[Artwork by BEN HEINE]
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Before the meeting, I assumed that someone with a stage name like “Lady” (her given name is Stefani Joanne Germanotta) was going to be a bit standoffish—that’s the strategy employed by most nervous young musicians on the occasion of their first real interview, in any case. But I never thought she was going to actually be Lady Gaga. These days, very few artists play the media like Bob Dylan, or stay in character as Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh did in his early career. In the age of VH1’s Behind the Music, tabloid culture, and reality television, musicians are aware that they should show themselves to journalists in as much mundane detail as they can muster. “But Lady Gaga is my name,” she said, amazed that I would have thought otherwise. “If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.”
Gaga eased into a brown leather couch with as much grace as possible given her outfit, a stiff white jumpsuit with a jacket cut from a Martin Margiela pattern, the enormous shoulder pads stuffed underneath the fabric extending toward her ears. At five-two and 100 pounds, with her hair styled into a mod blonde bob, she looked flush from a strict diet of starvation: “Pop stars should not eat,” she pronounced. She was young, skinny, and blonde, but she had a prominent Italian nose, the kind of nose that rarely survives on a starlet. (This was during Gaga’s “hair-bow” phase—that would be pre-hair-hat and pre-hair-telephone—and when I asked about the bow’s whereabouts, she rested her head on a pillow of her hands and said, “She’s sleeping.”) In the hallway near her table, families of tourists took pictures of one another with cameras, unaware of her presence, and she recoiled dramatically at every flash. “Oh, cameras,” she said, shielding her eyes. “I cannot bear the cameras.” MORE