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kottke.org posts about Lady Gaga

Photo shoot of Lady Gaga before she was Gaga

When Stefani Germanotta was working as a waitress in the West Village in the summer of 2005 (anyone know where?), her coworker Malgorzata Saniewska shot a series of photos of her at Germanotta’s parents’ apartment.

Gaga Before Gaga

A year or two later, Germanotta became Lady Gaga.


Gaga cured her meat dress!

Of course she did. No word on if my local butcher will be offering cured Gaga flank steak as well.


Lady Gaga’s musical family tree

Do you get that funny feeling that you’ve heard Lady Gaga’s Born This Way somewhere before? Maybe when it was called Express Yourself or Waterfalls or God is a DJ?

A+ for the performance too. Everything is a Remix, folks.


New Lady Gaga only 99 cents on Amazon

That’s not a typo…Lady Gaga’s Born This Way is only a buck on Amazon.


Country version of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way

Lady Gaga released a country version of her latest single, Born This Way. This isn’t a remix or cover…it’s an official release by Gaga.

I don’t care for country music much, but this really makes me smile. (via ★capndesign)


Bieber, Gaga, and Netflix: Internet heavyweights

Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter’s infrastructure. Netflix Instant accounts for 20% of all non-mobile internet usage in the US during prime time. Now David Galbraith has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show Lady Gaga racking up a big bandwidth bill for Google:

My rough estimate: Lady Gaga has cost Google 10 petabytes in bandwidth same as 10,000 text messages for everyone on earth. If Lady Gaga’s Google bandwidth was charged at what ATT charges for SMS, it would have cost: 10.5 trillion dollars.

The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP’s basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?


Lady Gaga flank steak, $7.99 lb.

Lady Gaga’s meat dress at the MTV Video Music Awards inspired my local butcher shop to run a special on flank steak.

Lady Gaga flank steak


Lady Gaga sings about Java programming

Ok, so it’s not Gaga (and certainly not Christopher Walken), but she does work “object oriented” into the lyrics.

This is possibly the best production of the worst idea I’ve ever seen.


Lady Gaga’s Poker Face read by Christopher Walken


kottke.org post about Lady Gaga mention

Posting this one mainly for the title: Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga, a perfectly succinct skewering of the HuffPo-lead SEO crapathon that is online headline writing these days. All that’s missing is the 20 misspelled tags — Gene Weingarten, Gene Wiengarten, Gene Weingarden, Jean Weingarten, Gene Wine Garden, etc. — for true Master Douche-level SEO. (via the browser)


Pomplamoose covers Lady Gaga’s Telephone

Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of “production as performance” video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term “VideoSong”:

This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).

As NPR explains, the band is actually making a living from their covers…they sold 100,000 songs last year. Here’s their album of covers on iTunes.


The making of Lady Gaga

A long article from last week’s New York magazine about how Lady Gaga came to be. There are waaaay too many great quotes by Gaga in this article to pull out just one. What’s the phrase?…if Lady Gaga weren’t real, we’d have to invent her. Which I guess someone did.


Chatroulette cover of Lady Gaga’s Telephone

There are many Telephone video remixes out there; this one is my favorite. (thx, jacob)


The hidden meaning of Lady Gaga’s Telephone video

Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:

Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.


Telephone, music video, Lady Gaga, Beyonce

This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.


Lady Gaga + typeface = awesome

Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.

(via @caterina)