didn’t add the song, it was, ‘What do we do?’ She knew everyone at her label. If something wasn’t happening, she’d say, ‘Let me call that guy. What do I need to do? I’ll show up at the station, I’ll sing “Happy Birthday.” I’ll do whatever it takes.’ Because it wasn’t really happening in the States.”
She was equally on top of her momentum in other countries. “Someone could say, ‘Oh wow, ‘Poker Face’ is number one in ten countries across the board!’ but it would be like, ‘Well, we haven’t been to Japan yet, they don’t know who [I am]—let’s go to Japan.’ Or like, ‘You’re famous now, you’re on the cover of Rolling Stone’—[she’d say], ‘Well, I haven’t been on the cover of Cosmopolitan yet.’ ” (She achieved that goal with Cosmo’s April 2010 issue. By the end of that month, she was on the cover of Time magazine, next to Bill Clinton, named number one among their list of most influential artists.)
In July 2008, FlyLife was lobbying to get Gaga booked for something called the Underwear Party, to be held in August at a gay resort on Fire Island. It was what it sounds like—gay men partying in their underwear. Daniel Nardicio, who’d originated the event back in 2003, remembers being surprised by the booking. “When she re-branded herself as Lady Gaga, her people came to me and said, ‘We’d really love for you to work with her—she’s hot, she’s great.’ And I was like, ‘Wait—is this Stefani Germanotta?’ She was great before, but she was a lot more Natalie Merchant–y.”
Nardicio knew her from Michael T.’s Motherfucker parties and from “the scene,” as he puts it, but he didn’t pay her much mind back then. “She was cute,” he says. “Brunette.” But he didn’t think she was special, and he didn’t think this new incarnation, whatever it was, would fly. “She’d had this whiny, Long Island–y quality,” he says. “There was nothing really super-spectacular about her.”
Still, Nardicio knew something was going on with Gaga; FlyLife had given him a copy of her single, and he’d been playing it on his show on East Village Radio. “ ‘Just Dance’ was such a great record,’ ” he says. “That song really generated interest and heat. I had people write me, like, ‘Who did that song?’ and ‘When’s it available?’ ” He called FlyLife. “I said, ‘You know what? I want to bring her to Fire Island and get a big audience and out-promote her.’ ”
FlyLife gave Nardicio a thousand copies of the single, which he put in every house he could on Fire Island. The week before the Underwear Party, Gaga had performed on So You Think You Can Dance. “Just Dance” was finally getting airplay on Top 40 radio, including New York’s huge mainstream station Z100. Gaga had been crisscrossing Europe, playing small clubs, and on Perez Hilton’s site she was now a recurring character, averaging a post a day. Suddenly, it seemed, she was breaking through the membrane of mainstream consciousness at a freakishly rapid pace. Nardicio panicked.
“I called her people and said, ‘Look, I know she’s going to cancel now. She’s getting big, I know. I’m only paying her $500. Just cancel it now so I’m not standing there, day of, with my dick in my hand.’ And they go, ‘As far as we know, she’s coming.’ ”
It was one of many very shrewd moves on her part—not only keeping her word, but keeping it with such good humor. It’s also a testament to both her work ethic and ambition that she performed at the Fire Island gig the same day she got off a plane from Europe.
Nearly one thousand people turned up—equaling the number of CDs Nardicio had distributed on the Island. “A sea of gay guys in their underwear,” as Nardicio puts it. “And she looks out in the audience at one point and is like, ‘I am fucking living for you right now.’ Because, I mean, they were really screaming for her. It was so exciting, as a promoter, because you get those moments where you knock the ball out of the park and you get the right person at the right time. I did that with Scissor Sisters, with Gaga, and of course, the Levi Johnston thing, which is in a different area.” (It’s fitting, given Gaga’s insistence that her existence is a meta-commentary on fame, that Nardicio would unironically equate the work he did for her with working as a handler for Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy, but there it is: Fame in America, circa 2010.) Gaga did three songs: “Just Dance,” “LoveGame,” and “Poker Face,” had two female backup dancers, and spoke very little in between.
“It was very early-stages Madonna,” Nardicio recalls, “like when she did American Bandstand. But it was professional; Gaga had been with Interscope for a while, so they brought logos to put behind her. They brought her imaging. But it was tight and bare-boned.” He remembers being impressed that she sang live.
After the gig, Nardicio took Gaga and her entourage to dinner at a local seafood restaurant called Jumping Jack’s. What he recalls of her look that night: wig, sunglasses, tights, shoulder pads. He did not acknowledge that he’d known her before, back when she was Stefani; nor did she. He noticed that she didn’t drink at dinner. He thought about asking if he could “be part of this circus,” but thought better of it. (At least at the time he thought that he thought better of it.) He liked her, but felt something was off.
“My first feeling about her was that she seemed a little bit entitled, a little bit of a privileged rich girl,” he says. “And I realized that she is, a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I felt like I wasn’t sure if this whole Andy Warhol thing was a little too, like . . . I guess I was a little skeptical. I thought it was a little high-concept for a pop song about being drunk at a club and dancing.”
What Nardicio missed—or what maybe wasn’t yet readily apparent—was Gaga’s sense of humor and her supreme self-awareness. She was a twenty-two-year-old girl who was smart enough to write about what she knew: cute boys and partying. As she said in 2008: “It might sound dumb because people like Bono are writing about world hunger. But I don’t know about those things yet, so I write about what I know.” It sounds like something Paris Hilton might say in earnest.
“She’s since had money and support to build [her show] up into a thin
g, but at the time it wasn’t very polished,” says Nardicio. “And certainly her wig wasn’t very polished. I mean, the girl was working on a budget. She looked a little more ratty, a little more raw.”
This was nothing that Gaga herself was unaware of. In fact, before the dinner was over, she had charmed Nardicio into helping, for free, to promote her CD release party, slated for NYC’s Highline Ballroom in October. And he was thrilled to be asked. “I said, ‘I’m not doing this for money. I just want to be involved.’ Because she’s awesome.”
In July, she performed at the San Francisco Gay Pride parade, wearing a black-and-white bodysuit, a new wave–style black tuxedo jacket (hooded, of course), and black sunglasses. The performance was tailored to her audience; one of her female backup dancers grabbed Gaga’s crotch, and the disco stick featured prominently. She opened with “LoveGame,” then went into “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and “Just Dance.” The stage was bare-bones, audio cables visibly snaking along the lip, adorned with a couple of tacked-up Lady Gaga posters. But she performed like she was playing a sold-out arena; the performance was fully choreographed, and she elicited her biggest cheer when she said, “Being here makes me so fucking proud!” In what was becoming her hallmark act of intimacy, she removed her sunglasses for the rest of the set.
When, at another performance for MTV in Malta, organizers told her that her set would have to end at a very specific time, she flipped and demanded that her tour manager, Ciemny, fix it. “I gotta hand it to her, she pushed me,” says Ciemny. “She said, ‘Don’t second-guess me. Just do it.’ ”
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