VOGUE USA (AMERICAN VOGUE) MAGAZINE-OCTOBER 2024-LADY GAGA-Brand New

Description: “”””””PLACE THE ORDER WITHOUT ANY HESITATIONS”””””” Lady Gaga on Joker: Folie à Deux, Getting Engaged, and the Joy of Making Pop Music AgainBy Jonathan Van MeterPhotography by Ethan James GreenStyled by Alex Harrington The first four or five or six times I encountered Lady Gaga, in London or Paris or New York, backstage in Vegas or Madison Square Garden or the O2 arena, at the top of the Skytree in Tokyo or from inside a giant replica of her fragrance bottle at a party at the Guggenheim, or even when, six years ago, we hung out in her kitchen in Malibu and danced and cried while listening to music—“Like, real Italian style,” she said—every single one of those times, in all of those places, she was both there and not there. She was viscerally present and accounted for but also somehow absent. This is not a complaint. Costumes have a way of upstaging people. You can get so hung up on all the finery and camouflage that you fail to see the person wearing it. A modern-day Marie Antoinette gown with a four-foot train, to take one example, doesn’t just change the way a person moves; it changes the way she behaves. “I don’t like the idea of you drinking wine out of a plastic cup,” Lady Gaga said to me one time in one such getup—a baroness proffering stemware as she minced toward me. The first time I laid eyes on her in December 2010, she was barefoot, covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, wearing a robe made of voluminous red feathers—like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird, I wrote. She was dressed like a lunatic and—you guessed it—behaving like one. On another occasion—in another astounding frock, hair in a Bride-of-Frankenstein updo—she had on shoes that made her feet look like they were screwed on backward and brought her up to nearly my height. To be clear: Gaga is tiny. But when I was still getting to know her she was acting like a woman who is six feet tall. To wit: She languidly draped her hand in mine so that I could examine her elaborately bejeweled dragon ring. “I’m going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment,” she said. “Don’t judge me.” There are pictures from these adventures. One in particular, from Tokyo, speaks volumes. She is wearing the girliest little dress imaginable, though one made out of mirrored plastic cubes, that a fan left in front of her hotel room door. Was it the dress that made her behave like we were at prom? What you cannot see in the photos are the hundreds of Japanese photographers and cameramen grunting and jockeying for position, Gaga at the center of what felt like a circular firing squad. Once, in Paris, we went out for a very late lunch to which she wore a faded lavender ball gown that swept the floor and exposed her breasts. It had the effect of making it seem like she might, at any moment, collapse. Or maybe the dress demanded she inhabit a kind of helplessness—the Victorian woman in peril, the fainting damsel. There are paparazzi pictures of us coming and going from the restaurant. Her bodyguard, a very handsome bald man, is holding on to her arm (she’s so weak!), and I look like her bodyguard’s lesser twin, perhaps a doctor carrying smelling salts, escorting a madwoman to the sanatorium. A description Gaga would have no doubt loved at the time! I don’t think I’ve ever spent more hours with someone over so many years and in so many different venues without ever getting a complete picture of who they really are. I was too swept up in the thrill of it all, the presentation of various personae, the interview as performance art. We talked for hours, and I never got the sense that she wasn’t being real with me. But I almost always flew home worried. There were a few too many unsavory people in the outer rings of the inner circle, there was too much chaos swirling around her. And then: the drinking and the smoking. It just made me a little nervous. So when one day in July she walks into Shangri-La, the Malibu recording studio owned by Rick Rubin, looking like a woman who just pulled a sweater over her sweaty tights after a spin class, I am a little taken aback. The only trace of prior Lady Gaga iterations, at least today, are her eyebrows—bleached white, which lend her face the permanent cheerful surprise of a humanoid. Shangri-La, just a few minutes from her house, is actually a midcentury dwelling that somehow became a place where rock-and-roll superstars camped out to make music. (Bob Dylan’s tour bus from the ’70s is still parked in the backyard.) Gaga recorded her country-tinged 2016 album, Joanne, here, as well as some of the music from the soundtrack to her first major film, 2018’s A Star Is Born. In fact, the place has that energy, a kind of stripped-down, Pacific Coast Highway soft rock vibe but tightened up and modernized with white walls and painted floors. Gaga has spent the better part of 2024 here, recording both a surprise project and a new pop record she has taken to calling LG7, which comes out in February. (She will release its first single in October.) As we step past the baby grand, standing alone in its own glassed-in room, and out onto the lawn, where you can smell the briny Pacific just on the other side of the hedge, she says, “I’ve developed a relationship with this place—almost like a person.” This is a classic Gaga trope, perceiving an object as human. Which reminds me of something: I had recently learned the word hyperobject, from a book by the philosopher and English professor Timothy Morton, which, to be grossly reductive, refers to things like global warming or Mexico: too complicated and too massively distributed to wrap your head around all at once. I explain this to her and add that I have begun to think of certain people as hyperobjects. Like you, I say. “Thank you,” she says, like a 10-year-old who has just received a gold star. I present that as a compliment, I say. “I receive that as a compliment,” she says. We eventually find ourselves in a windowless room in front of a mixing board. As has often been the case, she wants to play me some new music. It is, after all, her primary way of communicating who she is—not just to her fans but also to herself. “There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure,” she says, “and when I start to explore that pain it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio, I’m relaxed and I am able to face my demons and what’s remarkable is…that’s the music. I’m able to hear it back.” Order a copy to know more.........Brand New Copies!! Newsstand Edition!! Magazine Has A Barcode!!

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End Time: 2024-10-19T15:29:57.000Z

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