Free Poker Face by Maureen Callahan

take on Gaga as a client. He said no. Her look was a problem. She and Fusari pressed on. They posted finished versions of “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” on MySpace. Gaga also did a “media buy”—basically, she bought space to be featured prominently for a couple of weeks—at PureVolume.com. It was an interesting choice; the site is mainly devoted to emo, which, without diminishing it, is a genre mainly devoted to lodging complaints: at the world, at one’s parents, at romantic interests that are largely unrequited, at one’s friends, at oneself. Gaga’s Euro-inflected, get-fucked-up-and-dance aesthetic was at utter odds with the site’s: It was the prom queen playing Dungeons & Dragons on a Friday night in some geek’s moldy suburban basement, or the social outcast daring to sit with the cool kids in the back of the bus, depending on your worldview.
    “I was very confused as to why she would be doing such a huge push on PureVolume,” says Sarah Lewitinn, who, at the time, worked in A&R at Island/Def Jam. “I thought she had a good voice, but it was hard to tell what was going on. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to go for a Michelle Branch, Paramore angle or what. She had a very different look to her than anything you would see on PureVolume. It didn’t really show any of the David-Bowie-meets-Madonna-meets-Britney-Spears angles that she eventually transformed into.”
    Gaga was still trying to decode her own artistic DNA: She knew that she—like all musical acts—needed a look that was a distinct image that would become a marketable, readily identifiable brand. But she had no idea what it should be.
    For all her later talk about being an artsy misfit outsider, she was really just a nice Catholic girl from the Upper West Side who was never a big reader, who shopped at expensive, generically tasteful boutiques like Olive and Bette’s, who just wanted everyone to like her.
    “I was the girl,” she told her label’s biographer, “with [Britney’s] name written all over my face, crying at TRL because I saw her hand.” Her vocal coach, at sixteen, was Don Lawrence, who’d also worked with Mick Jagger, Bono, and Christina Aguilera. “Gaga’s parents always had her connected with the best people,” says Sullivan. “She worked with [Don] always.” To this day, she travels with a recording of Lawrence’s vocal exercises.
    Lawrence introduced the young Stefani to execs at the Disney Channel and suggested she audition to replace the lead singer of a sugary teen girl group called No Secrets, who appear on their album cover in matching white jeans and unfortunate two-tone hoodies. They got their start in 2001, in the Fordlândia teenage factory that produced the ’N Sync/Britney/Christina Aguilera/Backstreet Boys teen-pop explosion of the nineties, first singing backup for Backstreet Boy Nick Carter’s scrawny, abrasive little brother, Aaron, on the unfortunately titled songs “Oh Aaron” and “Stride (Jump on the Fizzy).”
    “It gave me a taste of the record industry,” Gaga said of making the teen-pop-factory rounds. “I thought I was about to become Whitney Houston. But you don’t realize what that takes until later.”
    While shopping around for a record deal, Gaga continued booking as many live shows as she could, now sometimes performing as the Plastic Gaga Band. “I played in every club in New York City,” she said. “I bombed in every club, and then I killed it in every club. I did it the way you are supposed to: Y ou go and you play and pay your dues and work hard.” Around this time, Besencon was convinced to see her live; he did, and he finally signed on to manage her.
    The viral success of the two singles she’d posted online became her leverage with record labels; she was a best seller in cyberspace, so why wouldn’t they take a meeting with her?
    “She is perfectly, almost genetically engineered to be a twenty-first-century pop star,” says Eric Garland. As