Lady Gaga to guest judge on 'SYTYCD'

This could be fun to watch actually! While I am not a huge fan of hers, I do like “Edge of Glory”, “Pokeerface”, and “Bad Romance” and have to admit she has the “it” factor. Curious abouth er clothing choice that night though (her clothes are way out there).

Q: What did the banana say to the vibrator?
A: Why are YOU shaking? She’s going to eat me!

She cant dance very well though. They should of got beyonce or shakira. Now they can dance.

Her outrageous antics and risqué lyrics have made her the world’s most powerful celebrity – not bad for a spoilt piano-virtuoso daddy’s girl educated at private school…

THE announcement in the Newark Star-Ledger was hardly designed to set the world alight. In a column headed New Jersey People it announced that Joseph ­Germanotta, previously president of the business development company Global Touch Inc and a man with 10 years’ experience in telecoms and data services, had been made ­president and chief operating officer of Infocrossing Inc, a company ­hosting the servers, routers and switches for the new-fangled internet.

The item, published on the eve of the new millennium in December 1999, might have added that Mr Germanotta, known to his friends as Joe, was a family man with a wife called Cynthia, two daughters called Stefani and Natali, and an apartment on Manhattan’s smart Upper West Side.

Stefani, if anyone wanted to know, was a demure 13-year-old attending the conservative but prestigious ­Convent of the Sacred Heart, where two of her schoolmates were the Hilton hotel heiresses Paris and Nicky. Although Joe was crazy about his ­fellow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen he was determined that his daughter would have refined achievements and she had studied classical piano from an early age.

Yesterday, barely more than a ­decade on, that same Stefani Germanotta was named the world’s most powerful celebrity by the business magazine Forbes, knocking Oprah Winfrey off the top spot. As the magazine noted, she has 10 million Twitter followers and 32 million Facebook friends. A million people downloaded her recent single Born This Way in five days, making it the fastest-selling song in the history of iTunes, the online music shop. For good measure Forbes also named her the world’s seventh most powerful woman.

These days she is universally known as Lady Gaga and there is nothing remotely refined about her. The respectable, upwardly mobile girl from a well-heeled Manhattan background has reinvented herself as the world’s most showy performance artist. She has variously appeared with fire blazing from her breasts, dressed from head to toe in nothing but meat, and sitting on the lavatory in a music video. She has also become the queen of pop whose every new single creates global headlines and a breathless rush for downloads, with suggestive lyrics such as: “I want to take a ride on your disco stick.”

Taking Madonna, Andy Warhol and Grace Jones as her heroes and also borrowing from the showmanship of Freddie Mercury, she is a striking contrast to the manufactured sameness of most of the pop industry. As one music critic says: “She is a self-invented, self-composing, self-­choreographed pop missile on a mission to explode preconceptions.”

Gaga’s rise to the top would make a meteor look sluggish. Her first single was released in Britain less than two-and- a-half years ago and she has still only released one album. Yet by the time she appeared on BBC1’s Graham Norton Show last week – in a Miss Havisham-style wedding dress and veil over a gold-spiked headdress with Gothic tear-drop make-up – she was the undisputed empress of the studio. Repeatedly interrupted by a man shouting “I love you Gaga!” from the audience, she effortlessly upstaged Oscar-winners Gwyneth Paltrow and Geoffrey Rush as if she had been world famous all her life.

At her expensive Catholic convent school she was something of a misfit. “I never saw those girls for more than 10 seconds down the hallways,” she has said of the Hilton sisters. “I was the arty girl, the theatre chick. I dressed differently and I came from a different social class from the other girls.” Yet she never showed quite how different she really was. “I suppressed all those eccentricities about myself so I could fit in,” she says. “Once I was free, I was able to be myself. I pulled Gaga out of me and I found that all of the things about myself that I so desperately tried to suppress for so many years were the very things that all my art and music friends thought were so lovely about me, so I embraced them.”

She enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she wrote a thesis on Spencer Tunick, the photographer who assembles crowds of naked ­people in locations around the world. But then she dropped out of college and moved to the grungy Lower East Side where she started appearing half-naked in burlesque shows alongside drag queens and gogo boys. Acquiring a hefty cocaine habit, she started to experiment with the extravagant ­costumes that are now her trademark.

Her father was horrified. He stopped talking to her for a while – to her distress – after coming to see her at one of these dives. “I was performing in a leopard G-string and a black tank top,” she recalled. “He thought I was crazy. It wasn’t, ‘She’s inappropriate’ or ‘She’s a bad girl’ or ‘She’s a slut.’ He thought I was nuts, that I was doing drugs and had lost my mind and had no concept of reality any more. It was an issue of sanity.”

She had indeed lost the plot for a while. But then she remembered her ferocious ambition and packed in her drug habit. By 2006 she had hooked up with a New Jersey-based record producer called Rob Fusari who encouraged her – in the face of her great initial reluctance – to add dance beats to the songs she had written. She was still determined to develop a look that would get people talking but Fusari invented her new name, derived from the Queen song Radio Ga Ga. “That’s it,” she told him. “Don’t ever call me Stefani again.”

Her album was called The Fame, and fame was what it brought her. She remains the first artist in the ­history of the US Billboard chart to have all her first six singles reach number one. At the same time she has remained as much an artist – using herself as her canvas – as a pop star. “What makes Gaga different from Madonna is that she’s a performance artist operating in the mainstream,” celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton has said. “She takes Grace Jones and Yoko Ono and makes it pop.”

Insisting that she never turns off the Gaga persona and never appearing in any costume less than outrageous, she has left feminist theoreticians wrangling over whether she is a cynical self-packager or a force for something greater. The American academic Camille Paglia denounced her fundamental lack of sex appeal (even her most devoted fans agree that she is not particularly pretty).

“How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?” Paglia wrote. “Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution?”

As another writer countered, that missed the point. “For her fans, one of Gaga’s key attractions is precisely her ­dismissal of traditional, feminine sex appeal, of the need to be charming, of the values and aesthetic of other female singers: the ripe, pert bodies, the pretty, familiar costumes,” she wrote. She added that the vocally bisexual singer’s apparent lack of interest in dating makes her even more unique: “Gaga has carved out a space where she can stand alone and that loneliness actually heightens, rather than diminishes her power.”

To stimulate debate at that level, whatever you think of Gaga herself, is quite extraordinary for a 25-year-old with only one album to her name. Her second is out next week and it’s a fair bet that the records will go on being smashed and the chatter, both high and low-brow, will continue.

Happily for the lady once known as Stefani, relations with her parents are now fully restored. So proudly has Joe Germanotta embraced his daughter’s career that he now sports a tattoo in the shape of the lightning strike she sometimes paints on her face.

As the woman who last year earned £56million cheerily told Graham ­Norton: “Dad’s very happy now.”