I typed up a lot of it for another site, but don't have time to finish today.
+
Hello.
In March I went to Las Vegas to interview Lady Gaga. The idea was that during my time there I'd interview her for an NME cover feature to run in April (which it did and jolly illuminating it was too), for another cover feature to run at a later date) the Time Out interview is running this month), and for Popjustice.
It's not unusual for a journalist to cover a few bases on one trip, but it's not always easy to deliver the goods.
For a start, the larger an artist gets, the busier they are and the less time you'll have with them. And when an artist has passed the point where they're struggling for media coverage, they'll decide that it is time to start imposing rules on interviews. Sometimes they'll ask to see questions in advance, and certain areas might be flagged as completely off limits. The more you want to know and the more time you want to spend discussing it, the less you're able to ask and the less time you get. You'll arrive at an interview with a global superstar and it'll quickly become obvious that you're one of several interviews taking place in the same afternoon. Frequently a photo shoot will have run late or another interview will take precedence, and a journalist will end up desperately trying to get enough quotable material for several interviews out of a half-hour car journey to an airport during which a disengaged singer gazes out of a window and reels off the same pre-scripted quotes they've been giving other writers all day.
The experience with Gaga wasn't like that at all. If you've read the NME interview you'll be aware of some of this already, and if you haven't it's worth digging out as a companion piece to this newspaper. Basically I arrived at a recording studio near Las Vegas at around 4pm, and walked in to find Gaga recording vocals for the Country Road version of 'Born This Way' she put on YouTube eight hours later. She interrupted her vocal session for an hour's interview, then finished the vocals, and took me to another studio next door where she (along with Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow) played tracks from the album and talked me through the songs and their themes for another two hours. Gaga needed an image to accompany the YouTube stream of the new 'Born This Way' version so we went outside the studio - it was dark by this point - and she got me to snap her posing by a large 'STOP' sign. When that was done we spent another 45 minutes chatting during the drive to her suite at the Las Vegas MGM Grand and, once we were there, did another 90 minute interview. After that there was another hour and a half of hanging out while she put the Country Road version of 'Born This Way' on YouTube then prepared for a one-song club PA she'd agreed to do while we were in the studio. We then drove to the club and, after the PA, she introduced me to her mum and we drove together back to the MGM Grand.
After I'd written the NME and Time Out features there was still plenty of interview material for Popjustice; so much, in fact, that it felt too long to just put online. Maybe I shouldn't pay so much attention to the facile LOL-merchants who hurl phrases like "TL;DR" at any online article over 250 words, but I didn't want to have to edit down a massive interview with the planet's most interesting popstar if I didn't have to and - let's be honest - I also wanted a nice Popjustice/Gaga magazine cover to stick on the wall of the Popjustice office. The result: the newspaper you're holding now, containing 10,000 words of Lady Gaga talking in a way you rarely get to see.
It's a funny quirk of the magazine world that very few features and interviews with artists are actually written for the benefit of that artist's fans, with writers having to aim their articles at as broad an audience as possible. There's nothing wrong with asking popstars some difficult questions, of course, but one of the fun things about having decided to put this interview into its own newspaper is that I know anyone who's bought it is already interested in Lady Gaga. So I don't feel that I really need to explain why she's brilliant (SHE JUST IS ALRIGHT), and I don't feel like I need to ask questions on behalf of readers who don't like her. For that reason the interview you'll read here seems a little more controversial, a little more relaxed, a bit less "wheel out the performing monkey to be outrageous and grab headlines" than you might read elsewhere.
Amazing.
So is the album actually finished?
We could mix it and put it out tomorrow and it would be wonderful but we keep tweaking little bits, and I am constantly writing... Like I wrote another song just the other day. I just always make music. The idea of 'finished' just isn't ever really going to happen.
Obviously the release date is set in stone but who decides when the album is actually finished?
I do. I don't not include the label, I just make the music then play it for them. And I very early on - when the label heard songs - got the blessing of Jimmy Iovine and everyone over at Polydor. I've heard some of the things that have been sent my way from other people. It's a bit strange. It's hard not to be offended when someone says, 'I wrote a song for you'.
What sort of thing are people writing for you? What do they think Lady Gaga should sing about?
Boys and dicks. *****. *****. 'I'm in the club'. It's funny because there's not really one song on this album that's about any of that. There's no songs about getting drunk in a nightclub. 'Electric Chapel' is the closest. 'Government Hooker' is very filthy and sexual... But... There are no songs that are all 'ooh I want you in my bed', although they do feel very sexy. Very soulful, but not in a 'soul music' kind of way. I think people are now becoming slightly blind to the outfits and they're asking what the ****'s underneath it. And that's where this album comes in.
If you feel people are becoming blind to the outfits, does that make you want to make the outfits even bigger and more attention-grabbing, or do you see it as a signal that you can move away from the outfits?
It's more that I'm always a performance artist trying to more articulately relate my costume choices to my music. And that's what I'm really excited about. It's as if, well, 'Bad Romance' was great, 'Poker Face' was great, 'LoveGame' was great, all these songs were great but it wasn't until I wrote 'Born This Way' that I realized how culturally unrelatable my music had been before. I learned something so very valuable about myself putting that record [the 'Born This Way' single] out, and it's that I've done absolutely nothing to change the world - zero - until now. It made me realize I had so much to do, but that's wonderful for me. I don't know how to explain it any other way than to say that it felt like I'd opened a door to myself that I didn't know was there. I thought I'd already shaken the world up and I only realized when I put out 'Born This Way' that I hadn't started to shake the world up at all. It was like resetting my... Does this make any sense?
Maybe once I've heard more of the album...
But even if you haven't heard the rest of the album. I mean, just based on 'Born This Way'?
Well I understand how you might say that you think 'Born This Way' is lyrically the most important thing you've done. But what about beyond the lyrics? So does the importance you feel in the lyrics, does that importance win out over the melody of 'Bad Romance'? Do the lyrics being 'important' make it a better pop song?
No, it's completely different. 'Bad Romance' as a song was amazing and is amazing and had this giant cultural impact where it was big on YouTube and everyone learned the dance moves and made the costumes and everything. Right? 'Bad Romance' didn't piss anybody off, at all. Maybe it pissed off a couple of [other] artists, but it didn't piss off any actual people. It was just a really great pop song. This ['Born This Way'] was the first time that an outfit wasn't what pissed people off about me. Do you know how exciting that is for someone like me? The only thing that made me controversial before was the fact that my shoe had no heel. Suddenly, I put out 'Born This Way', the lyrics were really literal, and there was a huge backlash in the United States. Suddenly I'm not controversial because of my shoes, or controversial because of my clothes. I'm controversial because of my music.
But why did you want to piss people off?
It's not about pissing them off, it's about shaking them UP. It's the cultural shitstorm. There's a difference between being a cultural shitstorm based on artistry and style, and being a cultural shitstorm based on the message you're conveying. 'Born This Way' created a cultural shitstorm that is completely different from the cultural shitstorm 'Bad Romance' created. And what I didn't want to do is give you 'Bad Romance 2.0'. 'Judas' might be 'Bad Romance 7.0', yes, but I'm not going to give that to you first. First, I'm going to show you I'm capable of creating a different sort of shitstorm. But even I didn't know that [before 'Born This Way' came out]. I thought it was going to be part of the same shitstorm. Until I saw what occurred. 'Who does she think she is?' I mean the gay community was like 'who does she think she is speaking for us'. (Starting to shout a bit) The shitstorm that occured was so massive and it was the first time that I was viewed controversially because of my music.
Well one way of looking at that is that you were doing something right, because you got a reaction out of people. If you've done a song about equal rights and right wing people don't like it then perhaps you've done your job. But if the gay community is also going 'piss off', then has it still done it's job?
Of course it has. I had an eleven-year-old boy come up to me after the show yesterday, crying. 'And he said, "Born This Way" is my favourite song'. It's a triumph. It's a song that asks people to look inside themselves, even if they don't like it: 'why am I angry about this song?'. If you're already free, what's the problem? Is it because you don't want me to define your freedom? Is it because you don't want me to represent you? Is it because you don't believe that the kids who are eleven years old aren't still dealing with the social situations you dealt with in the 70s? I have twelve and sixteen-year-olds in my audience going, 'free me - when I go to school I'm being bullied. Help.' And I'm like, 'okay, this record's for you.' And that's it.
It's interesting that a lot of criticisms came from people, working in cities in the media or wherever, who've already sorted out their sexuality.
'Now we've been accepted by society it doesn't matter about teenagers'. I know my fans love this song. And I feel this huge sense of... To be honest the hardest thing about it was when you believe in something so much and the whole world is shooting a big arrow right through it. It's like, it came to me while I was in a shower, when I was in Manchester. I wrote it down and we drove to Liverpool and I finished the melodies.
Did 'Born This Way' have to sell in order to be a success? Usually artists insist that it's wrong to gauge a song based on it's sales but if the point of 'Born This Way' was to spread a message then it needed to be huge in order to be culturally important, right?
What you're saying is absolutely true... I want you to know how I think about music. Help me help myself when I'm explaining this to you. There's a lot of really ****** songs that are Number One for long periods of time in lots of countries. But I know that Gaga fans who are 11 years old now will remember 'Born This Way' in thirty years.
The logic at the heart of the 'God makes no mistakes' line in 'Born This Way' was, of course, infuriating to anti-gay religious groups...
Oh please of COURSE it is! If you don't believe in anything it's massively annoying because it's like, 'who the **** are you to press your religious beliefs on me?', but anyone who believes - and this is mostly in America... Well there are a lot of people who believe that when God is mad he shakes the earth, and I don't believe that. Well to say God makes no mistakes, it takes the knife away from all those who are prejudiced and religious. And that's why I did it.
Do you worry about the repercussions of that sort of line?
There were a lot of people who came into this room [the recording studio] who said, 'are you sure you want the word to be "God" in the song?'. And I said, 'yes'. The point is not for me to say what God is, the point is to make you look into yourself and to ask yourself, 'if there is a being in the sky or wherever who you believe created all of this, does he make mistakes?'. You can either believe or not believe, either way the song frees you. If you were born this way and are atheist, you were still born this way.
How did you want the song to feel?
I wanted to channel a time in music in the 90s - when [people like] Dianne Warren, the biggest songwriters of all time [were] making the biggest songs - I wrote a big song and I put it on a disco record. It's catchy, it's brilliant, if you don't feel liberated by it that's fine but I'm not going to run to or from anything or anyone.
It seems like you feel you've cracked the code to get to the next level of your career. I mean if you didn't feel that you were moving on, well, we'd probably still be sitting here talking about your new album, but I wonder what you'd be saying instead?
If I released any song other than 'Born This Way' first, everyone would have said, 'oh, she gave us another "Bad Romance" and lots of shiny clothes and dance moves in the video'. I had to do something that reflected the growth of the fanbase and the inspiration of the fans. And we got way more than we bargained for. We exposed the cultural situation that is so important... I can't even begin to tell you - Don't Ask Don't Tell being repealed just as the album was being made, Obama's anti-bullying campaign... All this stuff is happening in America that's all centered on saving young people's lives because of how they're treated in school. And that was the absolute whole point of the song.
It's 10,000 words so yeah... TL;DR for some, but it's a good read. Here's some excerpts:
-excerpts-
She seems so aware of everything going on. The backlash with BTW, Judas being Bad Romance 7.0, etc.
Quote:
There's a lot of really ****** songs that are Number One for long periods of time in lots of countries. But I know that Gaga fans who are 11 years old now will remember 'Born This Way' in thirty years.
I typed up a lot of it for another site, but don't have time to finish today.
+
Hello.
In March I went to Las Vegas to interview Lady Gaga. The idea was that during my time there I'd interview her for an NME cover feature to run in April (which it did and jolly illuminating it was too), for another cover feature to run at a later date) the Time Out interview is running this month), and for Popjustice.
It's not unusual for a journalist to cover a few bases on one trip, but it's not always easy to deliver the goods.
For a start, the larger an artist gets, the busier they are and the less time you'll have with them. And when an artist has passed the point where they're struggling for media coverage, they'll decide that it is time to start imposing rules on interviews. Sometimes they'll ask to see questions in advance, and certain areas might be flagged as completely off limits. The more you want to know and the more time you want to spend discussing it, the less you're able to ask and the less time you get. You'll arrive at an interview with a global superstar and it'll quickly become obvious that you're one of several interviews taking place in the same afternoon. Frequently a photo shoot will have run late or another interview will take precedence, and a journalist will end up desperately trying to get enough quotable material for several interviews out of a half-hour car journey to an airport during which a disengaged singer gazes out of a window and reels off the same pre-scripted quotes they've been giving other writers all day.
The experience with Gaga wasn't like that at all. If you've read the NME interview you'll be aware of some of this already, and if you haven't it's worth digging out as a companion piece to this newspaper. Basically I arrived at a recording studio near Las Vegas at around 4pm, and walked in to find Gaga recording vocals for the Country Road version of 'Born This Way' she put on YouTube eight hours later. She interrupted her vocal session for an hour's interview, then finished the vocals, and took me to another studio next door where she (along with Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow) played tracks from the album and talked me through the songs and their themes for another two hours. Gaga needed an image to accompany the YouTube stream of the new 'Born This Way' version so we went outside the studio - it was dark by this point - and she got me to snap her posing by a large 'STOP' sign. When that was done we spent another 45 minutes chatting during the drive to her suite at the Las Vegas MGM Grand and, once we were there, did another 90 minute interview. After that there was another hour and a half of hanging out while she put the Country Road version of 'Born This Way' on YouTube then prepared for a one-song club PA she'd agreed to do while we were in the studio. We then drove to the club and, after the PA, she introduced me to her mum and we drove together back to the MGM Grand.
After I'd written the NME and Time Out features there was still plenty of interview material for Popjustice; so much, in fact, that it felt too long to just put online. Maybe I shouldn't pay so much attention to the facile LOL-merchants who hurl phrases like "TL;DR" at any online article over 250 words, but I didn't want to have to edit down a massive interview with the planet's most interesting popstar if I didn't have to and - let's be honest - I also wanted a nice Popjustice/Gaga magazine cover to stick on the wall of the Popjustice office. The result: the newspaper you're holding now, containing 10,000 words of Lady Gaga talking in a way you rarely get to see.
It's a funny quirk of the magazine world that very few features and interviews with artists are actually written for the benefit of that artist's fans, with writers having to aim their articles at as broad an audience as possible. There's nothing wrong with asking popstars some difficult questions, of course, but one of the fun things about having decided to put this interview into its own newspaper is that I know anyone who's bought it is already interested in Lady Gaga. So I don't feel that I really need to explain why she's brilliant (SHE JUST IS ALRIGHT), and I don't feel like I need to ask questions on behalf of readers who don't like her. For that reason the interview you'll read here seems a little more controversial, a little more relaxed, a bit less "wheel out the performing monkey to be outrageous and grab headlines" than you might read elsewhere.
Amazing.
So is the album actually finished?
We could mix it and put it out tomorrow and it would be wonderful but we keep tweaking little bits, and I am constantly writing... Like I wrote another song just the other day. I just always make music. The idea of 'finished' just isn't ever really going to happen.
Obviously the release date is set in stone but who decides when the album is actually finished?
I do. I don't not include the label, I just make the music then play it for them. And I very early on - when the label heard songs - got the blessing of Jimmy Iovine and everyone over at Polydor. I've heard some of the things that have been sent my way from other people. It's a bit strange. It's hard not to be offended when someone says, 'I wrote a song for you'.
What sort of thing are people writing for you? What do they think Lady Gaga should sing about?
Boys and dicks. *****. *****. 'I'm in the club'. It's funny because there's not really one song on this album that's about any of that. There's no songs about getting drunk in a nightclub. 'Electric Chapel' is the closest. 'Government Hooker' is very filthy and sexual... But... There are no songs that are all 'ooh I want you in my bed', although they do feel very sexy. Very soulful, but not in a 'soul music' kind of way. I think people are now becoming slightly blind to the outfits and they're asking what the ****'s underneath it. And that's where this album comes in.
If you feel people are becoming blind to the outfits, does that make you want to make the outfits even bigger and more attention-grabbing, or do you see it as a signal that you can move away from the outfits?
It's more that I'm always a performance artist trying to more articulately relate my costume choices to my music. And that's what I'm really excited about. It's as if, well, 'Bad Romance' was great, 'Poker Face' was great, 'LoveGame' was great, all these songs were great but it wasn't until I wrote 'Born This Way' that I realized how culturally unrelatable my music had been before. I learned something so very valuable about myself putting that record [the 'Born This Way' single] out, and it's that I've done absolutely nothing to change the world - zero - until now. It made me realize I had so much to do, but that's wonderful for me. I don't know how to explain it any other way than to say that it felt like I'd opened a door to myself that I didn't know was there. I thought I'd already shaken the world up and I only realized when I put out 'Born This Way' that I hadn't started to shake the world up at all. It was like resetting my... Does this make any sense?
Maybe once I've heard more of the album...
But even if you haven't heard the rest of the album. I mean, just based on 'Born This Way'?
Well I understand how you might say that you think 'Born This Way' is lyrically the most important thing you've done. But what about beyond the lyrics? So does the importance you feel in the lyrics, does that importance win out over the melody of 'Bad Romance'? Do the lyrics being 'important' make it a better pop song?
No, it's completely different. 'Bad Romance' as a song was amazing and is amazing and had this giant cultural impact where it was big on YouTube and everyone learned the dance moves and made the costumes and everything. Right? 'Bad Romance' didn't piss anybody off, at all. Maybe it pissed off a couple of [other] artists, but it didn't piss off any actual people. It was just a really great pop song. This ['Born This Way'] was the first time that an outfit wasn't what pissed people off about me. Do you know how exciting that is for someone like me? The only thing that made me controversial before was the fact that my shoe had no heel. Suddenly, I put out 'Born This Way', the lyrics were really literal, and there was a huge backlash in the United States. Suddenly I'm not controversial because of my shoes, or controversial because of my clothes. I'm controversial because of my music.
But why did you want to piss people off?
It's not about pissing them off, it's about shaking them UP. It's the cultural shitstorm. There's a difference between being a cultural shitstorm based on artistry and style, and being a cultural shitstorm based on the message you're conveying. 'Born This Way' created a cultural shitstorm that is completely different from the cultural shitstorm 'Bad Romance' created. And what I didn't want to do is give you 'Bad Romance 2.0'. 'Judas' might be 'Bad Romance 7.0', yes, but I'm not going to give that to you first. First, I'm going to show you I'm capable of creating a different sort of shitstorm. But even I didn't know that [before 'Born This Way' came out]. I thought it was going to be part of the same shitstorm. Until I saw what occurred. 'Who does she think she is?' I mean the gay community was like 'who does she think she is speaking for us'. (Starting to shout a bit) The shitstorm that occured was so massive and it was the first time that I was viewed controversially because of my music.
Well one way of looking at that is that you were doing something right, because you got a reaction out of people. If you've done a song about equal rights and right wing people don't like it then perhaps you've done your job. But if the gay community is also going 'piss off', then has it still done it's job?
Of course it has. I had an eleven-year-old boy come up to me after the show yesterday, crying. 'And he said, "Born This Way" is my favourite song'. It's a triumph. It's a song that asks people to look inside themselves, even if they don't like it: 'why am I angry about this song?'. If you're already free, what's the problem? Is it because you don't want me to define your freedom? Is it because you don't want me to represent you? Is it because you don't believe that the kids who are eleven years old aren't still dealing with the social situations you dealt with in the 70s? I have twelve and sixteen-year-olds in my audience going, 'free me - when I go to school I'm being bullied. Help.' And I'm like, 'okay, this record's for you.' And that's it.
It's interesting that a lot of criticisms came from people, working in cities in the media or wherever, who've already sorted out their sexuality.
'Now we've been accepted by society it doesn't matter about teenagers'. I know my fans love this song. And I feel this huge sense of... To be honest the hardest thing about it was when you believe in something so much and the whole world is shooting a big arrow right through it. It's like, it came to me while I was in a shower, when I was in Manchester. I wrote it down and we drove to Liverpool and I finished the melodies.
Did 'Born This Way' have to sell in order to be a success? Usually artists insist that it's wrong to gauge a song based on it's sales but if the point of 'Born This Way' was to spread a message then it needed to be huge in order to be culturally important, right?
What you're saying is absolutely true... I want you to know how I think about music. Help me help myself when I'm explaining this to you. There's a lot of really ****** songs that are Number One for long periods of time in lots of countries. But I know that Gaga fans who are 11 years old now will remember 'Born This Way' in thirty years.
The logic at the heart of the 'God makes no mistakes' line in 'Born This Way' was, of course, infuriating to anti-gay religious groups...
Oh please of COURSE it is! If you don't believe in anything it's massively annoying because it's like, 'who the **** are you to press your religious beliefs on me?', but anyone who believes - and this is mostly in America... Well there are a lot of people who believe that when God is mad he shakes the earth, and I don't believe that. Well to say God makes no mistakes, it takes the knife away from all those who are prejudiced and religious. And that's why I did it.
Do you worry about the repercussions of that sort of line?
There were a lot of people who came into this room [the recording studio] who said, 'are you sure you want the word to be "God" in the song?'. And I said, 'yes'. The point is not for me to say what God is, the point is to make you look into yourself and to ask yourself, 'if there is a being in the sky or wherever who you believe created all of this, does he make mistakes?'. You can either believe or not believe, either way the song frees you. If you were born this way and are atheist, you were still born this way.
How did you want the song to feel?
I wanted to channel a time in music in the 90s - when [people like] Dianne Warren, the biggest songwriters of all time [were] making the biggest songs - I wrote a big song and I put it on a disco record. It's catchy, it's brilliant, if you don't feel liberated by it that's fine but I'm not going to run to or from anything or anyone.
It seems like you feel you've cracked the code to get to the next level of your career. I mean if you didn't feel that you were moving on, well, we'd probably still be sitting here talking about your new album, but I wonder what you'd be saying instead?
If I released any song other than 'Born This Way' first, everyone would have said, 'oh, she gave us another "Bad Romance" and lots of shiny clothes and dance moves in the video'. I had to do something that reflected the growth of the fanbase and the inspiration of the fans. And we got way more than we bargained for. We exposed the cultural situation that is so important... I can't even begin to tell you - Don't Ask Don't Tell being repealed just as the album was being made, Obama's anti-bullying campaign... All this stuff is happening in America that's all centered on saving young people's lives because of how they're treated in school. And that was the absolute whole point of the song.
It's 10,000 words so yeah... TL;DR for some, but it's a good read. Here's some excerpts:
What sort of thing are people writing for you? What do they think Lady Gaga should sing about?
Boys and dicks. *****. *****. 'I'm in the club'. It's funny because there's not really one song on this album that's about any of that. There's no songs about getting drunk in a nightclub. 'Electric Chapel' is the closest. 'Government Hooker' is very filthy and sexual... But... There are no songs that are all 'ooh I want you in my bed', although they do feel very sexy. Very soulful, but not in a 'soul music' kind of way. I think people are now becoming slightly blind to the outfits and they're asking what the ****'s underneath it. And that's where this album comes in.
Well I understand how you might say that you think 'Born This Way' is lyrically the most important thing you've done. But what about beyond the lyrics? So does the importance you feel in the lyrics, does that importance win out over the melody of 'Bad Romance'? Do the lyrics being 'important' make it a better pop song?
No, it's completely different. 'Bad Romance' as a song was amazing and is amazing and had this giant cultural impact where it was big on YouTube and everyone learned the dance moves and made the costumes and everything. Right? 'Bad Romance' didn't piss anybody off, at all. Maybe it pissed off a couple of [other] artists, but it didn't piss off any actual people. It was just a really great pop song. This ['Born This Way'] was the first time that an outfit wasn't what pissed people off about me. Do you know how exciting that is for someone like me? The only thing that made me controversial before was the fact that my shoe had no heel. Suddenly, I put out 'Born This Way', the lyrics were really literal, and there was a huge backlash in the United States. Suddenly I'm not controversial because of my shoes, or controversial because of my clothes. I'm controversial because of my music.
But why did you want to piss people off?
It's not about pissing them off, it's about shaking them UP. It's the cultural shitstorm. There's a difference between being a cultural shitstorm based on artistry and style, and being a cultural shitstorm based on the message you're conveying. 'Born This Way' created a cultural shitstorm that is completely different from the cultural shitstorm 'Bad Romance' created. And what I didn't want to do is give you 'Bad Romance 2.0'. 'Judas' might be 'Bad Romance 7.0', yes, but I'm not going to give that to you first. First, I'm going to show you I'm capable of creating a different sort of shitstorm. But even I didn't know that [before 'Born This Way' came out]. I thought it was going to be part of the same shitstorm. Until I saw what occurred. 'Who does she think she is?' I mean the gay community was like 'who does she think she is speaking for us'. (Starting to shout a bit) The shitstorm that occured was so massive and it was the first time that I was viewed controversially because of my music.
[On Government Hooker] Besides it having tonnes of relation to the fact we allow our Government to continually **** us over and over again, I think it also makes fun of the plastic popstar. 'I'm willing to do anything as long as you continue to **** me and pay me.'
...It's a fun dance record, and I quite like the idea of seeding something political into a sugary sweet dance song.
…'Government Hooker' would be an amazing single, I just don't know if it would get played on the radio at all. I mean, it's not really a question of who'd play it and who wouldn't, it's whether it would get played at all. I would not be interested in censoring it.
What would be in the video for 'Hair'? Do you think along those lines when you're recording a song?
Yes in that particular song I see myself with a leotard on, with a keytar, lying in the middle of a garage, rolling around on the floor. I had a vision at one point of having all my wigs - and I keep them all, I don't throw any away - just FLY across the screen while I'm having a really epic keytar moment.
You've worked with RedOne on a couple of tracks but most of the work has been with White Shadow and Fernando, who aren't very well known for such a high profile album. That's the sort of decision that ****s off big producers, isn't it?
But wouldn't it defy everything I stand for if I were to just hop over to a superproducer and ask them for a hit? I also, however, would say with as much humbleness as I can that I chose Fernando, White Shadow and RedOne because they're completely brilliant and they're the best in the business, and everyone in the business says they are. I want to give you so much more information than you've got…
Is it the case that other people in the business won't admit that they think those producers are great?
Yes. In Fernando's case in particular, yes. It's going to piss a lot of people off that he's even on this album at all.
What will your next tattoo be?
A cross, I think. The infamous 'God' tattoo.
Well I'd like to hear another 'Bad Romance'… Did you feel that 'Born This Way', opening the campaign, had to perform a certain function?
When I wrote 'The Fame' I had to hit people over the head with a sledgehammer in order to get it played on the radio. With 'Born This Way' the idea was to bring the sledgehammer out again. What will keep not only me excited artistically, but my fans excited too, is that I will always have to fight for my spot. ALWAYS. I'm always defending my championship.
…And I also want to encourage my fans and people all over the world to stop seeing music as singles. Because "Bad Romance" isn't evaporating into the air and going anywhere. Neither is "Just Dance" or "Poker Face". They are still here. I will be playing them for the rest of my life. Contrary to certain other artists you might review on your site, I have arena tours that I do. I'm not just thinking about the album as it's sold on the internet or in stores on CD, I'm thinking about how theatrically this music will fit into the party that is my show. If I was to create things that I've already done before then the show would be quite boring and I'm quite certain that people would stop buying tickets.
Fantastic read
For someone who claims to not know other people's perceptions of her, she knows an awful lot.
I always see the BTW/JUDAS video being played at some of our local cd stores in my country...
I always freak out when I see her videos are being played
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Jamming my ass on Let Them Hoes Fight 
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