Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress Redux
Jul, 20 2011
You gotta hand it to Lady Gaga; she’s a true visionary of The Whole Package, like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Freddie Mercury, or Elton John. The Gaga persona has gone through a number of stunning moments – she’s got horns, she was hatched from an egg, she has claws, and on and on. Yet perhaps the most gasp-worthy moment was when she wore a dress made of raw beef to the MTV Video Music Awards last year.
Shortly after the show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acquired the iconic sheath, but was flummoxed as to how to preserve the already decomposing dress. So they put the gown on ice, literally and figuratively, and two months later contacted Los Angeles area taxidermist, Sergio Vigilato, to figure out how to best display it.
In an article from the Los Angles Times, Vigilato outlined the process he used to get the 35-pound dress display ready.
Vigilato used bleach, formaldehyde, and detergent to remove bacteria. To display it, he patterned a dress form and glued the meat slabs to it. He then dyed it deep red to resemble its original color. The dress had been designed and constructed by Franc Fernandez and stylist Nicola Formichetti out of thinly cut flank steak.
-Court
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MTV Gets Music Award Season Underway
Nov, 9 2010
Lady Gaga dominated MTV’s European Music Awards this past Sunday in Madrid, picking up awards for best female, best pop act and best song ("Bad Romance"), kicking off an award season that culminates with the Grammy Awards and BRIT Awards in February.
Of the top winners at the EMAs, only one was not American: 16-year-old Canadian pop star Justin Bieber beat out Eminem and Kanye West to pick up the coveted best male prize.
Ke$ha won best new act, Paramore best alternative, and Katy Perry took the best video category for California Gurls. Bon Jovi closed the show having been awarded the inaugural Global Icon title.
The prizes were decided by popular vote on MTV's Europe Awards website, which received 46 million votes in total.
The same night at Australia's ARIA awards, the top prize for international artist went to English folk rockers Mumford & Sons, who beat out Gaga, Eminem and The Black Eyed Peas, among others.
Though past EMA and ARIA winners haven’t necessarily parlayed their victories into Grammy wins, Gaga’s latest release, The Fame Monster, has spawned the most Top 10 hits in Billboard chart history -- seven -- surpassing Michael Jackson's six for Thriller, which puts the pop starlet in prime position come February.
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Lady Gaga Wins 8 VMAs
Sep, 13 2010
The advent of MTV was largely responsible for the extra emphasis on image in pop music in the 1980s, as song exposure on the channel required videos and videos required artists to be creative with visuals. So it's no surprise that the 21st century's most visually creative pop artist, Lady Gaga, was the big winner at MTV's Video Music Awards on Sunday night, taking home eight awards including Video Of The Year, Best Female, Best Female Video and Best Dance Video, all for "Bad Romance."
While this year featured no surprise acceptance speech interruptions, Gaga ensured her acceptance of the biggest prize, Video Of The Year, would be talked about further by wearing a dress, hat and purse that looked like it was made of raw meat. Having recently worn a meat bikini for the cover of Japan's mens' Vogue magazine, it seems Gaga thinks about fashion even when she visits the butcher's.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift performed a new song called "Forgiveness" that seemed to be about Kanye West's interruption of her at last year's ceremony. "Thirty-two and still growing up now," she sang, "who you are is not what you did, you're still an innocent." The song will appear on her upcoming third album, Speak Now.
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Lady Gaga's Fame Still Monstrous
Jul, 6 2010
If you were in any doubt as to Lady Gaga’s dominance over modern pop culture, social network statistics site Famecount.com has revealed that Gaga has more Facebook fans than any other living person -- including President Obama. Gaga has almost 10m fans, putting her above Obama (9.4m), Justin Bieber (5.9m), Taylor Swift (5.8m), and every other human except for the late Michael Jackson (14.1m).
Meanwhile, fan Ian Clark from Blyth in the north of England took a joke with his 4 year old step-daughter a little too far when he decided to name his newborn daughter Meggie Maisie Lady Gaga. The proud father explained “When I asked the children what we should call the new baby, Maddy said we should call her Lady Gaga. I just thought it was a great name and I’m sure the bairn will find it funny when she’s older.”
Mum Melanie is still in shock. "I can’t believe he actually went ahead and did it," she said, "the more someone tells Ian he shouldn’t do [something], the more he wants to."
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Gaga's New Album: A Cake With Bitter Jelly
Jun, 23 2010
One of the many things Lady Gaga is very good at is keeping herself constantly in the public eye. She does it every day by wearing outrageous clothes, even when she's doing mundane non-pop star things like visiting her friends, ensuring photographers have more images of her for magazines and blogs; and she does it by carefully timing her musical releases and making sure each one is an event by accompanying singles with extravagant, exciting videos. Following 2008's debut album The Fame, and 2009's redux The Fame Monster, Gaga is on the verge of releasing a new album in 2010: right on time.
"I've been working on it for months now, and I feel very strongly that it's finished right now," she told Rolling Stone. "It came so quickly. Some artists take years; I don't. I write music every day." She hasn't revealed its title yet but it probably won't be something long: "I think I'm gonna get the album title tattooed on me and put out the photo," she said.
On the contents, Gaga suggested that unhappy recent experiences might influence its direction. "The message of the new music is now more bitter than it was before," she said, "because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be."
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"How Much!?" Gaga Faces $30m Lawsuit
Mar, 20 2010
You know you're doing well when people start asking you for money; you know you're doing very well indeed when someone sues you for $30m. That is what's happened to Lady Gaga, who is probably the biggest pop star in the world right now, and according to ex-producer Rob Fusari, that's largely down to him.
The connection between Gaga and Fusari has been well documented: Fusari took then-struggling musician Stefani Germanotta under his wing in 2006, gave her the stage-name Lady Gaga and helped her develop her unique style, and helped her write and produce songs for her debut album including the worldwide hit "Paparazzi." The pair also became romantically involved.
However, their relationship has since soured. "When those personal relationships evolve into romantic entanglements," the lawsuit explains, "any corresponding business relationship usually follows the same trajectory so that when one crashes they all burn. This is what happened here." Fusari admits to having received around $600,000 for Gaga-related work, but claims he's owed a lot more: about fifty times more. Lady Gaga has not publicly responded to the claim.
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Metalheads Go Gaga
Mar, 13 2010
What is or is not a music genre is always up for debate, because only some are defined on purely musical merit; others refer to the intended audience or the background of the performer, and others are just buzzwords designed to bring attention to specific artists.
It’s arguable that of all the big genres, metal is the most sub-divided: endless hours have been spent by long-haired fans in dark bedrooms deciding which specific label to assign to each particular nuance of cacophony. There’s always room for a new sub-genre in metal and the most recent tenuous suggestion is Gaga Metal. One-by-one metal fans are shamefacedly admitting to their love for Lady Gaga, as fans have been mashing her chart-topping hits with the ear-splitting guitars of their more typical fare. Of course there’s a Facebook group too, where Gaga Metalheads can join in discussions of their new guilty pleasure and share their favorite clips.
There’s no word from the Lady herself on what she thinks of this unlikely development, but when we say that the whole world seems to have gone Gaga, we really mean it.
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Lady Gaga Romps The Brits
Feb, 17 2010
The Brit Awards is the celebration of British musical talent, but the real winner at Tuesday night’s ceremony was an American.
Lady Gaga not only walked away with three awards, but wowed audiences with another unique performance. Home-grown talent made quite a splash, with strong performances from scene newcomers Florence and the Machine, who picked up Best British Album for Lungs, and X-Factor runners-up JLS who scooped British Breakthrough Act and British Single (for “Beat Again”). But the show belonged to Gaga, who picked up International Breakthrough Act, International Female Solo Artist and International Album (for The Fame).
Special awards went to artists from yesteryear, which included Oasis and Robbie Williams. A special shout-out went to the Spice Girls who received a vote of confidence from International Male award winner, Jay-Z, who cited them as an inspiration when picking up his Brit statue.
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The Day Lady Gaga Met Her Majesty
Dec, 11 2009
Lady Gaga has become famous for her stunning and controversial stage shows; her fake suicide, blood-drenched performance at the VMAs was played to a theater audience which didn’t know whether to clap or cry. When she performed for Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Variety Performance on Monday night, she remembered to tone down her act accordingly. Gone was the fake gore, the wheelchair dancing and the gallows-hanging finale, to be replaced by a comparatively demure performance in a floor-length, cleavage-covering scarlet latex gown, with a piano suspended 10ft above the stage. The decision to turn down the Gaga heat was not entirely left up to her, as she had been advised that the suicide scene would be inappropriate for a performance in front of the 83-year old British monarch. But Gaga didn’t mind, saying “it doesn't matter because I'm a massive fan of the Queen -- I was so excited and have even been practicing my curtsy”. Lady Gaga was sharing the bill with fellow performers including Miley Cyrus, Mika and Alexandra Burke.
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Lady Gaga
Sep, 14 2009
Say what you like about Lady GaGa's musical talents, but her seemingly endless capacity for making a spectacle of herself is very entertaining. In July, GaGa appeared on German TV wearing a suit of stitched-together Kermit The Frogs, which he seems to have interpreted in a complimentary way because on Sunday they stepped out together. She turned up for MTV's Video Music Awards ceremony at New York's Radio City Music Hall with Kermit as her date. "It's our first date, but we've been eyeing each other for a while," she told reporters, before Kermit remembered Miss Piggy might be watching and insisted "We're just friends!" In the venue, she watched the ceremony with a white bird's nest on her face, and gave a fairly normal performance of "Paparazzi," for the first two minutes at least; then things got really weird. A wheelchair-bound dancer was pushed on-stage, then as the shoulder-dancer was wheeled off again, GaGa straddled and pretended to play a piano, before blood shockingly appeared to spill from her chest. Groaning and moaning and covered in red, she was hoisted up on a rope as the song came to an end, from which she dangled, lifeless, staring with glazed-over eyes at the bewildered crowd. The Lady is dead; long live the Lady!
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Lady Gaga
Jul, 16 2009
GaGa is more than music; GaGa is a press machine; a look, a sound, and an unending battery of soundbites. The 23 year old singer has married an insatiable ambition and work ethic with an astute keenness to provoke and challenge convention, resulting in a stellar rise to the top of the pop heap. The latest in a long line of headline-grabbing comments is her assertion that she is unlikely to marry: “I think my parents thought I’d be married by now, but I rebelled against that whole life. I’m unconventional, I’m a rebel.” Certainly her carefully crafted pop-art image seems incompatible with 2.4 kids and a white picket fence, and it seems likely that there is a lot more than one platinum-selling album of perfect pop to come from the pint-sized singer; but even Madonna settled down in the end. Though she is keen to shrug off comparisons between herself and the Material Girl, the parallels are becoming clearer to the most casual observer.
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Lady Gaga
May, 10 2009
Lady GaGa hearts The Beatles. We know this because she was recently quoted as saying: “I’m quite sure that if it were 1968 I may not be the Lady GaGa that I am today. I might be arguing with Yoko Ono and trying to win John Lennon]’s heart and chasing The Beatles in a bus on LSD, hoping that one of them hands me a microphone one day.” She adds that her platinum-selling debut album The Fame was inspired in part by her listening to the Fab Four’s Abbey Road, on repeat for six months – “It's so incredibly brilliant - an innate sense of joy - they really had that down. It's full of joy with a hat of tips to the melancholy." So far so good, but the soundbite we're struggling to agree with is the one drawing parallels between the adulation of Beatlemania and Disneymania: “Now we have the Jonas Brothers representing the return of the superfan”. Even Lady GaGa’s short career has been more impressive than that of the squeaky clean boys from New Jersey -- they’ve still to have a No.1 single after all -- so maybe she was just being cheeky.
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Lady Gaga
Mar, 19 2009
Lady Gaga's debut album, The Fame and the accompanying singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face," have dominated the upper reaches of the pop charts in several countries this year, and her frank, entertaining personality shines through in the many interviews which she gives. The 22 year old Italian-American girl from Yonkers, New York has worked hard to invent herself as a self-assured, kooky pop star and eclectic fashion queen, having served her apprenticeship writing tunes for huge acts like the Pussycat Dolls and Britney. Her style has been likened to some of pop’s finest, and she happily cites them as role models -- Madonna, Christina, Amy -- Amy, really? We don’t imagine that Amy Winehouse has often been cited as a role model, but Lady Gaga credits her with being the champion of the ‘strange,’ paving the way for a different kind of star. “I will always have a very deep love for Amy Winehouse," she told PopEater. "Because of Amy, very strange girls like me go to prom with very good-looking guys.” With Amy still separated from her husband Blake, and facing yet another courtroom battle (for the assault of a fan), let’s hope she’s at least feeling the love from Lady Gaga.
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