Lady gaga's wikipedia

Lady Gaga...
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (/ˈstɛfəniː dʒʌrməˈnɑːtə/; born March 28, 1986), better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to focus on her musical career. She began performing in the rock music scene of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and by the end of 2007, was signed with Streamline Records. Employed as a songwriter for the record company, her vocal abilities captured the attention of recording artist Akon, who signed her to his label Kon Live Distribution.
Lady Gaga came to prominence as a recording artist following the release of her debut album The Fame (2008), which was a critical and commercial success that topped charts around the world and included the international number-one singles "Just Dance" and "Poker Face". After embarking on the Fame Ball Tour, she followed the album with The Fame Monster (2009), which spawned the worldwide hit singles "Bad Romance", "Telephone" and "Alejandro" and allowed her to embark on the eighteen-month long Monster Ball Tour, which later became one of the highest-grossing concert tours of all time. Her most recent album Born This Way (2011) topped the charts of most major markets and generated more international chart-topping singles that include "Born This Way", "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory". Beside her musical career, she involves herself with humanitarian causes and LGBT activism.
Influenced by such acts as David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Queen, Lady Gaga is well recognized for her flamboyant, diverse and outré contributions to the music industry through fashion, performance and music videos. She has sold an estimated 23 million albums and 64 million singles worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time and her singles some of the best-selling worldwide. Her achievements include four Guinness World Records, five Grammy Awards and thirteen MTV Video Music Awards. Lady Gaga has consecutively appeared on Billboard magazine's Artists of the Year (scoring the definitive title in 2010), is regularly placed on lists composed by Forbes magazine, and was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Biography

1986–2004: Early life
Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on March 28, 1986, in New York City.[5] Brought up in the family home in Manhattan's Upper West Side, Lady Gaga is of Italianand more distant French-Canadian descent, and is the daughter of Cynthia (née Bissett) and Joseph Germanotta, an internet entrepreneur. The elder of two children, Lady Gaga has one sister, Natali, a fashion student, who was born in 1992.Lady Gaga has stressed that – despite her seemingly affluent upbringing – she did not come from a wealthy background, stating that her parents "both came from lower-class families, so we've worked for everything—my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father."
From the age of 11, Lady Gaga – who was raised Roman Catholic – attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side.She described her academic life in high school as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview, "I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn't fit in, and I felt like a freak." Acquaintances dispute that she did not fit in at school. "She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1," recalled a former high school classmate.
Being part of such a prestigious performance course, she sharpened her songwriting skills while composing essays and analytical papers on art, religion, social issues and politics including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst; such research prepared her for her future career focus in "music, art, sex and celebrity." She also tried out for and won auditions while at CAP21, including the part of an unsuspecting diner customer where MTV's Boiling Points – a prank reality television show – was being filmed.Notwithstanding these achievements, she felt that she was more creative than some of her classmates."Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," she said. By the second semester of her sophomore year, she withdrew from the school to focus on her musical career.Her father agreed to pay her rent for a year, on the condition that she re-enroll at Tisch if unsuccessful. "I left my entire family, got the cheapest apartment I could find, and ate shit until somebody would listen," she remembers.

2005–07: Career beginnings
Settled in a small apartment on Rivington Street towards the summer of 2005,Lady Gaga recorded a couple of songs with hip-hop singer Grandmaster Melle Mel, for an audio book accompanying the children's book The Portal in the Park, by Cricket Casey. She also began a band called the Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand) with some friends from NYU – guitarist Calvin Pia, bassist Eli Silverman, drummer Alex Beckham and booking manager Frank Fredericks[28] – in September of that year.The band played a mixture of songs: some self-penned alongside classic rock numbers like Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er". Playing in bars like the Greenwich Village's The Bitter End and the Lower East Side's the Mercury Lounge, the band developed a small fan base and caught the eye of music producer Joe Vulpis. Soon after arranging time in Vulpis' studio in the months that followed, SGBand were selling their extended plays Words and Red and Blue at gigs around New York while becoming a local fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene.
Although the musical relationship between Fusari and Lady Gaga was unsuccessful at first, the pair soon set up a company titled Team Lovechild in which they recorded and produced electropop tracks and sent them to music industry bosses. Joshua Sarubin, the head of A&R at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively and vied for the record company to take a chance on her "unusual and provocative" performance. After having his boss Antonio "L.A." Reid in agreement, Lady Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September 2006 with the intention of having an album ready in nine months. However, she was dropped by the label after only three months – an unfortunate period of her life that would later inspire her treatment for the music video for her 2011 single "Marry the Night".Devastated, Lady Gaga returned to the solace of the family home for Christmas and the nightlife culture of the Lower East Side. She became increasingly experimental: fascinating herself with emerging neo-burlesque shows, go-go dancing at bars dressed in little more than a bikiniin addition to experimenting with drugs. Her father, however, did not understand the reason behind her drug intake and could not look at her for several months."I was onstage in a thong, with a fringe hanging over my ass thinking that had covered it, lighting hairsprays on fire, go-go dancing to Black Sabbath and singing songs about oral sex. The kids would scream and cheer and then we'd all go grab a beer. It represented freedom to me. I went to a Catholic school but it was on the New York underground that I found myself." It was then when she became romantically involved with a heavy metal drummer in a relationship and break-up she likened to the musical film Grease: "I was his Sandy, and he was my Danny, and I just broke." He later became an inspiration behind some of her later songs.[

2008–10: The Fame and The Fame Monster


Lady Gaga performing at The Fame Ball Tour in 2009
By 2008, Lady Gaga had relocated to Los Angeles, where she worked extensively with her record label to complete her debut albumin addition to setting up her own creative team – modeled on Andy Warhol's Factory – Haus of Gaga. Intensive work continued on the album, combining genres "from Def Leppard drums and hand claps to metal drums on urban tracks" while drawing inspiration from 1980s synthpop and incorporating dance music with clear hooks. The Fame, described as an exploration of her obsession with fame and the intricacies of a rich and famous lifestyle, was first released on August 19, 2008, preceded by lead single "Just Dance" four months earlier. Due to radio play being slow, Lady Gaga supported the releases by performing in the backwaters of Malta and Vietnam in addition to small gay clubs around the United States.She was also billed as a supporting artist on the North American leg of New Kids on the Block's reunion concert tour.
A sleeper hit, "Just Dance" hit the summit of the charts in six countries – Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States – in January 2009. The Grammy Award-nominated songprovoked the instant success of The Fame. Receiving positive reviews from contemporary critics who commended Lady Gaga's ability to discover a melodious hook and compared her vocal abilities to those of Gwen Stefani, the album went to number-one in countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Ireland while appearing in the top-five in Australia, the United States and fifteen other countries.On Billboard's Dance/Electronic Albums chart, it stayed at the top spot 106 non-consecutive weeks. Since its release, The Fame has sold over 12 million copies worldwide. Lady Gaga achieved an even greater unexpected success when "Poker Face", another sleeper hit, reachedumber-one in almost all major music markets in the world including the United Kingdom and the United States in early 2009.The follow-up single won the award for Best Dance Recording at the 52nd Grammy Awards over nominations for Song of the Year and Record of the Year, while The Fame was nominated for Album of the Year and won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronica Album. Lady Gaga was the recipient of many other honors in 2009 including the accumulation of 3 of 9 MTV Video Music Awards nominations – she won Best New Artist while the video for her single "Paparazzi" gained the awards for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects– and Billboard magazine's Rising Star award. In addition to being an opening act on the Pussycat Dolls' Doll Domination Tour during the first half of 2009 on their legs in Europe and Oceania, she also embarked on her own six-month critically appreciated worldwide concert tour The Fame Ball Tour which ran from March to September 2009

2011–present: Born This Way
Lady Gaga's second studio album and third major release Born This Way was released on May 23, 2011. Described as "a marriage of electronic music with major [...] metal or rock 'n' roll, pop, anthemic style melodies with really sledge-hammering dance beats" and referred to as an album "about what what keeps us up at night and what makes us afraid", she stated. Lady Gaga characterized her new music as "something so much deeper than a wig or lipstick or a fucking meat dress" and upon hearing it, Akon remarked that she is taking music to the "next level".Its arrival followed the release of its eponymous lead single "Born This Way" on February 11, 2011,which was performed live for the first time at the 53rd Grammy Awards two days after its release. The song, dealing with self-acceptance regardless of race or sexual orientation, debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the 19th number-one debut and the 1,000th number-one single in the history of the charts, while selling more than 3 million digital copies in the United States by October 2011, becoming her eighth consecutive single to exceed the sales of two million. A music video was released for the song, showing Lady Gaga giving birth to a new race amidst surrealistic images; critics noted artistic and cultural references and praised its concept. Lady Gaga lent her vocals elsewhere, pairing with Elton John to record an original duet for the animated feature film Gnomeo & Juliet. The song, titled "Hello, Hello", was released on February 11, 2011, without Lady Gaga's vocals. The duet version was only featured in the film.In February, Lady Gaga's concerts of her then-ongoing tour at Madison Square Garden in New York City, were filmed for an HBO special aired in May. The special was nominated for five Emmy Awards.
Two other singles, "Judas" and "The Edge of Glory",as well as a promotional single, "Hair", were eventually released before the album. The music video for "Judas", in which Gaga portrays Mary Magdalene, and Biblical figures such as Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot are also featured, was criticized for its religious references; the video, nonetheless, received acclaim for its overall delivery and praise from others who claimed that there was nothing offensive about it. "Judas" additionally peaked within the top ten in several major musical markets. "The Edge of Glory" was intended as a promotional single; nevertheless, due to commercial success in digital outlets,the song was released as a single to critical appreciation, accompanied by a music video. Gaga also undertook a job as a fashion columnist for V, where she wrote about her creative process, her studying of the world of pop culture, and her ability to tune into the evolution of pop-culture meme.Upon release, Born This Way sold 1.108 million copies in its first week in the United States, debuting atop the Billboard 200, and topping the charts in more than 20 other countries. The album received generally positive reviews from music critics, who praised its range of different styles as well as her vocals.Later, Lady Gaga went to Sydney to promote Born This Way with a one-of-a-kind concert at the Sydney Town Hall on July 13, 2011


Musical and performance style
Lady Gaga's musical and performance style has been the subject of much analysis and scrutiny of critics. She professes that she is "liberating" herself by constantly reinventing her image and sound, insisting that it is a practice she has been drawn to since her childhood. Her career has been a continuous experimentation with new musical ideas and images in constant quest for new heights of fame and acclaim.
Vocally, Lady Gaga has drawn frequent comparison to the ranges of Madonna and Gwen Stefani. Possessing the range of a contralto, Lady Gaga exhibits "overwhelming expression, instinctive vocal phrasing, '80s rock reminiscent chest belts and animalistic vocal ticks" while being able to move through 2.4 octaves. Lady Gaga, who refuses to lip sync,has manipulated her vocal style over the course of her career yet considers Born This Way (2011) "much more vocally up to par with what I've always been capable of."In summation of her voice, Entertainment Weekly wrote, "There's an immense emotional intelligence behind the way she uses her voice. Almost never does she overwhelm a song with her vocal ability, recognizing instead that artistry is to be found in nuance rather than lung power."
Although her early lyrics have been criticized for lacking intellectual stimulation, "[Gaga] does manage to get you moving and grooving at an almost effortless pace." She admits that her songwriting has been misinterpreted; her friend and blogger Perez Hilton articulated her message in a clearer way: "you write really deep intelligent lyrics with shallow concepts." Lady Gaga opined, "Perez is very intelligent and clearly listened to my record from beginning to end, and he is correct. "I love songwriting. It's so funny – I will just jam around in my underwear or I could be washing my dishes. I wrote several songs just at the piano," she confesses.[149] Gaga believes that "all good music can be played at a piano and still sound like a hit."[150] She has covered a wide variety of topics in her songs: while The Fame (2008) meditates on the lust for stardom, The Fame Monster (2009) expresses fame's dark side through monster metaphors. Born This Way (2011) is sung in English, French, German and Spanish and includes common themes in Lady Gaga's controversial songwriting like love, sex, religion, money, drugs, identity, liberation, sexuality, freedom and individualism.
Her performances are described as "highly entertaining and innovative"; the blood-spurting performance of "Paparazzi" at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards was described as "eye-popping" by MTV. She continued the "blood soaked" theme in The Monster Ball Tour, in which she wore a revealing leather corset and is "attacked" by a performer dressed in black who gnaws on her throat, causing "blood" to spurt down her chest, after which she lies "dying" in a pool of blood. Her performances of that scene on tour in England triggered protests from family groups and fans in the aftermath of a local tragedy, in which a taxi driver had murdered 12 people. "What happened in Bradford is very fresh in people's minds and given all the violence which happened in Cumbria just hours earlier, it was insensitive," said Lynn Costello of Mothers Against Violence. Her unconventionality continued at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards when she performed in drag as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, and delivered a lovesick monologue before a performance of her song "Yoü and I". Chris Rock has defended her flamboyant and provocative behavior. "Well, she's Lady Gaga," he said. "She's not 'Lady Behave Yourself.' Do you want great behavior from a person named Gaga? Is this what you were expecting?

Philanthropy

Besides her career in music, Lady Gaga has also contributed to various charities and humanitarian works. In 2011, she launched her own non-profit organization, the Born This Way Foundation, which focuses on youth empowerment and issues like self-confidence, well-being, anti-bullying, mentoring, and career development. "My mother and I have initiated a passion project. We call it the Born This Way Foundation," Gaga said in a statement about the foundation, which takes its name from the eponymous 2011 single and album. "Together we hope to establish a standard of Bravery and Kindness, as well as a community worldwide that protects and nurtures others in the face of bullying and abandonment." The foundation will work with a number of partners, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The California Endowment and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

For natural disasters, Gaga has also helped various relief efforts. Although declining an invitation to appear on the single "We Are the World 25" to benefit victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, she donated the proceeds of her January 24, 2010 concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall to the country's reconstruction relief fund. All profits from her official online store on that day were also donated. Lady Gaga announced that an estimated total of $500,000 was collected for the fund. Hours after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, Gaga tweeted a message and a link to Japan Prayer Bracelets. All revenue from a bracelet she designed in conjunction with the company was donated to relief efforts. As of March 29, 2011, the bracelets raised $1.5 million.However, attorney Alyson Oliver filed a lawsuit against Lady Gaga in Detroit in June 2011, noting that the bracelet was subject to a sales tax and an extra $3.99 shipping charge was added to the price. She also believed that not all proceeds from the bracelets would go to the relief efforts, demanding a public accounting of the campaign and refunds for people who had bought the bracelet. Lady Gaga's spokesperson called the lawsuit "meritless" and "misleading".On June 25, 2011 Lady Gaga performed at MTV Japan's charity show in Makuhari Messe, which benefited the Japanese Red Cross