On Tuesday evening, Lady Gaga wowed a crowd of Google employees and promoted the company’s Google Moderator service with a live interview from the company’s California campus. There was a Gaga look-alike contest, many awkward Gaga-rific costumes, and of course, the Lady herself, shilling her new record Born This Way. Here are some of the fascinating tidbits we learned from her hour-long interview with Google’s vice-president of consumer products, Marissa Mayer.
Her entourage taunts her with food.
Gaga often travels with an entourage of friend and musicians from New York, and they like to prank her. “There’s a lot of backstage shenanigans. Very often they make jokes about my diet because they know I have to stay fit for videos, so they’ll leave mounds of cheeseburgers and stuff in my dressing room. It’s really awful. It’s vicious.”
Her security detail kind of hates her.
“My security, they want to shoot me. Because I will literally leave the house and go to the bodega down the street where I live in New York and they’re like, “Where are you?” Where I live, I have been hustling for so long, it’s more just like, “You’re home.” Even though my first album was called The Fame, that was never the goal with all of this.”
The kids that used to bully her contact her for concert tickets now.
“There’s been lots of concert ticket requests. I think one of the most awkward things anyone ever said to me was, ‘Well my my, how the tables have turned.’ To be honest, I don’t have that kind of vengeful spirit and I never did. I say this with so much genuineness in my heart: Bullying stays with you your whole life. I was never the winner. I was always the loser, and that still stays with me.”
Gaga does the same vocal exercises she’s been doing since she was 11.
“I vocally rehearse every single day. I do a 30-minute warm-up every day. It’s been the same vocal warm-up since I was 11 years old.”
Marissa Mayer is a total dork.
During the interview, Mayer shared her 2009 Halloween pic of herself as Gaga with Gaga, her Google audience, and millions of YouTubers.
All of Gaga’s tattoos are on the left side of her body.
“It was actually per my father’s request. He asked that I remain, on one side, slightly normal.”
Gaga loves “David After Dentist.”
When asked what her favorite YouTube video is that isn’t hers, she responded, “It’s so embarrassing but I love it so much. I love the boy, when he comes home from the dentist! Whenever I’m really tired before I do a show, I always go, ‘Is this real life?’”
Lady Gaga would like to take her fans “away from the computer.”
“The fan experience that takes them a bit away from the computer in terms of the actual purchase of the song. I want to encourage the fans to experience the music and the lyrics removed of that sort of behind-the-computer banter. When I was a kid I was standing outside of HMV praying that I saw Billie Joe’s fingernail waiting to get my Green Day CD signed. That’s what I want to re-create for my fans.” Titters from the Google audience.
Despite writing a song called “Paparazzi,” she isn’t plagued by them.
“I have to be really honest: People who say they can’t escape the paparazzi are full of shit. Let me just be the artist to throw everybody under the bus. I don’t spend lots of money on houses or lots of cars, but I do spend money on security and they never find me.”
Lady Gaga doesn’t know about Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday.”
But, still! “I say Rebecca Black is a genius, and anyone who’s telling her she’s cheesy is full of shit.”
She’s addicted to yoga.
“I’m very into yoga. I’m actually really into crazy hot yoga in hundred-degree rooms. It’s the only thing I feel I can be really bad at and nobody knows. I guess that’s the thing about fame that’s difficult. If you screw up [pauses] Google is there.”
