Gaga came to prominence following the release of her debut studio album The Fame (2008), which was a critical and commercial success and achieved international popularity with the singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". The album reached number one on the record charts of six countries, topped the Billboard Dance/Electronic Albums chart while simultaneously peaking at number two on the Billboard 200 chart in the United States and accomplished positions within the top ten worldwide. Achieving similar worldwide success, The Fame Monster (2009), its follow-up, produced a further three global chart-topping singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone" and "Alejandro" and allowed her to embark on her second global concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, just months after having finished her first, The Fame Ball Tour. Her second studio album Born This Way (2011) topped the charts in all major musical markets after the arrival of its singles "Born This Way", "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory"—the first-mentioned achieved the number-one spot in countries worldwide and was the fastest-selling single in the history of iTunes, selling one million copies in five days.
Influenced by glam rock singers such as David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, as well as dance-pop artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga is well-recognized for her outré and ever-changing sense of style in music, in fashion, in performance and in her music videos. Her contributions to the music industry have accrued her numerous achievements such as five Grammy Awards—among twelve nominations—and four Guinness World Records. Gaga has sold an estimated 13 million albums and 51 million singles, making her one of the best-selling music artists worldwide. In the United States, she is among the best-selling digital artists, selling an estimated 29.3 million digital singles over the course of her career. In 2010, Billboard named her the Artist of the Year, and ranked her as the seventy-third best artist of the 2000s decade. Gaga has been included in the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world as well as being listed in a number of Forbes' annual lists.
Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on March 28, 1986, in New York City. The first child of Joseph Germanotta, an internet entrepreneur, and Cynthia (née Bissett), Gaga has one sister, Natali, who was born in 1992. She is of Italian and more distant French-Canadian ancestry. Gaga is left-handed and began learning to play piano at the age of 4, went on to write her first piano ballad at 13, and began performing at open mike nights by the age of 14. Raised as a Roman Catholic on Manhattan's Upper West Side after the family moved there in 1993, Gaga attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, from the age of 11. Despite the affluence of the Upper West Side, Gaga stressed that she did not come from a wealthy background, stating that her parents "both came from lower-class families, so we've worked for everything—my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father." She described her academic life in high school as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview, "I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn't fit in, and I felt like a freak." Acquaintances dispute that she did not fit in at school. "She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1," recalled a former high school classmate.
An avid actor in high school musicals, Gaga portrayed the lead roles of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. both at Regis High School. She also appeared in a very small role as a mischievous classmate in the television drama series The Sopranos in a 2001 episode titled "The Telltale Moozadell". At age 16, she began to sing and play in front of live audiences and unsuccessfully auditioned for parts in New York shows. When her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart came to an end, her mother encouraged her to apply to New York University to study drama and performance – specifically the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21), which is a faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts.
At age 17, Gaga gained early admission and lived in a NYU dorm on 11th Street. There, she studied music and sharpened her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, social issues and politics. Gaga wrote a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst; research that prepared her for her future career focus in "music, art, sex and celebrity." Gaga felt that she was more creative than some of her classmates. "Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," she said. Being part of such a prestigious performance course, Gaga tried out for and won auditions while at CAP21, including the part of an unsuspecting diner customer where MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show, was being filmed. Notwithstanding these achievements, by the second semester of her sophomore year, she withdrew from the school to focus on her musical career. Her father agreed to pay her rent for a year, on the condition that she re-enroll at Tisch if she was unsuccessful. "I left my entire family, got the cheapest apartment I could find, and ate shit until somebody would listen," she said.
Settled in a small apartment on Rivington Street towards the summer of 2005, Gaga recorded a couple of songs with hip-hop singer Grandmaster Melle Mel, for an audio book accompanying the children's book The Portal in the Park, by Cricket Casey. She also began a band called the Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand) with some friends from NYU – guitarist Calvin Pia, bassist Eli Silverman and drummer Alex Beckham – in September of that year. The band played a mixture of songs, some self-penned, along with classic rock numbers like: Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er". Playing in Lower East Side bars like The Bitter End and the Mercury Lounge. The band developed a small fan base and caught the eye of music producer Joe Vulpis. Soon after arranging time in Vulpis' studio beneath a New Jersey liquor store in the months that followed, SGBand were selling their extended plays Words and Red and Blue at gigs around New York while becoming a local fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene.
While at the peak of their career, SGBand performed at the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at The Cutting Room in June where Wendy Starland, a singer and model, appeared as a talent scout for music producer Rob Fusari who was searching for a female singer to front a new band. After Starland had informed Fusari of Gaga's ability, he contacted her. By this time, SGBand had grown apart and Gaga left to work with the music producer in New Jersey where she would travel daily to work on songs she had written and compose new material. While in collaboration, Fusari compared some of her vocal harmonies to those of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen. It was Fusari who helped create the moniker Gaga after the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". Gaga was in the process of trying to come up with a stage name when she received a text message from Fusari that read "Lady Gaga." He explained, "Every day, when Stef came to the studio, instead of saying hello, I would start singing 'Radio Ga Ga'. That was her entrance song. [Lady Gaga] was actually a glitch; I typed 'Radio Ga Ga' in a text and it did an autocorrect so somehow 'Radio' got changed to 'Lady'. She texted me back, "That's it." After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She's like, "Don't ever call me Stefani again." The New York Post, however, has reported that this story is incorrect, and that the name resulted from a marketing meeting.
Although the musical relationship between Fusari and Gaga was unsuccessful at first, the pair soon set up a company titled Team Lovechild, in which they recorded and produced electro-beat pop tracks and sent them to music industry bosses. Joshua Sarubin, the head of A&R at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and vied for the record company to take a chance on her "unusual and provocative" performance. After having his boss Antonio "L.A." Reid in agreement, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September 2006 with the intention of having an album ready in nine months. However, she was dropped by the label after only three months. Devastated, Gaga returned to the solace of the family home for Christmas as well as the nightlife culture of the Lower East Side. Becoming fascinated with some of the emerging neo-burlesque shows, Gaga began go-go dancing in bars dressed in little more than a bikini. She began experimenting with drugs in addition to performing in many shows. "I was onstage in a thong, with a fringe hanging over my ass thinking that had covered it, lighting hairsprays on fire, go-go dancing to Black Sabbath and singing songs about oral sex. The kids would scream and cheer and then we'd all go grab a beer. It represented freedom to me. I went to a Catholic school but it was on the New York underground that I found myself." Her father, however, did not understand the reason behind her drug intake and could not look at her for several months. During this time, she met performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped mold her on-stage persona. Starlight explained that, upon their first meeting, Gaga wanted to perform with her to songs she had recorded with Fusari. Like SGBand, the pair began playing gigs at many of the downtown club venues like the Mercury Lounge, The Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall. Their live performance art piece was known as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue" and, billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow", was a low-fi tribute to 1970s variety acts. Soon after, the two were invited to play at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival in August that year. The show was critically acclaimed, and their performance received positive reviews. Having initially focused on avant-garde electronic dance music, Gaga had found her musical niche when she began to incorporate pop melodies and the glam rock of David Bowie and Queen into her music. While Gaga and Starlight were busy performing, producer Rob Fusari continued to work on the songs he had created with Gaga. Fusari sent these songs to his friend, producer and record executive Vincent Herbert. Herbert was quick to sign her to his label Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records, upon its establishment in 2007. She credited Herbert as the man who discovered her, adding "I really feel like we made pop history, and we're gonna keep going." Having already served as an apprentice songwriter under an internship at Famous Music Publishing, which was later acquired by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Gaga subsequently struck a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV. As a result, she was hired to write songs for Britney Spears and labelmates New Kids on the Block, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls. While Gaga was writing at Interscope, singer-songwriter Akon recognized her vocal abilities when she sang a reference vocal for one of his tracks in studio. He then convinced Interscope-Geffen-A&M Chairman and CEO Jimmy Iovine to form a joint deal by having her also sign with his own label Kon Live Distribution and later called her his "franchise player." As 2007 came to a close, her former management company introduced her to songwriter and producer RedOne, whom they also managed. The first song she produced with RedOne was "Boys Boys Boys", a mash-up inspired by Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls" and AC/DC's "T.N.T.". Gaga continued her collaboration with RedOne in the recording studio for a week on her debut album and also joined the roster of Cherrytree Records, an Interscope imprint established by producer and songwriter Martin Kierszenbaum, after co-writing four songs with Kierszenbaum including the single "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)".
Influenced by glam rock singers such as David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, as well as dance-pop artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga is well-recognized for her outré and ever-changing sense of style in music, in fashion, in performance and in her music videos. Her contributions to the music industry have accrued her numerous achievements such as five Grammy Awards—among twelve nominations—and four Guinness World Records. Gaga has sold an estimated 13 million albums and 51 million singles, making her one of the best-selling music artists worldwide. In the United States, she is among the best-selling digital artists, selling an estimated 29.3 million digital singles over the course of her career. In 2010, Billboard named her the Artist of the Year, and ranked her as the seventy-third best artist of the 2000s decade. Gaga has been included in the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world as well as being listed in a number of Forbes' annual lists.
Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on March 28, 1986, in New York City. The first child of Joseph Germanotta, an internet entrepreneur, and Cynthia (née Bissett), Gaga has one sister, Natali, who was born in 1992. She is of Italian and more distant French-Canadian ancestry. Gaga is left-handed and began learning to play piano at the age of 4, went on to write her first piano ballad at 13, and began performing at open mike nights by the age of 14. Raised as a Roman Catholic on Manhattan's Upper West Side after the family moved there in 1993, Gaga attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, from the age of 11. Despite the affluence of the Upper West Side, Gaga stressed that she did not come from a wealthy background, stating that her parents "both came from lower-class families, so we've worked for everything—my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father." She described her academic life in high school as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview, "I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn't fit in, and I felt like a freak." Acquaintances dispute that she did not fit in at school. "She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1," recalled a former high school classmate.
An avid actor in high school musicals, Gaga portrayed the lead roles of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. both at Regis High School. She also appeared in a very small role as a mischievous classmate in the television drama series The Sopranos in a 2001 episode titled "The Telltale Moozadell". At age 16, she began to sing and play in front of live audiences and unsuccessfully auditioned for parts in New York shows. When her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart came to an end, her mother encouraged her to apply to New York University to study drama and performance – specifically the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21), which is a faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts.
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While at the peak of their career, SGBand performed at the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at The Cutting Room in June where Wendy Starland, a singer and model, appeared as a talent scout for music producer Rob Fusari who was searching for a female singer to front a new band. After Starland had informed Fusari of Gaga's ability, he contacted her. By this time, SGBand had grown apart and Gaga left to work with the music producer in New Jersey where she would travel daily to work on songs she had written and compose new material. While in collaboration, Fusari compared some of her vocal harmonies to those of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen. It was Fusari who helped create the moniker Gaga after the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". Gaga was in the process of trying to come up with a stage name when she received a text message from Fusari that read "Lady Gaga." He explained, "Every day, when Stef came to the studio, instead of saying hello, I would start singing 'Radio Ga Ga'. That was her entrance song. [Lady Gaga] was actually a glitch; I typed 'Radio Ga Ga' in a text and it did an autocorrect so somehow 'Radio' got changed to 'Lady'. She texted me back, "That's it." After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She's like, "Don't ever call me Stefani again." The New York Post, however, has reported that this story is incorrect, and that the name resulted from a marketing meeting.
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