Lady Gaga
After signing with Interscope Records in 2007, Gaga achieved global recognition with her debut album, The Fame (2008), and its reissue, The Fame Monster (2009). The project yielded a string of successful singles, including "Just Dance", "Poker Face", and "Bad Romance", which made her one of the few artists with at least three Diamond-certified songs in the US.
Her second studio album, Born This Way (2011), explored electronic rock and techno-pop and sold 1.1 million copies in the US in its first week. Its title track became the fastest-selling song on the iTunes Store, with over one million downloads in less than a week. Following her electronic dance music-influenced third album, Artpop (2013), she pursued jazz on the album Cheek to Cheek (2014) with Tony Bennett, and delved into soft rock on the album Joanne (2016).
Gaga also ventured into acting, gaining praise for her leading roles in the miniseries American Horror Story: Hotel (2015โ2016) and the films A Star Is Born (2018) and House of Gucci (2021). Her contributions to the A Star Is Born soundtrack, which spawned the chart-topping single "Shallow", made her the first person to win an Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Grammy Award in one year.
Gaga returned to her early sound with the pop-oriented albums Chromatica (2020) and Mayhem (2025), which respectively included the number-one singles "Rain on Me" and "Die with a Smile". She also continued to explore jazz with Love for Sale (2021), her second and final album with Bennett, and the soundtrack Harlequin (2024).
Gaga has seven number-one albums on the Billboard 200 and six number-one songs on the Billboard Hot 100. She is the first female artist with four singles that each sold at least 10 million copies globally and holds the record for the most-attended concert by a woman. The highest-paid female musician in 2011, she has received 16 Grammy Awards, 22 MTV Video Music Awards, 2 Golden Globe Awards, a Sports Emmy Award, and a recognition from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Gaga's philanthropy and activism focus on mental health awareness and LGBTQ rights. Her business ventures include vegan cosmetics brand Haus Labs and the non-profit Born This Way Foundation, which supports the wellness of young people.
Life and career
1986โ2004: Early life
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Her parents are Cynthia Louise (nรฉe Bissett), a philanthropist and business executive, and Joseph Germanotta, an Internet entrepreneur; both have Italian ancestry.
According to Gaga, her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. They raised Gaga and her younger sister, Natali, in an upper-middle-class Catholic family on the Upper West Side. From age 11, Gaga attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side.
She has described her high-school self as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" and somewhat insecure. She considered herself a misfit and was mocked for being provocative and eccentric.
At age four, Gaga began playing the piano when her mother insisted that she become "a cultured young woman". She took piano lessons and practiced throughout her childhood. The lessons taught her to learn music by ear, which she preferred over reading sheet music. Her parents encouraged her to pursue music and enrolled her in Creative Arts Camp.
As a teenager, she played at open mic nights. She played the lead roles of Adelaide in the play Guys and Dolls and Philia in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School. She also studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for 10 years. Her screen debut was a background appearance in the 2000 music video for the AC/DC song "Stiff Upper Lip".
Gaga unsuccessfully auditioned for New York theater productions; she appeared in a background role as a high-school student in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos titled "The Telltale Moozadell". Fan interest in that episode increased when a clip of Gaga's scene surfaced online in 2010.
In 2003, Gaga gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. There, she improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues, and politics, including a thesis on the pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. In 2005, Gaga withdrew from school during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career.
That year, she also played a restaurant customer on MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show.
In a 2014 interview, Gaga discussed being raped at age 19 by her producer, and undergoing emotional and physical therapy for the trauma. She later revealed that following the assault, her rapist dropped her off pregnant near her parents' house because she was sick and vomiting. Gaga has post-traumatic stress disorder which she attributes to the rape; she said the trauma has changed her as a person and will never leave her.
2005โ2007: Career beginnings
In 2005, Gaga recorded two songs with rapper Melle Mel for an audiobook accompanying the Cricket Casey children's novel The Portal in the Park. She also formed a band called the SGBand with some friends from NYU. They played gigs around New York and became a fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene. After the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at the Cutting Room in June, talent scout Wendy Starland recommended Gaga to music producer Rob Fusari.
He collaborated with Gaga, helping her develop songs and compose new material. He said they began dating in May 2006, and claimed he was the first person to call her "Lady Gaga", which was derived from the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga". According to Fusari, the name was coined when he attempted to call her "Radio Ga Ga" in a text message, with his phone's spell checker autocorrecting "Radio" to "Lady". Their relationship lasted until January 2007.
Fusari and Gaga established a company called Team Lovechild, LLC to promote her career. They recorded and produced electropop tracks, sending them to music industry executives. Joshua Sarubin, the head of Artists and Repertoire at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and, after approval from his boss Antonio "L.A." Reid, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September 2006.
She was dropped from the label three months later, a decision which Reid later said was the biggest mistake of his life. Following this, Gaga began performing at neo-burlesque shows, and said these represented freedom to her. During this time, she met the performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped mold her onstage persona.
The pair began performing at downtown club venues like the Mercury Lounge, the Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall. Their live performance art piece, known as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue" and billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow", was a tribute to 1970s variety acts. They also performed at the 2007 Lollapalooza music festival.
Having initially focused on avant-garde electronic dance music, Gaga began to incorporate pop melodies and the glam rock style of David Bowie and Queen into her songs. While Gaga and Starlight were performing, Fusari continued to develop the songs he had created with her, sending them to the producer and record executive Vincent Herbert.
In November 2007, Herbert signed Gaga to his label Streamline Records, an imprint of Interscope Records, which had been established that month. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her. Having served as an apprentice songwriter during an internship at Famous Music, Gaga struck a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
As a result, she was hired to write songs for Britney Spears, New Kids on the Block, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls.
At Interscope, the singer Akon was impressed with Gaga's singing ability when she sang a reference vocal for one of his tracks in studio. Akon convinced Jimmy Iovine, chairman and CEO of Interscope Geffen A&M Records (a sister company of Def Jam), to form a joint deal by having Gaga also sign with his own label KonLive Distribution, and described her as his "franchise player".
According to Gaga, some radio stations found her early music too "racy", "dance-oriented", and "underground" for the mainstream market, to which she responded: "My name is Lady Gaga, I've been on the music scene for years, and I'm telling you, this is what's next."
2008โ2010: Breakthrough with The Fame and The Fame Monster
By 2008, Gaga had relocated to Los Angeles to complete her debut album, The Fame, and to set up her own creative team called the Haus of Gaga, modeled on Andy Warhol's The Factory. Gaga collaborated with the songwriter-producers RedOne and Martin Kierszenbaum on The Fame, which was released on August 19, 2008 by Cherrytree Records, an Interscope imprint established by Kierszenbaum.
The album reached number one in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, as well as the top five in Australia and the United States. Its first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", reached number one in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. "Poker Face" was also the world's best-selling single of 2009, with 9.8 million copies sold, and spent a record 83 weeks on Billboard magazine's Digital Songs chart.
Three other singles, "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)", "LoveGame" and "Paparazzi", were released from the album, with "Paparazzi" reaching number one in Germany. Remixed versions of the singles from The Fame, except "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)", were included on Gaga's extended play (EP) Hitmixes in August 2009.
At the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, The Fame and "Poker Face" won Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Recording, respectively. Gaga was the most awarded artist at the 2010 Brit Awards, winning in three categories.
Following her opening act on the Pussycat Dolls' 2009 Doll Domination Tour in Europe and Oceania, Gaga headlined her worldwide The Fame Ball Tour, which ran from March to September 2009. While traveling the globe, she wrote eight songs for The Fame Monster, a reissue of The Fame. The new songs were also released as a standalone EP on November 18, 2009.
The first single, "Bad Romance", was released one month earlier and was number one in Canada and the UK, and number two in Australia, New Zealand and the US. "Telephone", with Beyoncรฉ, followed as the second single from the EP and became Gaga's fourth UK number one. Its third single was "Alejandro", which reached number one in Finland; its music video was deemed blasphemous by the Catholic League.
Both "Telephone" and "Alejandro" reached the top five in the US. The video for "Bad Romance" became the most watched video on YouTube in April 2010. That October, Gaga became the first person with more than one billion total YouTube views.
At the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, Gaga won eight awards from 13 nominations, including Video of the Year for "Bad Romance". She was the most nominated artist for a single year, and the first woman to receive two nominations for Video of the Year at the same ceremony. The Fame Monster won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album, and "Bad Romance" won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. Rolling Stone featured "Bad Romance" and its music video on their respective lists of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and "100 Greatest Music Videos of All Time" in 2021.
In 2009, Gaga spent a record 150 weeks on the UK Singles Chart and became the most downloaded female act in a year in the US, with 11.1 million downloads, earning an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. Worldwide, The Fame and The Fame Monster together have sold more than 15 million copies, and the latter was 2010's second best-selling album.
Its success allowed Gaga to start her second worldwide concert tour, The Monster Ball Tour, and release The Remix, her final record with Cherrytree Records and among the best-selling remix albums of all time. The Monster Ball Tour ran from November 2009 to May 2011 and grossed $227.4 million, making it the highest-grossing concert tour for a debut headlining artist.
Concerts performed at Madison Square Garden in New York City were filmed for an HBO television special, Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden.
During this era, Gaga ventured into business, collaborating with consumer electronics company Monster Cable Products to create in-ear, jewel-encrusted headphones called Heartbeats by Lady Gaga. She also partnered with Polaroid in January 2010 as their creative director and announced a suite of photo-capture products called Grey Label.
Her collaboration with her past record producer and ex-boyfriend Rob Fusari led to a lawsuit against her production team, Mermaid Music LLC. At this time, Gaga was tested borderline positive for lupus but claimed not to be affected by the symptoms and hoped to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
2011โ2014: Born This Way, Artpop, and Cheek to Cheek
In February 2011, Gaga released "Born This Way", the lead single from her studio album of the same name. The song sold more than one million copies within five days, earning the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling single on iTunes. It debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the 1,000th number-one single in the history of the charts.
Its second single "Judas" followed two months later, and "The Edge of Glory" served as its third single. Both reached the top 10 in the US and the UK. Her music video for "The Edge of Glory", unlike her previous work, portrays her dancing on a fire escape and walking on a lonely street, without intricate choreography and back-up dancers.
Born This Way was released on May 23, 2011, and debuted atop the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 1.1 million copies. It sold eight million copies worldwide and received three Grammy nominations, including Gaga's third consecutive nomination for Album of the Year. Rolling Stone listed the record among "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2020. Born This Way's following singles were "You and I" and "Marry the Night", which reached numbers 6 and 29 in the US, respectively.
Its track, "Bloody Mary", became a resurgent success and was released as a single in 2022. While filming the "You and I" music video, Gaga met and started dating actor Taylor Kinney in July 2011, who played her love interest. She also embarked on the Born This Way Ball tour in April 2012, which was scheduled to conclude the following March, but ended one month earlier when Gaga canceled the remaining dates due to a labral tear of her right hip that required surgery.
While refunds for the cancellations were estimated to be worth $25 million, the tour grossed $183.9 million globally.
In 2011, Gaga also worked with Tony Bennett on a jazz version of "The Lady Is a Tramp", with Elton John on "Hello Hello" for the animated feature film Gnomeo & Juliet, and with The Lonely Island and Justin Timberlake on "3-Way (The Golden Rule)". On October 15, 2011, she performed an exclusive, one-off concert in Los Angeles for the "A Decade of Difference" event, celebrating the 65th birthday of former US President Bill Clinton.
In November 2011, she was featured in a Thanksgiving television special titled A Very Gaga Thanksgiving, which attracted 5.7 million American viewers and spawned the release of her fourth EP, A Very Gaga Holiday. In 2012, Gaga guest-starred as an animated version of herself in an episode of The Simpsons called "Lisa Goes Gaga", and released her first fragrance, Lady Gaga Fame, followed by a second one, Eau de Gaga, in 2014.
Gaga began work on her third studio album, Artpop, in early 2012, during the Born This Way Ball tour. She crafted the album to mirror "a night at the club". In August 2013, Gaga released the album's lead single "Applause", which reached number one in Hungary, number four in the US, and number five in the UK. A lyric video for Artpop track "Aura" followed in October to accompany Robert Rodriguez's Machete Kills, where Gaga plays an assassin named La Chameleon.
The film received generally mixed reviews and earned less than half of its $33 million budget. The second Artpop single, "Do What U Want", featured singer R. Kelly and was released later that month, topping the charts in Hungary and reaching number 13 in the US. Artpop was released on November 6, 2013, to mixed reviews.
Helen Brown of The Daily Telegraph criticized Gaga for making another album about her fame and doubted the record's originality, but found it "great for dancing". The album debuted atop the Billboard 200 chart, and sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide as of July 2014. "G.U.Y." was released as the third single in March 2014 and peaked at number 76 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
๐ Source: Wikipedia
