Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
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You know, they say that most workaholics are that way because it’s an addiction and a way to avoid other things.
LADY GAGA: In so many ways, my music also heals me. So is it heroin, and I need the fix to feel better? Or is it that music is healing? I guess that’s the big question. When you work as hard as I do, or you resign your life to something like music or art or writing, you have to commit yourself to this struggle and commit yourself to the pain. And I commit myself to my heartbreak wholeheartedly. It’s something that I will never let go. But that heartbreak in a way is my feature. It’s a representation of the process of my work. As artists we are eternally heartbroken.
That is total Rilke.
LADY GAGA: That’s Rilke right here (shows tattoo of a passage from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke on her upper arm). It’s in German.
I didn’t mean to get so deep so early . . .
LADY GAGA: I’m deeper than you thought (laughs). And we didn’t talk about my favorite wacky outfit.
I was going to ask if you thought workaholism was a way of avoiding intimacy and the vulnerability that comes with that.
LADY GAGA: Well ( hesitates), sex is certainly not like a priority at the moment.
Sex is different than intimacy.
LADY GAGA: I guess I view sex and intimacy as the same. But I’m at a different place in my life now than I was two years ago. So I guess I’m a woman now.
In what way do you mean?
LADY GAGA: I just . . . I don’t know when or why you realize that you’ve become a woman, but I’m a woman. I think different. I feel different. And I care less and less about what people think as the hours go by. I feel very strong. But (whispers) I don’t know.
A lot of times you seem to choose good-looking guys who are dumb to sleep with, because your heart is safe that way . . .
LADY GAGA: I’ve done that.
Whereas with intimacy, that’s being able to show someone who you are and your vulnerabilities, and them being able to do the same, and both of you knowing you’re safe.
LADY GAGA: Well, there’s very few people I can do that with. I do it with my fans. I’m very intimate with my fans. I mean last night onstage, I told them about my grandpa [being hospitalized].
But now that you’ve sworn off romantic love in your life, you do treat the audience kind of like a lover. Like last night, you were telling them, “No pop star’s gonna treat you like I treat you.” It’s what you might say to a boyfriend you don’t want to lose.
LADY GAGA: I see that now. That’s interesting. But there’s some things I keep sacred for myself. And as someone who has written two albums about it, I have the right to choose whether or not I want to be a celebrity and I don’t want to be one. And I feel that I’m relatively clever enough to control that people pay attention more to my music and to my clothing than they do to my personal life. Trust me, I’d much rather people write about what I wear and what I’m singing and what I do in my videos than writing about who I’m fucking. I mean, that, for me, is the kiss of death.
Do you feel like you’re sacrificing certain parts of yourself and your life for your art and career?
LADY GAGA: It’s kind of good for me, though, isn’t it? Because what if we want to date? We’re not gonna tell anybody. And we’re gonna lie profusely that we’re not together. And if you’re like, “Why don’t you want people to know?” then I know you’re with me for the wrong reasons, so I’m like, “Fuck off.”
But the danger of lying is that you’re seen as hypocritical, like when Britney Spears said she was a virgin.
LADY GAGA: Okay, I’m not a virgin. The cat’s out of the bag.
The point being that the more you try to hide things—
LADY GAGA: I guess what I’m trying to say is, this is show biz for me. It might not be show biz for the rest of you, but for me, this is show biz. If I were to ever, God forbid, get hurt onstage and my fans were screaming outside of the hospital, waiting for me to come out, I’d come out as Gaga. I wouldn’t come out in sweatpants because I busted my leg or whatever.
And that’s what Michael [Jackson] did. Michael got burned and he lifted that glittered glove so damn high so his fans could see him because he was in the art of show business. That’s what we do. Some people don’t. They want to relate in a different way. I don’t want people to see I’m a human being. I don’t even drink water onstage in front of anybody because I want them to focus on the fantasy of the music and be transported from where they are to somewhere else. People can’t do that if you’re just on earth. We need to go to heaven.
[Continued . . .]
In 2002, Alanis Morissette released the first album she’d ever produced by herself. As part of this emancipation, she sang about one of her earliest experiences of exploitation in the music industry: when she was pressured at age fourteen into having a relationship with her twenty-nine-year-old producer. The song, “Hands Clean,” became perhaps the first single explicitly dealing with statutory rape to hit the top forty.
I’m surprised that your record label let “Hands Clean” come out as the first single, since it’s so controversial.
ALANIS MORISSETTE: Some people at the record label knew exactly what it was about and others actually didn’t. But I think once I explained it to them, it made a little more sense.
How much did you tell them about it?
MORISSETTE: I told them everything other than the identity of the person.
Had you been wanting to write about it for a long time?
MORISSETTE: I’ve been wanting to face the truth about it with my own self for a long time. I believe there is a distinct difference between privacy and secrecy, and for a long time I [put] them both into the same category. But then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I can still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent about it at the same time. So it was a pretty revelatory moment. I also do know in the same breath that I have a little ways to go, particularly with that subject (pauses, laughs). I have a ways to go in every other department, too, that’s pretty obvious.
Did the experience affect your trust of other people in the music business?
MORISSETTE: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve had trust issues up until, you know, about thirteen seconds ago, to say the least. It’s formed my view of not only the industry, but society in terms of patriarchy and power struggling and all of that.
Do you think of what happened as statutory rape?
MORISSETTE: Basically it could be categorized as that, but at the same time, I’m not one to really categorize. I’m the kind of person that will say “a person that I’ve been spending time with in a romantic way” rather than saying my boyfriend. So I’ll say “someone that I was romantically linked to at a time when I was emotionally not necessarily prepared for it” as opposed to qualifying it as, like, statutory rape.
How did you end up getting out of the situation?