Tweets. Leaks. Titillation. Sacrilege.
Is this any way to roll out an album?
No, Lady Gaga is not taking the usual route as she prepares to release her "Born This Way" album on May 23. But the route she is taking is quintessential Gaga: messy, loud and attention-getting, as befits an artist who calls herself "the jester to the kingdom."
Her latest act of provocation, or piece of strategy, is the single "Judas," which leaked onto the Internet last week -- just in time to cause a fuss, prompt charges that she is anti-religion, and get enough attention that when it was officially released on iTunes, it immediately became the service's top seller.
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Like one of her clear role models, Madonna, Gaga is no stranger to a little commercially potent blasphemy: The video for her song "Alejandro" was attacked by the Catholic League last year.
But "Judas," with its release originally scheduled for the Tuesday of Easter week until the leak accelerated its release by four days, is provocation on a different level.
A love song of sorts to the man who Christians believe betrayed Jesus … sitting at number one on the charts this week… and accompanied by a video in which Lady Gaga plays Mary Magdalene … Well, it's all but designed to draw the kind of attention it got from Catholic League president Bill Donohoe, who said (before he'd heard the song or seen the video), "She is trying to rip off Christian idolatry to shore up her talentless, mundane and boring performances."
Some music critics weren't much kinder -- Caryn Ganz calls it "a noisy, directionless collage of half-finished ideas" -- but Lady Gaga's not selling to the Catholic League, or to music critics.
She's selling to her 10 million Facebook friends (she was the first living person to hit that milestone), her 9,458,015 Twitter followers, and the YouTube fans who made her the first artist with one billion views.
And for those fans (monsters, she calls them), a little controversy only serves to stir up attention and rally the faithful.
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"Gaga is a digital baby," her manager, Troy Carter, said at a tech conference in 2010. "That's how they communicate."
So her m.o. of attention-getting leaks, constant teases and bits of info on Twitter, and videos designed not for MTV but for YouTube, has made the artist formerly known as Stefania Germanotta the poster child for the new way to roll out new music -- communicate with fans and cause a fuss.
Still, she has a major label (the Universal Music Group's Interscope), where she signed the kind of "360 deal" that gives the company a cut not just of her music sales, but her concert, merchandising and sponsorship revenue as well.
