The conversation turns to the music industry. Gaga has an endearingly schoolmarmish belief that most acts are “lazy.”
“I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like ‘BUY IT! FUCK YOU!’ It’s mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don’t believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982.”
She explains she doesn’t mind people downloading her music for free, “because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40m for one cycle of two years touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100m. Make music—then tour. It’s just the way it is today.”
While on this huge, technically complex, sell-out world tour, Gaga has written and recorded the majority of her next album: “I don’t understand bands who say they’ll tour for one year—then record the next!” she exclaims at one point, going Thatcher again. “I make music every DAY!”
Although she “can’t talk about it yet,” she is clearly excited about the next album. She keeps trying to tell me things about it, then claps her hands over her mouth, going, “I can’t!”
“But everyone’s going to fucking know about it when it comes out,” she says, excitedly. “You know when people say ‘If you could say one sentence about who you are, what you life is?’ It’s that. For the whole album. Because I recently had this . . . miracle-like experience, where I feel much more connected to God.”
You were raised a Catholic—so when you say “God,” do you mean the Catholic God, or a more spiritual sense of “God?”
“More spiritual,” Gaga says, looking like she’s biting her tongue. “I don’t want to say much, because I want it to stay hidden until it comes out—but I will say that religion is very confusing for everyone, and particularly me, because there’s really no religion that doesn’t hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.”
“Would you play for the Pope, if he asked you?”
“Yeah,” Gaga says. There’s a pause. Perhaps she considers her current stage show, and the section where her male dancers grab their gigantic, fake white penises, and bounce them off their palms to Boys Boys Boys.
“Well. I’d do an acoustic show for the Pope,” she amends.
Astonishingly, given how late I was, Gaga has given me a full hour of interview time. I later find out that she turned down doing a video acceptance speech for the World Music Awards in order to fit me in. I feel I’ve done amazingly well, considering how badly the day started. Then Gaga puts her cup down, and turns to me.
“You should come out with us tonight,” she says, warmly. “Actually, I’ve never had a journalist come out with me, so you’d be the first. It’s going to be fun. It’s like an old sex club, in Berlin. Come party with Gaga!”
It is midnight. Gaga came off stage half an hour ago. Dressed, once again, in knickers, bra, fishnets and her black taffeta McQueen, she has been standing in freezing, driving rain outside the 02 World, signing autographs for fans.
Her fans are infamously, incredibly devoted—as she is to them. She calls them her “Little Monsters.” They draw pictures of her, get tattoos like hers, weep when she touches them. Her den-mother championing of “all the freaks”—fat girls, gay boys, lesbian girls, Goths, nerds. Everyone who gets picked on at school—allied to her global pop juggernaut, makes her relationship with her fans intense. When you watch her with them, you see that culturally, what she’s doing is . . . providing a space for them. Giving them somewhere to meet.
Then, her security guy gives the signal, and we are all bundled into people-carriers with blacked-out windows, and whizzed across Berlin.
Paps in cars try to follow us, but it seems what Gaga said earlier was true: if you spend enough money on security, they can’t follow you. She simply has two burly men stand in front of their cars, impeding them, until we have vanished.
“It’s, like, a sex party,” Gaga explains. “You know—like in Eyes Wide Shut? All I can say is, I am not responsible for what happens next. And wear a condom.”
As we take the alleyway to the sex club, security men appear and close off the alleyway with giant, blacked-out gates.
The club—The Laboratory—is an industrial, maze-like building. To get to the dance floor, you have to pass a series of tiny, cell-like booths, decked out with a selection of beds, bathtubs, hoists and chains.
“For fucking,” a German member of our entourage explains—both helpfully, and somewhat unnecessarily.
Despite the undoubted and extreme novelty of such a venue, Adrian—Gaga’s British press officer—and I give away our nationalities instantly when we comment, excitedly, “Oh my God! You can SMOKE in here!” It seems a far more thrilling prospect than . . . some bumming.
It’s a small entourage—Gaga, me, Adrian, her make-up artist, her security guy, and maybe two others. We walk onto the small dance floor, in a club filled with drag queens, lesbians dressed as sailors, boys in tight t-shirts, girls in black leather. The music is pounding. There is a gigantic harness hanging over the bar.
“For fucking,” the same German says again, helpfully.
Gaga is heading up our group. Even, like, Keane would slope off to a VIP booth at this point, and wait for people to bring them drinks.
Instead—cloak billowing, and very much looking like one of the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal—Gaga marches up to the bar, leans on it in a practiced bar-fly manner. With a bellowed, “What does everyone want to drink?” she gets the round in.
It reminds me of what was possibly the best moment of this year in Gaga world: the tabloids running a shot of Gaga—dressed only in fishnets, a bra and leather cap—sitting in a pub in Blackpool, with a pint of Stella and a plate of chips.
“I really love a dingy, pissy bar,” Gaga says. “I’m really old-school that way.”
We go into an alcove with a wipe-clean banquette—“For the fucking!” the German says, again—and set up camp. Gaga takes off her McQueen cloak, and chucks into a corner. She’s now just in bra, fishnet and knickers, with sequins around her eyes.
“Do you know what that girl at the bar said to me?” she says, sipping her Scotch, and taking a single drag off a fag before handing it back. “She said, ‘You’re a feminist. People think it means “man-hating,” but it doesn’t.’ Isn’t that funny?”
Earlier in the day, conversation had turned to whether Gaga would describe herself as feminist or not. As the very best conversations about feminism often will, it had segued from robust declarations of emancipation and sisterhood (“I am a feminist because I believe in women’s rights, and protecting who we are, down to the core.”) to musing on who she fancied (“In the video to ‘Telephone,’ the girl I kiss, Heather, lives as a man. And as someone who does like women, something about a more masculine woman makes me feel more . . . feminine. When we kissed, I got that fuzzy butterfly feeling.”)
We had concluded that it was odd most women “shy away” from declaring themselves feminists, because “It really doesn’t mean ‘man-hating.’ ”
“And now she’s just said the same thing to me! AND she’s hot!” Gaga beams. She points to the girl—who looks like an androgynous, cupid-mouthed, Jean-Paul Gaultier cabin boy. “Gorgeous,” Gaga sighs.
This is Gaga off-duty. Although the booth becomes by way of a shrine to her—between now and 4 AM, fully two-thirds of the club come over to pay obeisance to her: drag queens and tom-girls and superfreaks, all acknowledging the current definitive pop cultural salon keeper—Gaga alternates being wholly gracious and welcoming to them, and getting absolutely off her cake. With the thrill of like recognizing like, I realize she’s a total lightweight—giggly after two Scotches, dancing in the booth after three, and wholly on the prowl after four.
“Are you straight?” she asks some hot, American boy we’ve been ta
lking to at one point, in the manner of someone who needs to make plans for the rest of the evening based on the reply. When he says, regretfully, “No,” her attention seems to, amusingly, wander.
But that’s just for sex. Gaga’s devotion to, and promotion of, every aspect of gay culture is legendary. Bisexual herself, while her musical education might once have been classical, her cultural education was homosexual, and comes to a head in the video to her forthcoming single, “Alejandro.”
Sprawled across the banquette, in a mood of eager excitement, Gaga shows me stills from the video shoot on her BlackBerry. She’s dressed up as Joan of Arc, with a ferocious Purdey haircut. To be honest I can’t see much more than that, because she’s a bit pissed, and her thumbs keep getting in the way.
The video is about the “purity of my friendships with my gay friends,” Gaga explained, earlier. “And how I’ve been unable to find that with a straight man in my life. It’s a celebration and an admiration of gay love—it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery gays require to be together. In the video I’m pining for the love of my gay friends—but they just don’t want me.”
We look at the photo on her BlackBerry again.
“I’m not sure about my hair,” Gaga says, suddenly, staring at the BlackBerry.
3 AM. I am pretty wasted. I am kneeling on the banquette, with Gaga lying by my knees. I have just come up with the theory that, if you have one of your heroes lying tipsily next to you, you should tell them all the pretentious pop culture theories you have come up with about them. So I slurringly tell her that the difference between her and, say, Madonna, is that you don’t penetrate Gaga. Her songs and videos are—while sexual—about dysfunction and neuroses and alienation and self-discovery. They’re not, in any sense, a come-on. Despite having worn very little clothing for most of her career, Gaga is not a cock-tease.
“Yeah! It’s not what straight men masturbate over when they’re at home watching pornography,” she confirms. “It’s not for them. It’s for . . . us.” And she gestures around the club.
Earlier in the day, she had said—somewhat unexpectedly—“I still feel very much like an outsider. And I have zero concept of how I’m assessed in the world.” As one of the most-discussed women in the world, this is a surprise. Does she really not read her press? Perhaps this is how she’s stayed so . . . normal. Ordering drinks, chatting to everyone. She’s the least pretentious multi-million-selling artist I’ve ever met.
A minute later, Gaga springs up, and beckons for me to follow her. Weaving her way down a series of corridors, we eventually end in—the VIP toilet.
“You’re wearing a jumpsuit,” Gaga says, with feminine solidarity. “You can’t get out of one of those in the normal toilets.”
As I start to arduously unzip, Gaga sits on the toilet with a cheerful, “I’m just going to pee through my fishnets!” and offloads some of those whiskies.
For the first year of her career, massive internet rumors claimed that Gaga was, in fact a man—a rumor so strong that Oprah had to question her about it when Gaga appeared on her show.
Perhaps uniquely amongst all the journalists in the world, I can now factually confirm that Lady Gaga does not have a penis. That rumor can, conclusively, die.
4 AM. Time for bed. We pull up outside the Ritz Carlton, in a people carrier with blacked-out windows. Gaga opens the door, and totters out, looking—despite the McQueen cloak—like any tipsy twenty-three-year-old girl on a night out in Newcastle, on a Saturday night. Her gray wig looks dishevelled. Her face-sequins are wonky. Her eyes are pointing in slightly different directions—although, to be fair, I can only focus on her myself if I close one eye, and rest my head against the window. Tonight, she played to 40,000 fans. Tomorrow, it’s Sting’s Rainforest Benefit, where she takes her place among the pantheon: Debbie Harry, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John.
She leans against the car for a moment, issues a small hiccup, and then turns, dramatically.
“I. Am. KNACKERED!” she roars. She then walks, slightly unsteadily, up the steps of the Ritz Carlton hotel. A total, total dude.
Gaga is, of course, the perfect bridging subject between “ranting about gays” and “ranting about feminism.” And so we move on, to the vexed subject of wondering where all the clothes went on MTV.
MTV HOES
“I wish,” my friend Jenny tweeted last week, “there was an MTV Normal. For people who love pop—but don’t want to watch a load of girls dressed as hoes.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Twenty-first–century pop music presents one of the biggest vexes for the modern feminist—and by “feminist” I mean “all women,” really; unless you have recently and decisively campaigned to have your voting rights removed.
When I was a teenager, all my pop heroes were Britpop and grunge—unisex jeans and sneakers for all. I was raised with the expectation that, if I wanted to, I could sell twenty million albums with my upper arms covered at all times.
My daughters, on the other hand, are being raised in the Era of the Pop Ho. This is a time when the lower slopes of Britney Spears’s leotard-clad pubis mons are more recognizable than—although oddly redolent of—David Cameron’s face, and pop videos for female artists have become so predictable, I can run you through what will happen in 90 percent of them, right here:
1. “Just checkin’ my legs are still there.” Self-groping which begins with a lascivious sweep across the collarbone, develops into decisive breast-rubbing, and then ends with some pretty full-on caressing of your own buttocks, belly and thighs. The ubiquity of this dance move is baffling: however much healthy, positive self-love a woman has, she’s still not going to be this mesmerized and excited by having an arse by the age of twenty-three. She knows it’s there. She doesn’t have to keep checking. By and large, women generally can keep their hands off themselves for the three minutes it takes to make a pop video. I know up to nine women, and none of them have ever had to excuse themselves from the table, saying, “Sorry—just going to feel myself up in the coat closet. Back in a moment.”
2. Having sex with an invisible ghost. Sooner or later, every modern popstress is going to have to vibrate in a squatting position, in order to pleasure the Ghost of Christmas Horny. That’s what we ladies do in 2011. We hump spooks.
3. “Making your booty touch the ground.” Women of pop—if you want to get to Number One, you will, at some point, have to make your “booty” (bottom) touch the ground. It is as regulation a move in twenty-first–century pop as having incredibly dry-looking hair was in the 1980s. Of course, making your booty touch the ground isn’t that difficult—almost any woman can do it, given a full minute or so to get down and up again, and allowed to repeatedly say “Ouf!” and “Argk!” while clutching at the mantlepiece. In the scheme of things, it’s no biggie. But what may sadden the viewer, after a couple of hours, is noting how “booty grounding” is solely the province of women. You never see the boys doing it—despite them having legs that are anatomically identical to women’s, and rocking the considerable advantage of not being in six-inch heels. I have never seen Bob Dylan make his booty touch the floor. It is not something that was asked of Oasis.
4. “Having some manner of liquid/viscous substance land on your face, then licking it off lasciviously.” In no other field of human experience does someone busily engaged in their work—in this case, miming to their latest single—have something land on their face, and react with anything other than a cry of “WHAT? WHAT IS GOING ON? I am gonna start effin’ and jeffin’ if we cannot keep the rain-machine/mud/custard off my face, Andrew. Just—stop hurling stuff at me! I’m trying to look thoughtful! I sold fifteen million singles last year!”
Do not get me wrong. It’s not as if I dislike women acting all fruity in videos—I was raised on Madonna. Beyoncé and Gaga are my girls. Put the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself on, and I will terrify you on the dance floor. Literally ter
rify you. You will want to leave.
It’s just the . . . ubiquity of female pop stars dressing up as hoes that’s disturbing. It’s as weird and unnerving as if all male pop stars had decided, ten years ago, to dress up as farmers. All the time. In every single video. Imagine! Sitting down to watch your 5,000th video incorporating a hay-baler, and a man in a straw-covered gilet giving medicine to a coughing ewe. You’d think all men had gone insane. But that’s what it’s like with the women, and the ho-ing.
Anyway, I’ve finally found the best moral through route for watching MTV with my daughters, without making them feel that if they want to sell twenty million albums, they must dress like hoes. And it is pity. Every time we see Rihanna on her hands and knees with her coccyx hanging out of her knickers, my girls will shake their heads, sadly, and say, “It is a great song—but we feel sorry for Rihanna. If she was really one of the biggest pop stars in the world, she’d be allowed to wear a nice cardigan once in a while. Poor Rihanna. Poor, cardigan-less Rihanna.”
Rihanna has too few clothes. Someone in a burqa, meanwhile, could be argued to have too many. Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman. Your wardrobe might as well have “socio-sexual-political minefield” written on it.
I lifted a paragraph of this column—on burqas—from How to Be a Woman, but have included it in full here, because the idea of a “woman-made religion” continues to deeply intrigue me, to the point of maybe making one myself. After all, how much did L. Ron Hubbard coin off inventing Scientology? And that’s a bollocks religion. People being controlled by tiny aliens inside? You’ve just lifted that off The Twilight Zone, Ron. It’s pathetic.
BURQAS: ARE THE MEN DOING IT?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve whiled away hours imagining how different the world would would be if the major religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hindusim—had been invented by women. As someone who had atheism burned into them when they were fifteen and noticed a) all the terrible, unanswered suffering in the world and b) the first growths of a desperately unwanted woman-mustache, apparently given to me by a cruel God, my subsequent interest in theology became one of sociological curiosity: looking at religions’ rules, and working out why people thousands of years ago would have invented those particular guidelines in the first place.