Читать книгу Everyone Loves You When You're Dead - Neil Strauss - Страница 14

Russell Targ is by all appearances a stereotypical nerd genius, with pants pulled past his belly button, mop-like gray curls, thick black-framed glasses, and a high, pinched voice. In the 1950s, he made his reputation by helping to develop the laser. But in 1972, his life took a turn for the surreal when he and another physicist found themselves with a contract from the CIA. For the next two decades, he was at the forefront of one of the strangest chapters of the Cold War: psychic espionage.

This is not a conspiracy theory, like the rumor that the military covered up a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. This is actual fact: For twenty-three years, the U.S. government funded the research and development of teams of psychic spies trained in a type of ESP known as remote viewing, in which, with pen, paper, and brain, they attempted to tune into events taking place in locations and times outside ordinary sensory perception.

These spies claim to have psychically penetrated Russian nuclear laboratories, visited hostages in the American embassy in Tehran, and scoured the globe for secret terrorist camps. Asked after his presidency about unusual events during his term, Jimmy Carter recalled an incident in which a psychic in the program found the location of a downed Russian spy plane.

Sitting with Targ in, of all places, a casino in Las Vegas, I began interviewing him about the program, with a healthy dose of skepticism. But then, suddenly, he asked . . .

RUSSELL TARG: Have you ever done any types of psychic things?

I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

TARG : I can try to show you something psychic. You’ll need to use your pen and your notebook.

What do I have to do?

TARG : I have an object in my pocket. It’s not an ordinary kind of thing that you would find in your pocket. And what I’m inviting you to do is try and describe the shapes that come to mind. But don’t try and guess my object.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little loud for this?

TARG : If you were going to draw a shape associated with this object, what would you draw? (I draw an uneven circle on the paper.) Now what words do you associate with that object?

Uneven shape? Lustrous in parts?

TARG : Good. Take a breath.

I’m probably thinking too hard, right?

TARG : I just want you to get back into that mood. If you go back to that object that you saw, what else comes to view?

Um, parts are gray or black. And maybe it’s rough on the outside.

TARG : You can write all that down. You are in contact with the object. Now you just want to draw the object that I’m about to show you.

Should I try to put my mind inside your pocket or just let it come to me?

TARG : Just let it come to you. You can look into your immediate future, because I’m about to lay this in front of you. (I put the pen to the paper and let my hand relax. I start to sketch a circle, but at the bottom left, for some reason, I draw a small shape jutting out of its side.) What did you just draw here?

I felt there was something protruding on one side of it.

TARG : Did you look at the thing in your hand? What did it look like?

Shiny.

TARG : You can write that down.

You probably have, like, a wallet or a pencil in your pocket.

TARG : Now tell me, without naming the object, what is the overriding property? Without naming the object, what are the recurring things you’re experiencing?

Well, I feel like there’s a circle with something poking out of one side. And I still feel like it’s lustrous in parts but not all of it.

TARG : Well, that’s all entirely correct. Would you like to see the object?

There’s one more thing I want to write down. I feel like maybe it’s a tool. I don’t know. Maybe I’m going too far.

TARG : What made you think that? What did you experience?

Because when I thought it had a protrusion on it, I made an inference that it would be a handle for an object that has some sort of practical use.

TARG : You can write that down if you want to. I think that’s excellent. Not ideal conditions here. Are you ready to see it?

He pulls a round black object out of his pocket, with something jutting out of the side, and places it next to my sketch. It matches perfectly. The object is a magnifying glass in a black, round, rough-surfaced case with a small protruding handle used to pull the shiny magnifying lens out.

How did you do that?

TARG : I have a background of thirty years in physics. So I wouldn’t be doing something that didn’t actually work.

So what’s the secret?

TARG : The secret is that there isn’t really any secret. It’s an ability we all have.

A friend of mine was videotaping the interview, and we later showed it to a professional illusionist named Franz Harary to see if there was any magic trick involved.

FRANZ HARARY: With the experience you just showed me, there is no way magic could be involved.

Maybe Harary was protecting trade secrets. Maybe he didn’t know this particular trick. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe . . .

[Continued . . .]

Shortly after my experience with Russell Targ, I was interviewing Britney Spears. As recounted in The Game, the interview was going nowhere. Each question received a short, indifferent response. So I decided to do something I still feel bad about: trick her.

I told her about remote viewing, then asked her to think of someone she knew. I explained that I would guess the initials, and then proceeded to do a mind-reading illusion I learned while researching The Game. Of course, I messed it up. The following is a more complete transcript of the scene summarized in the book.

BRITNEY SPEARS: If you get this, I’m going to shit.

What was the person’s initials?

SPEARS: G. C.

Okay, turn over the paper.

SPEARS: C. C.! That’s weird. That’s really close. I can’t believe you did that!

Eighty percent of the time I can nail it if someone’s open.

SPEARS: I probably have so many walls in front, so that’s why you didn’t get them both. Let’s try it one more time.

This time, why don’t you try it?

SPEARS: I’m scared. I can’t do that.

I tell her I’m going to write down a number between one and ten, and she has to psychically guess what it is. On a piece of paper, I write “7,” which is the number people guess most of the time, and hand it to her face down.

Now tell me the first number that you feel.

SPEARS: What if it’s wrong? It’s probably wrong.

What do you think it is?

SPEARS: Seven.

Seven? Okay, now turn over the paper.

SPEARS: Maybe I chose too fast. (She slowly turns over the paper, then screams when she sees that the number is seven.) How did I do that? (She jumps off the couch, runs to the hotel mirror, and looks at herself in it.) Oh my God, I did that!

That’s amazing.

SPEARS: Whoa, I did that! (Returns to the couch, still excited.) I just knew that it was seven! Oh my God, I can’t believe I just did that. That’s weird.

See, you already know all the answers inside. It’s just that society trains you to think too much.

SPEARS: You already know the . . . Oh my God. Cool interview! I like this interview! This has been the best interview of my life. This is cool. (Fans herself to calm down.) Can we stop the tape recorder?

I turn off the tape recorder, and she talks about psychology, spirituality, writing, and escaping her family. When I turn it on again, a much better interview ensues.

SPEARS: I’m writing a book right now.

What’s it about?

SPEARS: I don’t want to say because I want to come out and whatever . . . But it’s like I’m going inside myself like I’ve never gone before. It’s really kind of cool. And I never thought that I would just pick up a pen and start writing. I didn’t think I would do that. But something is happening and I can’t stop.

It’s hard to write about yourself.

SPEARS: It is weird writing about yourself. But I’m not writing about myself. I’m looking at the bigger picture. I want people to read this and not think of Britney Spears when they read it. And I’m really opening up with it. Like you know when you read Conversations with God and it’s like this channel that’s going through him, but it’s not about him. It’s just like about the bigger things. That’s what this is.

I know exactly what you’re talking about.8

SPEARS: Because I don’t like stuff about me. I could never do an autobiography about my life. I think that’s so lame and cheesy and self-serving. But this thing I’m writing is just like trying to help people.

A year later, Spears scrapped her idea for a self-help book and asked me to write her autobiography with her. That book didn’t happen either.

[Continued . . .]

When it comes to one-hit wonders, the group ? and the Mysterians (pronounced Question Mark and the Mysterians) stands at the head of the pack. In 1966, the band’s first single, “96 Tears,” came out of nowhere and topped the charts. The organ-drenched song is not only still played on the radio today, but is renowned as a garage rock classic and an important precursor of punk rock. Before this interview, all I knew about the artist known as ? was that he was a skinny, leather-clad Mexican-American who had supposedly never removed his sunglasses since the sixties.

You said you originally wanted to be a dancer, so how’d you end up becoming a singer?

?: The first time was in Flint, Michigan. I asked if I could sing a song after one of my dance routines. Then my parents got me a tape recorder, and I started singing songs like “96 Tears” into it when I was ten.

You composed it when you were ten years old?

?: Yes, and then I wanted to learn to play an instrument so I could make the music in my head come alive. I went to the music store, and this girl said that her dad knew how to play piano and could teach me. So I went to the nice side of town. I thought, “This is what it must be like to be rich.” Everyone wondered what I was doing there.

I asked her dad, “Could you teach me how to play the music in my head?” He said, “You got to go to the beginning with ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ ” And I said, “I ain’t got no time for that.” I sang “96 Tears” for him, and he played it. But then he said the lessons would cost ten dollars a week, so I knew I wasn’t going back there. In the back of my head, I said, “Forget it.”

But eventually you formed your own band?

?: Yeah, we recorded with no headphones, no acoustics, no separation—just a two-track machine. We recorded “96 Tears,” then made up the B-side. I had remembered a lot of the words I’d written, but I’d forgotten some of them, too. Eight months later, it was number one.

How did you end up getting signed?

?: I needed a record label, so I went with Cameo Records because their records were orange and it’s my favorite color. If I had known the Beatles were on Capitol when they approached me or Elvis was on RCA, I would have gone with them. And then I got mad and felt like getting off the label when our record came out and it wasn’t orange.

What do you think of the term garage rock?

?: It was just rock and roll. After “96 Tears,” rock and roll died. Hendrix and everyone were great musicians, but they weren’t playing rock and roll. They called it rock. So what happened to rock and roll? I call our music the new age of rock and roll. I got ESP, too. I don’t use it all the time, though.

As in extrasensory perception?

?: Yeah, at first the press said I was a gimmick, but how can I be? I’m a real person. I was born on Mars many eons ago. I was around when dinosaurs were around. I’ve always had dreams of T. rex chasing me, and he got me. I discovered this week that they just found footprints from when the dinosaurs were around and they weren’t ape footprints. I said, “See, I told you I was around then. We hid so we wouldn’t get eaten.” Since then, I’ve lived many different lives. And even though I was born on Mars, I’m not an alien. I hate when people call it Mars, because it’s not really Mars anyway.

What is it then?

?: It’s just a planet, do you know what I’m saying. It’s part of the universe. That’s man’s ignorance: They have to label everything. They have to call us Martians just like they call the blacks niggers. Who is mankind to do that just because they feel more superior?

Why do you never remove your sunglasses?

?: I never take my sunglasses off. Somebody instilled that in me, gave me that power and ability to have that. I have so much knowledge. When I return in another lifeform, I may be a tennis player or a basketball player because I’m very athletic today.

How do you know you’re going to be reincarnated as a human?

?: Well, I myself am going to come back in the year ten thousand and I’m going to be singing “96 Tears.” And people will know it’s me in this other body.

How will they know?

?: Because I will say a unique phrase that no one in history has said before. And I’ve only told it to a few people. But for right now, I’m just going to rock and roll.

Can you tell me the phrase?

?: No.

It took a lot of work to get Ben Stiller to agree to an interview. He was worried that he’d be portrayed as neurotic, like the character he plays in the movie he was promoting at the time, Greenberg. And he was upset that Alec Baldwin was rumored to be on the cover of Rolling Stone instead of him. After several weeks of negotiations with Stiller’s publicist, I finally met him in the entranceway to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. He was slumped in a black overcoat, with unkempt hair and a wiry gray goatee growing uncomfortably on his chin. A far cry from the outgoing, extroverted characters he usually plays on screen, in conversation he was guarded, as if imagining how every word was going to be used against him.

Your publicist called and said you were worried that all we’d talk about is whether you’re as neurotic as the character you play in Greenberg. Don’t you think that would actually make you seem that neurotic?

BEN STILLER: Yes, but I didn’t know that happened, though I take responsibility for it as a person who has a publicist. I honestly didn’t. A lot of times, publicists do things like that.

I looked at your top Google searches, and one of the top searches is “Ben Stiller bipolar.”

STILLER: I said it once to a writer in jest, and the irony in those things sometimes doesn’t come out. I learned my lesson, too, which is don’t joke about bipolars. It isn’t fair to people who have bipolar disorder.

So let’s put the rumor to rest once and for all: Are you bipolar?

STILLER: No.

And you’re not taking any medication?

STILLER: No.

You go to therapy, probably, but not for that?

STILLER: I have in my life, yes.

But you’re not in therapy now?

STILLER: I have in my life.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

STILLER: I don’t think it is, either. It can be really helpful. I think self-examination is a good thing, and it can take many forms. To be aware in some way is a good thing.

So the comment was totally out of context?

STILLER: Yes. Maybe you should talk to that dude, maybe he’ll pull out some freakin’—

That’s a good idea. What was his name?

STILLER: No, no. I think it was just said in jest.⁹

Part of comedy is exaggeration, so obviously that should have been understood.

STILLER: I think comedy is also context and inflection. A lot of times in an e-mail or letter, you can say something that has an ironic sort of underpinning that doesn’t come across, thus the birth of the emoticon—and there’s another level of irony about the ridiculousness of emoticons.

The other big search was “Ben Stiller height.”

STILLER: How interesting. That’s really weird. Wow. And I thought I was wasting my time on the Internet.

[Continued . . .]

You can tell a lot about musicians by how they arrive at an interview. Some come with a manager, a publicist, bodyguards, or a retinue of hangers-on. Bruce Springsteen came to this interview alone. He drove himself from his home in Rumson, New Jersey, to the Sony Music Studios in Manhattan in his black Explorer—and arrived early.

Sitting in solitude with his back to the door in a darkened conference room, a mass of flannel and denim with a glinting silver cross earring, he didn’t need much prodding to be talked into heading to a nearby bar, where he ordered a shot of tequila and a beer, and gave the waitress a two hundred percent tip.

I hadn’t planned to ask this, but have you ever been in therapy?

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I found it to be one of the most healthy experiences of my life. I grew up in a working-class family where that was very frowned upon. So it was very, very difficult for me to ever get to a place where I said I needed some help. You know, I stumbled into some different very dark times where I simply had no other idea of what to do. It’s not necessarily for everybody maybe, but all I can say is, I’ve lived a much fuller life. I’ve accomplished things personally that felt simply impossible previously. It’s a sign of strength, you know, to put your hand out and ask for help, whether it’s a friend or a professional or whatever.

So do you still go regularly?

SPRINGSTEEN: Long periods of time will go by when I’m not [in therapy], but it’s a resource to call on if I need to. You know, it helps you center yourself emotionally and be the man you want to be. I mean, it’s funny because I simply never knew anyone who’d had that experience, so initially you go through a lot of different feelings about it. But all I can say is the leap of consciousness that it takes to go from playing in your garage to playing in front of five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand people—or when you experience any kind of success at all—can be very, very demanding.

Unlike most musicians I’ve interviewed, you’ve managed to avoid letting success cause you to lose your perspective and grounding.

SPRINGSTEEN: It’s interesting, because when I started out making music, I wasn’t fundamentally interested in having a big hit right away. I was into writing music that was going to thread its way into people’s lives. I was interested in becoming a part of people’s lives, and having some usefulness—that would be the best word. I would imagine that a lot of people that end up going into the arts or film or music were at some point told by somebody that they were useless. Everyone has felt that. So I know that one of the main motivations for me was to try to be useful, and then of course there were all those other pop dreams of the Cadillac or the girls. All the stuff that comes with it was there, but sort of on the periphery.

In some way, I was trying to find a fundamental purpose for my own existence. And basically trying to enter people’s lives in that fashion and hopefully maintain that relationship over a lifetime, or at least as long as I felt I had something useful to say. That was why we took so long in between records. We made a lot of music. There are albums and albums worth of stuff sitting in the can. But I just didn’t feel they were that useful. [. . .]

What kind of advice would you give the young Bruce Springsteen now?

SPRINGSTEEN: Two things. One, I would tell him to approach his job like, on one hand, it’s the most serious thing in the world and, on the other hand, as if it’s only rock and roll. You have to keep both of those things in your head at the same time. I think I took it very seriously. And while I don’t regret doing so, I think that I would have been a bit easier and less self-punishing on myself at different times if I’d remembered that it was only rock and roll.

What do you mean by self-punishing?

SPRINGSTEEN: Beating up on myself physically (laughs). For me it was mostly mental and, you know, you drift down your different self-destructive roads at different times and hopefully you have the type of bonds that pull you back out of that abyss and say, “Hey, wait a minute.” When I was twenty-five, I was in London and there were posters of me everywhere in this theater that were making me want to throw up and puke. I was disgusted at what I’d become, and then someone in the band would say, “Hey, do you believe we’re in London, England, and we’re going to play tonight and somebody’s going to pay us for it?”

So I was lucky. I had good friends and a good support network that assisted me along the way. In retrospect, I look back on those times now and they just seem funny, you know.

And what advice would the young Bruce Springsteen give you?

SPRINGSTEEN: Louder guitars.

Should we head out of here?

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, damn, we’ve had a good time. I’m stoned.¹⁰ Let’s not stop now.

Springsteen emerges from the dark cavern of Hannah’s Cocktail Lounge into the warm April sun of the city.

SPRINGSTEEN: Oh, man, it’s the summertime. What a day.

A police car screeches to a stop in the middle of the street, and two officers step out. It is not the first time Springsteen has been approached by fans in law enforcement that day.

POLICE OFFICER: Hey, big guy.

SPRINGSTEEN: Hey, guy.

POLICE OFFICER: How you doing, buddy?

SPRINGSTEEN: Very good. Just having a good time. Enjoying the day.

POLICE OFFICER: A beautiful day out for walking around, huh?

SPRINGSTEEN: Fabulous.

POLICE OFFICER: How’d that concert go the other day?

SPRINGSTEEN: Good. Good time. I really enjoyed it.

POLICE OFFICER: Do you mind signing this for me?

Holds out his ticket pad. Springsteen autographs the ticket.

Backstage at the LG Arena in Birmingham, England, Lady Gaga was preparing for her show. Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run blared on vinyl as she danced around her dressing room, wearing a blue bandana around her head in tribute and an unbuttoned studded vest with a black bra underneath. She was at the height of her fame, and consequently had done very few interviews. Fortunately, completely by accident, when I’d met her backstage in Nottingham the previous evening, I passed a crucial test by insisting on a seat to the concert there, which she didn’t want me to see because it was a scaled-down “B show,” as she called it.

LADY GAGA: You’re going to get a good interview because when I met you yesterday, you wanted to see my B show. Are you kidding? We might as well have had sex by now. I mean, you came in my dressing room and said, “Please, I know it’s a B show. I know you’re hard on yourself. But I just want to see it once before I interview you tomorrow.”

Well, good. Because I’m going to start with a hard question.

LADY GAGA: Go ahead.

I have a theory about you.

LADY GAGA: Should I lay down?

You might need to.

LADY GAGA: We don’t have enough couches to lay me down.

Have you ever been to therapy, by the way?

LADY GAGA: No. I’ve like spoken to spiritual guides and things.

But never a straight-up psychiatrist?

LADY GAGA: I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

That’s interesting.

LADY GAGA: What’s worse: being normal or being abnormal? I don’t know.

So the question is: Do you think if you’d never gotten your heart broken five years ago, you wouldn’t have become as successful as you did afterward?

LADY GAGA: No, I wouldn’t. No, I wouldn’t have been as successful without him.¹¹

So here’s the thought . . .

LADY GAGA: You made me cry (wipes tears from her eyes).

Do you think that all that love you directed toward men now goes toward your fans instead?

LADY GAGA: Well, I’ve really never loved anyone like I loved him. Or like I love him. I will say that the relationship really shaped me. It made me into a fighter. But I wouldn’t say that my love for my fans is equated to my attention for men. But I will say that love comes in many different forms. And I sort of resolved that if you can’t have the guy of your dreams, there are other ways to give love. So I guess in some ways you’re kind of right.

Did he contact you at all after you got famous?

LADY GAGA: I don’t want to talk about him.

Okay.

LADY GAGA: I’m sorry. I want to, but he’s too precious to talk about.

I’m surprised. I thought you’d be out of it and over it by now.

LADY GAGA: Out of where?

Emotionally out of it. You seem to still be emotionally attached in some way.12

LADY GAGA: Into what?

In that experience or that relationship.

LADY GAGA: Oh, I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am. I didn’t just like wake up one day and forget how I got here. In fact, I’ll always have one high heel in New York City. I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

Okay, you kind of dodged that, so one last thing: Do you think with that guy, it was obsession or love?

LADY GAGA: Love. But, you know, I don’t really know very much about love. But I suppose if I knew everything about love, I wouldn’t be good at making music, would I?

I don’t know. Some artists make their best music when they’re in love.

LADY GAGA: I’m terrified of babies, though.

Because?

LADY GAGA: I think, creatively, as a woman, you change once you give birth. I’m totally not ready for that.

Did you ever have any resolution with your father after he cut you off during your wild days?

LADY GAGA: It’s just recently that I’ve been healed in a way because my father had this heart surgery that he was supposed to have since I was a kid. The fear of losing the man of my dreams, such as my dad—there’s fucking Freud for you—was terrifying. So the biggest fear of my life passed.

Do you ever feel like you’re fulfilling your dad’s unrealized rock star ambitions?

LADY GAGA: Yeah, sure I do. I love my daddy. My daddy’s everything. I hope I can find a man that will treat me as good as my dad.

[Continued . . .]

Christina Aguilera marched into her publicist’s New York office, loudly smacking chewing gum. She was wearing baggy green army pants, a gold-chain necklace reading Christina, and a faded jean jacket over a navel-exposing T-shirt emblazoned with the word Rockstar. Her lips were glossed too pale, her eyes shadowed too blue. She plopped into a chair and splayed her legs over the armrest. Without stopping the music blaring on her headphones, she ordered, “Could you put Hot 97 on the radio?”

The next stop for the pop princess: a greasy feast at Houston’s restaurant, where she insisted that everyone plunge each tortilla chip into all three dipping sauces—spinach-artichoke, sour cream, and salsa—for optimum flavor.

I’d been assigned to spend a week with this seemingly spoiled-rotten nineteen-year-old for her first Rolling Stone cover story. And only an hour into the experience, I was already regretting it.

How did the photo shoot go?

CHRISTINA AGUILERA: Everyone was like, “She’s going crazy during that Rolling Stone photo shoot.” They’re so afraid that I’m going to be too sexy, you know what I mean.

Sexy in what way?

AGUILERA: I was doing some crazy stuff and my publicist was like, “Christina, don’t do that! Christina, don’t do this!” But I like being a little provocative.

Of course to the record label, you’re not a person, you’re an investment.

AGUILERA: Exactly. She’s like, “I wouldn’t care so much if you didn’t have such a great voice.” She was becoming an alcoholic at the shoot, pulling her hair out and asking for more red wine. She was finally like, “Put your hands on your crotch, I don’t care!”

So what were you doing exactly?

AGUILERA: It was crazy. I had my Walkman on for a couple of poses and I put it right, you know, where my crotch is. And I was looking at the camera kind of full on and strong, and head down a little bit and sassy. Just doing that suggestiveness. It was interesting. . . .

To just vamp it up a little bit?

AGUILERA: Yeah, you need that release sometimes.

I think that’s part of the pop music tradition, to walk that line between innocence and sexuality.

AGUILERA: Sexuality is a part of how I perform onstage. It’s something that I’m playful with and flirt with, and that’s flirting with disaster sometimes. It’s just part of my nature and I can’t help that. I’m not crossing the border too much, yet. But . . .

But what?

AGUILERA: I just don’t think I can hide who I am much longer.

As the week passes and I travel with Aguilera to Toronto, where she’s rehearsing for a tour, her teeny-bopper façade begins to melt away and reveal something much more real and vulnerable. At dinner one night, while her band and dancers get drunk and rowdy, Aguilera sits quietly near the corner of the table, talking with her choreographer, Tina Landon. In her hotel room the next morning, she apologizes for her introverted behavior.

AGUILERA: Yesterday was a weird thing. I was in a bad mood about something that happened. I was pulled out of rehearsals, and I didn’t want to be. There was drama. I was talking with Tina about that—and about my love, my first love. I fell in love for the first time this year. I’m kinda like going through it.

That’s a great thing to experience.

AGUILERA: It’s crazy. I’ve never felt like that before. It’s a little bit scary. I’m used to being this independent chick like not even really thinking about boys, and all of a sudden—whoa—like, this guy takes over everything. Well, not everything. But my focus is suddenly about this guy. It’s made me vulnerable, and I don’t like to be that way. [. . .]

Do you think you’re experiencing it because you’re at an age now where you’re open to those feelings, or is it real chemistry with him?

AGUILERA: What do you mean chemistry?

When you’re drawn to this one person and they’re drawn to you, and there’s this electricity and you can’t logically figure out why.

AGUILERA: Yeah, it’s like, why am I so crazy over this person? It’s so crazy, so crazy. It’s beautiful. It’s tough, though, to really maintain a relationship while doing what I’m doing. You have to deal with his insecurities about who I am and all the I’m not good enough ideas in his head, which don’t matter to me at all.

At least it’s a person from the normal world.

AGUILERA: Are you saying it’s not someone in the business?

I’m saying it’s not a pop star. It’s someone who works for you.

AGUILERA: How did you know?¹³ [. . .]

Do you have dreams about him?

AGUILERA: Ooh, I’ve been dreaming some weird stuff. I dreamt that I had just come back from a trip to some foreign country and he left a message on my phone for this other girl. He didn’t even know it. It was like he pressed speed dial and it went to the wrong number. And he’s all like, “I’m really feeling you now and I miss you and I love you.” And he was really pouring his heart out to this girl and it was not supposed to be for me. I woke up and I cried. I haven’t cried over a dream since I was like . . . in years.

Did you tell him about it?

AGUILERA: I didn’t tell him about it.

You should, because then he’d know that you have insecurities too.

AGUILERA: I’m going to tell him.

Fifteen minutes later, in the midst of discussing how she was upset that she didn’t get writing credit for her breakthrough hit “Genie in a Bottle,” she blurts out of the blue . . .

AGUILERA: Let me ask you one question: Who do you think is the cutest one of my dancers?

Girl or guy?

AGUILERA: Guy. Just out of curiosity.

I don’t know. All your dancers have great energy.

As we discuss her dancers, she begins to get impatient, until . . .

AGUILERA: What about Jorge?

He’s cool. He’s got a good body.

AGUILERA: I think it’s interesting to hear other people’s opinions.

She leans back in the couch, satisfied she’s covered that one up pretty well.

[Continued . . .]

I talked to a number of people who’ve worked with you in the past, and I wanted to get your reaction to some of the things they said.

BEN STILLER: Uh-oh. Okay.

One of the former writers on The Ben Stiller Show said there was a joke among the writers that if they wanted to make sure their sketch would be used, they included a scene with you taking off your shirt. Have you ever heard that?

STILLER: Oh my God, no. Jesus Christ . . .

Was that not true?

STILLER: You’re not going to tell me what writer said that, of course. I have no response to that, but they were probably right. That’s great.

Someone else you worked with described you as competitive and afraid of failure.

STILLER: I’ve obviously failed at that. I don’t know if fear of failure is necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the ultimate fear of failure would be paralysis and not doing anything. I guess somehow if that’s there, which I’m sure it definitely is, I don’t want that to be what stops me from trying something.

“Micromanager” was another word that came up a lot.

STILLER: That’s one of the hard things. I’m working on it. I’ve attempted to micromanage many things. And I feel like I’m in a place where I know that’s not bringing me happiness. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and too tired to do it all. [. . .]

People also say that you’re one of the hardest working people they know, that work is an addiction for you.

STILLER: The first part of getting rid of an addiction is acknowledging that you have it, and I acknowledge that I enjoy working. I think anyone that’s kicked heroin will tell you they enjoyed it until they realized it was screwing up their life. I haven’t hit my bottom yet. But I’ve gotten to a place where I realized it’s out of balance, and I’ve adjusted that. The area of my life that I have no question about is my commitment to my family and how much I love my family. And I think that’s the implication when people ask, “Oh, why do you work so much?”

They didn’t say it as a judgment like that. But maybe your perspective comes from being raised by parents who were entertainers and not around a lot.

STILLER: It’s all valid stuff. I grew up with parents who needed to work to take care of their family and also enjoyed working, too. They were great parents and also weren’t perfect parents. I’m all of those things, too.

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?

MORISSETTE: I left. Yeah, I moved. I remember my twin brother turning to me one day and saying, “You’re so unhappy. Just go.” And I remember pointing to a record of mine. It was leaning up against the wall in the corner of my room and I said, “But I don’t want to let go of that.” And he said, “You don’t have to. Just go.” And that was a really sweet moment.

Has the person the song’s about contacted you since?

MORISSETTE: No, not yet. I’m sure I’ll speak with him at some point. But there’s not that much to say, other than that I’m sharing my experience and I will always respect his privacy as I did with the person that “You Oughta Know” is about and as I did with many of the songs.

What would be your advice for a teenage girl trying to make it in the industry today?

MORISSETTE: If I were to have a daughter who wanted to engage in this type of industry, I would make sure I had her back. I just feel like there was this illusion that I had to pick between two doors: this complex kind of dynamic with older men and younger women in the industry, or no music being expressed. But I realize as I get older and have more experience that there’s always a fucking third door, you know.

When spending an extended amount of time with someone for an article, previously guarded secrets often tend to surface. In the case of At the Drive-In, a post-hardcore band that became the next big thing in rock music before imploding, it was a secret so dark that it felt necessary to call At the Drive-In guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López afterward and prepare him for its disclosure.

This portion of the interview took place before an At the Drive-In show at Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. Rodríguez-López and drummer Tony Hajjar were discussing working with producer Ross Robinson.

When I’ve seen Ross produce other bands, he’s had them regressing to their childhood and on the floor crying like babies to get something emotional out of them. Did he get into any psychotherapy with you?

TONY HAJJAR: I haven’t talked about this, but I remember recording “Invalid Litter Dept.” The song is about all the women that were murdered in the Juárez area. And the thing that happened was that in that song, Ross brought up my mom. She passed away in 1988, and it was a poignant time. That’s what he got out of me on that song, that’s for sure. And I haven’t figured out whether that was good or bad.

How did she pass away?

HAJJAR: She died of cancer—on May 25, 1988.

And now you forever associate the song with her?

HAJJAR: I don’t know if I should have gone that far when we were recording. Now, every time we play it, I do associate the song with my emotions about her.

OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: You obviously have an emotional link when you make music, but I think he embedded it that much deeper.¹⁴

Did he do that with you, too?

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: For me, the emotional links he made with all the songs worked. I did a lot of camping when I was younger to work on my issues as an incest survivor. And there are plenty of things, like breath therapy, that I learned but had never thought to apply to music in the studio.

So it was like finding a way to get something constructive out of a destructive experience?

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: Exactly. I definitely went through a time of searching and dropping out of high school and hitchhiking for a year and eating out of garbage cans and shooting all kinds of things into my arm and getting into really fucked-up situations just for the sake of experiencing them. And self-mutilation. That’s not to say if we do our next record with someone else, I’m going to sit there with them and talk about all this stuff that happened to me. But now I know I can be conscious of it and use it as a tool for myself to get a better performance.

HAJJAR: I think we came out of that experience probably stronger and closer than we ever were, and I consider us five a really, really close band because we care about each other’s thoughts and emotions and respect each other.¹⁵ It was just an amazing time. I can’t believe that it happened.

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: We had sex (laughs).

Rodríguez-López brought up incest so casually that I assume it’s a commonly known fact about him. But afterward, I can’t find a single reference to the incident. So before the article is published, I call to warn him.

You mentioned in passing that you were an incest survivor, and I wanted to let you know that’s going to be in the article.

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: Yes, I know I said it.

Are you comfortable with it being in the story?

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: I don’t know. I think I trust your judgment.

The magazine wanted me to ask if there was a possibility of a lawsuit from the person who did it.

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: No way.

Why is that?

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: Because of this person’s career, they wouldn’t want to associate themselves with that.

Does anyone else know about it or could anyone testify that it happened?

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: My close friends know about it.

The call ended awkwardly, but five hours later, Rodríguez-López phoned back.

RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: Thanks for calling about it. I had a long talk with my friends, and I’m ready for the information to be out.

After dinner one night, Christina Aguilera climbed into a chauffeured van, sat in the backseat, and stared out of the window in silence for the entire ride, interrupted occasionally by the ringing of her cell phone. Her Discman earphones were over her head, but no music was playing. She was simply shutting off.

This seemed to be a frequent habit of hers: She would stare out a window or at a ceiling, and her mind would drift somewhere. You could yell her name, tap her on the shoulder, set her shoes on fire—and chances are she wouldn’t respond. At the time, little was known about Aguilera’s past other than her stint on The Mickey Mouse Club with Britney Spears, but gradually it became obvious why this habit began.

I notice a lot of times you seem to be zoning out.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA: I’m never zoning out. I told you I was a deep thinker. My mind is always thinking. I’ll think about really crazy things, like being on top of that pole up there (points to a flagpole outside). Or I’ll get a lot of different weird visions. It’s like my own little world. My life just revolves around putting myself out there for people, and giving and giving. So whenever I get those five minutes in a van or limo or wherever, those are special moments to just zone out and think and dream. I just love being able to do that. It’s funny that you notice that.

Shortly afterward, she discusses wanting to be a role model. It seems like a strange thing to say, especially considering her conversation after the photo shoot about wanting to be more sexual and rebellious.

It’s interesting how you want to be sexually provocative, yet a role model at the same time.

AGUILERA: Where the whole role model comes in for me is that it’s cool to touch people and to make a difference in a positive way as far as, um, maybe getting the word out more about issues concerning domestic violence and child abuse and other issues that I’m really really adamant on trying to help with my status and everything. That is something I promised myself I would do before I even got signed. Deep down I want to have others benefit from my success. I want to be able to help others, open up shelters and visit them.

Was there something that happened in your past that makes you passionate about those particular issues?

AGUILERA: I’ve been around situations. Domestic violence. It’s so sad. It’s a topic that’s so kept quiet. It’s in the home and no one wants to get involved.

Do you mean your home?

AGUILERA: Yeah, I think the reason why my drive was so strong and I was so passionate about music was because I grew up in an environment of domestic violence. Music was my release to get away from it all. I would seriously run up to my bedroom and put on that Sound of Music tape. She [Julie Andrews] was free and alive, and she was playful and rebellious against the nuns. I know it sounds really cheesy but, um, that was my escape. I would open up my bedroom window and I would just imagine the audience. I would just sing out. As far as the past, I got myself out of it. And I promised myself when this happened, I would try to help others who were in the same situation.

Why do you think it took your mom so long to get out of the relationship?

AGUILERA: People don’t know domestic abuse unless they’re in it. It’s not only physical abuse, but it’s the damage inside—mental abuse. It’s a sad thing to go through and watch. They play with your mind and make you feel bad about yourself and (trails off and doesn’t speak for several seconds) . . .

So now you want to help others in the same situation?

AGUILERA: Yes, one thing would be to go to different schools and talk to kids about different personal experiences of my own and try and help them in some way. Get them to come out about their own experiences.

As far as your relationship with your father now, did he ever apologize?

AGUILERA: Yeah, he’s apologized. I think he had a lot of guilt.

Did he apologize after you got successful or before?

AGUILERA: Actually before. I also lived around other situations. Next door to where we lived, I heard what was going on. There was so much domestic violence going around when I grew up, with my dad traveling in the military. It’s so sad. So sad. I wanted to be so strong for everybody—for my mom and everyone. That’s why I’m so girl-empowerment oriented (laughs uncomfortably). Even “Genie in a Bottle” is about making a guy work for it.

[Continued . . .]

A year after Ike Turner’s 1975 performance in New York City with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, the floodgates of his life burst open. Tina Turner walked out on him, claiming emotional and physical abuse; his studio in Inglewood, California, was razed in a fire; and he began logging more arrests (eleven) than legitimate solo albums (one). Then there was the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, which portrayed him as a domineering, temperamental, career-obsessed, wife-beating cocaine addict. A few years after emerging from prison for cocaine possession in the mid-nineties, Turner decided to play his first concert in New York since that 1975 performance. With some reluctance, he agreed to an interview before the show.

When you were growing up, you saw a man shoot twenty-six other men?

IKE TURNER: Yeah, when I was a kid. It was in Mississippi. In those days, it was almost like if you was black, you was just like a roach or an ant or something they step on and never even think about it. I’ve seen them put blacks in bails of tar. You know, they take a guy and dip him in a hot bail of tar, and then put feathers on him. That’s the way it was in those days.

Did that create a lot of resentment in you?

TURNER: You know, I never carried any malice in my heart for nobody, because otherwise I would never meet guys like you or nobody, man. You have to meet people for what they are themselves. It never had no bearings on me. My father was killed by a group of whites. The same thing, man, but anyway, I’m pretty open. I wish the public would be better open with me and with my career. Because movies can make people anyway they wanna make them.

Why haven’t you performed in New York in so long?

TURNER: You know, like when Tina and I broke up, I don’t know, I got insecure and started doing drugs and things. Man, I just didn’t . . . I was afraid of rejection from the public, you know, because everybody knew that she did the singing. But I did all the choreography, the songs, the music, the arrangements. I did everything. But the public never knew what I did, because I wasn’t interested in being the front of the show. So I just got insecure, man. And I didn’t really get myself back together until I went to jail. I started performing some in jail, and putting groups together and shows together in jail, and then that’s when I got my confidence back.

What kind of opportunities did you have to perform in jail?

TURNER: Once every two or three months you can put together a show, and we were dressing guys up like Ikettes. Everybody was dancing like girls onstage, and we just had a lot of fun.

I wonder if they’re going to contact you for a job when they get out.

TURNER (laughs): For a fact, some of ’em have.

What instruments did you have in jail?

TURNER: They gave me a piano when I was in jail and they gave me two guitars. I was living in a dorm, and so I would put it under the bed and stuff. I never was mistreated in jail, man. I was earning five hundred dollars a week while I was in jail selling coffee, candy, and cigarettes. I saved up thirteen thousand dollars the seven months I was in there, because I had went down to zero financially.

You know, I got a call from some group that says they’re going to protest the show—

TURNER: What?!

You haven’t heard about that?

TURNER: No, no. You know, they really misled the public about me in this movie. The movie ain’t really about Tina, it’s about me. And I’ve never seen the movie yet. But Tina, in this magazine that just came out called Elle magazine, admits in there that she never was a victim, that the whole movie was a lie. And she said she could’ve left anytime. And anyway they did that movie like that to sell the movie.

So why didn’t you sue the producers?

TURNER: My attorney was supposed to be a friend of mine and Tina’s, and I signed this contract for him. And it was four years later, man, when I found out that I signed away my rights to sue them if they portrayed me in the wrong light. And it really hurt me a lot. It’s really a downer, man. It’s making it harder for me getting my career because some people think I’m really like that movie.

A lot of people don’t realize you had an impressive career before Ike and Tina with “Rocket 88” and all these incredible sessions that helped form rock and roll.

TURNER: No, they don’t. I used to hide Elvis Presley behind the piano back in Arkansas.

So he could watch?

TURNER: Yeah, we were playing a black club and they don’t allow whites in there, just like they don’t allow blacks in white clubs. He used to drive a gravel truck.¹⁶ And I used to slip him behind a piano in those days. And Little Richard—he wrote the first three pages in my book and said his style came from me. You know, it’s the same thing with Jerry Lee Lewis—he’s a copy of me. Prince is a copy of me. A lot of things that are out are copies of me and what I do.

Maybe your book can help set the record straight.

TURNER: But it’s only being published in London. I tried all over America, and I hit a lot of stone walls, man. Because of that movie.

Separate from the movie, do you have regrets about anything?

TURNER: No, no, no, man. Today, man, my life is great. I’m proud of the way that I was with Tina and my kids. I don’t do nothing that I regret, man, because I’m not the one that they made me out to be in the movie. It’s like Tina always said: “If you knew Ike, you’d love him. But if you don’t know him—if you just look at the way he looks onstage”—because onstage, I be into my music and I ain’t thinking about how my face is looking . . .

So you think your reputation comes from the way your face looks onstage?

TURNER: I don’t know. I have no regrets of the past. I’m really happy with my accomplishments. I’m sorry that it had to get down to where they have to down me to launch her career. I think they could’ve did it without it. But anyway, I’ll get over it.

In 2007, Ike Turner died in his home in Southern California at the age of seventy-six. The cause was a cocaine overdose.

The moment Lady Gaga’s concert in Birmingham ended, she rushed from the stage to the tour bus, covered in stage blood. As the bus lurched out of the backstage parking lot, she heard a crowd screaming her name outside, then yelled to the bus driver: “Hold on, will you stop the bus? I’m just going to say hi to my fans.”

Her bodyguards looked disapprovingly at her, then relented. She walked to the door of the bus and opened it to see hundreds of fans stampeding toward her. The bodyguards quickly ordered the driver to shut the door. As the bus pulled away, Lady Gaga smiled, pleased, and walked back to continue the interview.

You have a lot of things in your behavior that are signs of someone who had a traumatic experience in adolescence or childhood. Is that something you would ever discuss publicly?

LADY GAGA (gasps): Probably not.

When Christina Aguilera began talking about the dark issues in her past, there was no negative response to it and it ended up informing her work.

LADY GAGA (hesitates): I feel like I tell this story in my own way and my fans know who I really am. I don’t want to teach them the wrong things. And you also have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much. They know who I am. They know how they can relate to me. I’ve laid it all on the table. And if they’re smart like you, they make that assessment. But I don’t want to be a bad example.

A bad example in the sense of being a victim?

LADY GAGA: Yeah, and I’m not a victim. And my message is positive. My show has a lovely naïveté and melancholy to it: a pop melancholy. That’s my art. If I told that other story in that way, I don’t know if that’s the best way I can help the universe.

Because if you did talk about it, then the things you do would be misinterpreted and seen through that experience?

LADY GAGA: Yeah. Maybe if I was writing my own book or something. I guess it’s hard to . . . If I say one thing in our interview right now, it will be all over the world the day after it hits the stands. And it would be twisted and turned. And it’s like you have to honor some things. Some things are sacred.

I understand.

LADY GAGA: There are some things that are so traumatic, I don’t even fully remember them. But I will say wholeheartedly that I had the most wonderful mother and father my whole life. I was never abused. I didn’t have a bad childhood. All of the things I went through were on my own quest for an artistic journey to fuck myself up like Warhol and Bowie and Mick, and just go for it.

That’s interesting that you have this idea that the artist has to expose himself to these dark parts of life.

LADY GAGA: You do, but all of the trauma I caused to myself (pauses). Or it was caused by people that I met when being outrageous and irresponsible. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I like to, within moderation, respect that I’m not Mick Jagger or David Bowie, and I don’t just have fans that are a certain age. There are, like, nine-year-olds listening to my music, so I guess I try to be respectful of who’s reading Rolling Stone, if at all possible.

You do talk about cocks and pussy all the time, but I know what you mean.

LADY GAGA: I do, but cock and pussy is not the same as the things that I could talk about.

We can talk about something more positive. You seem to have become more religious or spiritual in the last year or so.

LADY GAGA: I’ve had a few different experiences. I’m really connected to my Aunt Joanne and she’s not with us anymore. And then there was my father’s surgery. And also my life has changed so much. It’s hard not to believe that God hasn’t been watching out for me when I’ve had such obstacles with drugs and rejection and people not believing in me. It’s been a very long and continuous road that I love, but it’s hard to just chalk it all up to myself. I have to believe there’s something greater than myself.

Like a higher power?

LADY GAGA: Yeah, a higher power that’s been watching out for me. Sometimes it really freaks me out—or I should say it petrifies me—when I think about laying in my apartment [in New York] with bug bites from bedbugs and roaches on the floor and mirrors with cocaine everywhere, and no will or interest in doing anything but making music and getting high. So I guess I’ve come a really long way and I have my friends to thank for that—and I have God.

[Continued . . .]

According to Ali Farka Touré, the world-famous African bluesman, spirits are at the root of all art. And if the spirits love a human being, they give him power. However, at the time of this interview, he had little time to spend in the spirit plane. After winning a Grammy for an album he recorded with Ry Cooder, which spent a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one on the Billboard world music chart, he had to cancel a North American tour to stay home and protect his family from attacks by Tuareg nomads, who were fighting with the Malian government. Some of that hostility may have carried over into our interview, which was conducted through an interpreter when he was in Paris shortly afterward. It may also be worth noting that he was given the nickname Farka, or donkey, shortly after birth because of his stubbornness.

Is everything okay at home now?

ALI FARKA TOURÉ: There was nothing, okay. It was just a little incident.

Is this the first time you’ve left since the attacks?

TOURÉ: It’s the first time I’ve left. There is no problem now.

Are you planning on doing a new record with Ry Cooder?

TOURÉ: No.

How about a record of your own?

TOURÉ: Oh no. I mean, yes, I have started my own recording already.

Are you collaborating with anyone on it?

TOURÉ: Hey, hey, that’s enough of that. No more elaboration.¹⁷

Were you disappointed that you had to cancel your American tour?

TOURÉ: Not at all, at all, at all. But in all sincerity, what really pissed me off was the guy who we were working with was a real asshole.

Are you playing any other shows in the U.S.?

TOURÉ: No!

Are you touring anywhere else?

TOURÉ: In Africa. I’ve almost done all of Africa. I’m very proud of this. My favorite place is Mali.

Do you think that the spirit of the blues is stronger there?

TOURÉ: That’s very true. Where you are, you may call it the blues, but here, where I live, it’s much purer than that. It’s the African tradition.

Were you influenced at all by American blues?

TOURÉ: It was only from Africa, but why does one need to be influenced? Should you not be able to understand who you are by yourself, first?

Do you know yourself?

TOURÉ: Yeah!

When did you find out who you were?

TOURÉ: I was born in it. I grew up with it, and I evolved in it. My music is pure tradition. It’s what I know. I don’t know American music or French music or other music.¹⁸ I know only my art, the geography, the sources, and the roots of my country. And I know them perfectly.

If it’s traditional, then it must have influences in the past.

TOURÉ: Well, listen, what influences my personality or my music is really only my own business. I’m not forced to reveal it.

Do you consider yourself more a farmer than a musician?

TOURÉ: That is a hundred percent the truth. Agriculture is much more important than music. Why? Because if you can make music, it is a given that you have a full stomach. The one who doesn’t have a full stomach can not even make music.

Some say you have the power to see into the future. What do you think?

TOURÉ: It’s certain that if I do have the power to see in the future, it is a secret, which I will hold and nurture inside myself.

In 2004, Ali Farka Touré was elected mayor of Niafunké, his hometown in Mali. He died two years later of bone cancer. He was sixty-six.

On November 27, 1981, after playing a concert at Max’s Kansas City, the no-wave guitarist and singer Von Lmo disappeared. In his wake, he left behind countless stories (like the time he challenged Keith Moon to a drum battle backstage at a Who concert), legendary shows (his group Kongress, fronted by a magician, was banned from CBGB after nearly setting the club on fire), and a noisy style of guitar playing that inspired bands like Sonic Youth. His Future Language album soon became a collector’s item, due not just to its seminal avant-garde pop metal but also to its cover, which featured five grown men wearing moon boots and cheap silver spacesuits.

Almost ten years after Von Lmo’s disappearance, one of his former bandmates spotted him driving a gold Cadillac down a one-way street in the wrong direction. Von Lmo was officially back.

Where have you been the past ten years?

VON LMO: I was in a transition period. Everyone thought that I was dead, but I was just in suspended animation. Being in suspended animation, I gained a lot of incredible knowledge and lost twenty years off my life. I rejuvenated myself while I was gone. I’m in the body of a teenager now. If you look at pictures of me from 1980 and if you look at me now, you can see the enormous change.¹⁹

Is there any truth to the rumor that you’re a vampire?

VON LMO: I used to be into vampirism. I still am, sort of. I’m a member of the Z/n Society, which is goddesses and vampires. However, whether I’m a vampire or not, it’s nobody’s business.

You also claim to be a psychic?

VON LMO: I do have extrasensory perception. I’ve always been psychic since I can remember. I do believe that this year will hold true to the new sound. That new sound is going to come forth and generate throughout millions of people. What Hendrix was to the sixties, I can be to the nineties. If not this year, it will be the tip of next year. People are ready for a change, and I have that facility. I have the setup and the technology. The Von Lmo band is here to give people the opportunity to make that change, to open up the mind and step into the next dimension.

You always tell your audience to enter the blacklight dimension. What or where is it?

VON LMO: I believe strongly in psychedelia. I’m into the psychedelic form of life, which is the blacklight dimension. When people ask me where I was born, I tell them I was born in the blacklight dimension, which is a dimension other than what most people are used to. It’s very colorful, it has many interchangeable parts, it’s flexible, and it can enhance your mind way beyond any other dimension. [. . .] Without my music, you can’t get to these other dimensions. Music is everything. Music is life. Without music, there is only one thing and it’s called death.

It’s like your song “Leave Your Body.”

VON LMO: It’s the same idea, but “Leave Your Body” was written for a friend of mine, a girl who was actually a groupie of the band, who was going to commit suicide in 1979. I tried to help her by telling her that she’s going to have to leave her body, get out of that present state, and just find herself. That’s how I derived the lyrics to the song and helped her not to commit suicide, and it worked. I’m not saying that it can work for everyone. I’m not saying you can just pop in this song and it’s going to help, but it can’t hurt to try.

I actually first saw your Future Language album in a record bin with a sticker that said “Worst Record of the Decade” on the cover. . . .

VON LMO: Sometimes people just aren’t advanced enough for my music.

In 2007, Von Lmo disappeared again: According to his former collaborators, he didn’t go into suspended animation but to prison. A search of inmate records at the time revealed a prisoner in Sing Sing with his given name.

Lyn Buchanan is a genial, easygoing man with prematurely gray hair, a George Lucas beard, and a well-established paunch. He has spent most of his life working on guided-missile and computer systems for the military, and nothing seems to surprise or unsettle him. That’s why, when he was assigned to work in a special army unit at Fort Meade in Maryland, it took him years to realize that something was unusual about his job. This revelation occurred en route to Russell Targ’s research laboratory at Stanford University.

LYN BUCHANAN: I was on a plane, looking at all the business people and secretaries, and I thought, “I wonder what they would think if they knew that I was a government agent training psychics.”

How did you get involved with the remote-viewing program?

BUCHANAN: Most of it’s still classified, but I was in the army and I was writing a highly complex computer program. There was a jealous sergeant who wanted my job, and he would sabotage my code. So on the day when I had to present the code to the commanding generals of twelve different countries, I was in the bathroom getting ready—fixing my hair and straightening out my clothes. And when I returned, I saw the sergeant walking away from my computer. When I hit one of the keys on the computer, the screen just went blank and the guy said, “Gotcha.”

I got flaming mad. I’ve always had PK [psychokinesis], and so the whole computer network on the base just blew up—ninety-six computers and billions of dollars in damage.

How did they trace that to you?

BUCHANAN: There was a general named [Albert] Stubblebine. And he had a field officer whose job it was to look for talented psychic people. And when he saw what was going on, he reported what he thought to Stubblebine.

A couple days later, I ran into Stubblebine in the hall. And he got in my face and said, “Did you kill my computer with your mind?”

In my head, I saw my grandchildren still paying off the costs of the damage in the future. But I knew he wouldn’t ask that question if he didn’t know the answer. So I answered him, “Yes, sir.”

“Far fucking out,” he said. “Have I got a job for you!”

And that’s when they recruited you to join the remote-viewing project?

BUCHANAN: Yes. My reaction was, “We’re on Candid Camera, right? The army doesn’t do this stuff.” But they brought me out to Fort Meade and I became one of the viewers in the unit. When my skills got better, I became the trainer.

What’s the most amazing experience you’ve had?

BUCHANAN: Everybody thinks that we had the most amazing job in the military, and really we did. But after you do it eight hours a day for five days a week, you realize that you’re just going to work. It’s a job. We would do some of the most far-out espionage and mentally travel to all these sites, but at the end of the day we just wanted to go home.

But tell me something really interesting that happened.

BUCHANAN: Ten times in seventeen years, I’ve had a PSI experience.

What’s that?

BUCHANAN: A perfect site immersion. You see what you’re viewing so completely that you can’t tell that you’re not there. I live for it. In that, though, if you try to walk through a wall, it will really hurt you. The first time it happened, the Russians had developed a death ray—an extremely powerful particle beam weapon. They wanted to see how the particles moved to figure out how it worked and what it was. But they couldn’t get anyone in there, so they decided to put a remote viewer in. They said, “We need someone to volunteer to step inside a death ray.”

And you volunteered?

BUCHANAN: They moved me to the site and sent me back in time to when the beam was fired. I was describing it to them. And then they said, “Step into the beam.” I stepped in, and all this sandlike stuff was peppering me. I looked, and there were thousands of images of me in the beam. And my awareness was coming from all the points at once.²⁰ [. . .]

Now that the program is declassified, can you teach anyone how to remote view?

BUCHANAN: Definitely. When the information first came out, we got eight to twenty applicants a day. I turned down ninety-five percent of them—flaming kooks, really bad. Now I’d say that ninety-five percent of the people who call us are very levelheaded. What we teach is the real thing. This is not a toy. If someone has mental problems, you don’t teach them this stuff.

Do corporations ever call you because they want to spy on competitors?

BUCHANAN: Yes, a significant number of corporations have been getting training lately.

How many?

BUCHANAN: I can’t say, but enough to make the other companies worry about it.

In 1991, Perry Farrell, the singer in Jane’s Addiction, started what became the pre-eminent touring alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza. But success is a mixed blessing. By Lollapalooza’s third year, he complained, “I felt like it had come out of my hands. The tug was that hard. People just saw like a money Ferris wheel there with every bucket full of cash.”

For a while, Farrell considered selling his stake in Lollapalooza. To prevent this from happening, music executives involved in the festival gave him more control for its fourth season.

Everyone tells me you have all these great ideas for Lollapalooza, but the corporate side of the festival always blocks them. So I thought that instead of doing a regular interview, we could discuss your dream Lollapalooza.

PERRY FARRELL: If we do that, what’ll happen is somebody else will do it. Or they’ll borrow one great idea and I’ll get real bugged about it. It happens sometimes because I’m always blabbing around about ideas and stuff.

So let’s just discuss a few of the ideas.

FARRELL: Okay. I guess one of my main ideas would be to have a place called Perry’s Space and (hesitates) . . . It’s like you get shuttled out to space—you know, to a place that could hold a few thousand people. There would be three stages out there, because (pauses)—I’m thinking to myself—you’d have a few thousand people on the main stage, yeah. That would work. The drive is always nice for clearing your head.

Would there be music on each stage?

FARRELL: You could also have other things. We could have maybe alien bands playing. And who knows what kind of techno stuff they would have to present. I mean right now we’ve got computers, right? But who knows what they’ve got. They might have like plutonium rides, where you’d really be like shot up in space and get a quick rush or something. And then instead of parachuting down, you would float down.

Imagine the insurance the festival would have to pay.

FARRELL: Actually, it would be nothing. You couldn’t get hurt. There might be strays that were shot into space and something happened, like current from a black hole that was like ten zillion miles away was starting to sort of gravitate toward us and people are getting sucked out. So there might be one casualty per show. But there always is anyway at the regular Lollapalooza shows, so . . .

So what would be on the main stage?

FARRELL: There’s a good question. God, all the alien music probably wouldn’t make sense. But they would produce things like certain kilohertz or megahertz because they would know how to physically manipulate your body through sound to make you cry and fall in love and actually have orgasms.

How about for the art and technology portion of the festival?

FARRELL: For their technology, they might show you crafts of flight like we have out in Nevada at Area 51. Maybe you would have virtual simulations of flying saucers and how they were made. They would probably give us classes on how to clean up the environment and how to repair the ozone. I think they could turn us on to everything that we had questions about, including robot training and how to have your own human slave, you know. Zombie slaves.

Why do people always assume aliens are more advanced than us? Maybe they’re not.

FARRELL: I think they are. They’re way more advanced. Wouldn’t that be nice, to have your own zombie for a minute? You just go behind a curtain.

And then what?

FARRELL: And you could program your own zombie.

Is there something else you’re thinking of for Lollapalooza in the less-distant future?

FARRELL: Yeah, this year I’m trying to get like autopsies going on the third stage.

Literally?

FARRELL: I have a doctor friend of mine who wants to perform autopsies. I’m gonna try to get it for the West Coast. See if he can do it.

Lollapalooza staff confirmed that Farrell was planning to show autopsies at the festival, though, not surprisingly, the idea never came to fruition. Instead, in 2005, Farrell helped start Kidzapalooza, a rock festival for children.

Lucia Pamela may be best known as the mother of Georgia Frontiere, who inherited the Los Angeles Rams (when her sixth husband drowned) and moved them to her hometown of St. Louis. But to music aficionados, Pamela is a celebrity in her own right. Voted Miss St. Louis in 1926, Pamela started what many believe to be the first all-female orchestra, Lucia Pamela and the Musical Pirates. She also started a singing duo with Georgia, the Pamela Sisters, and was cited by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for having memorized some ten thousand songs.

But if you ask Pamela what accomplishment she’s proudest of, she’ll tell you it was building a rocket, touring the Milky Way, and beating Neil Armstrong to the moon, where she recorded her album Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela. Clearly, the line between fact and fiction doesn’t exist for Pamela, which is what eventually made the album an enduring cult classic.

Where did you record your album?

LUCIA PAMELA: It was recorded on Moontown. I was the only one from Earth there.

Is that where you saw the roosters and the blue wind you sing about?

PAMELA: All of the music is true. And most of it is from experience. I also made a coloring book about the trip.

For children?

PAMELA: It’s for people of all ages. Children aren’t the only ones that like to color books (pauses). Have you ever been to the moon?

No, but I’d like to go.

PAMELA: The moon was quite surprising. Besides the moon, we found other areas outside the earth. I can’t remember whether we named any of them or not. We went to Venus, Mars, Neptune. . . . I was quite surprised to find that there was an awful lot of Oriental people there.

What was Nutland like?21

PAMELA: Oh, it was a beautiful place, and everybody there was wonderful. But they couldn’t speak English. Most of them spoke different languages, mostly Chinese, Japanese, and French . . . and Almond.

When was the last time you visited the moon?

PAMELA: This time last year, we flew up to the moon, yes. Me and some friends of mine. I’ve got it written down who flew us there. I can teach people how to travel to the moon and Mars and Venus. I also teach music and ice-skating. It doesn’t take a long time if they really want to learn. I’ll help anybody who wants to be helped.

Do you have any predictions for the future?

PAMELA: I want everything good to happen, but I want the weather to be good. If the weather is good, then everything is good.

In 2002, Lucia Pamela died in a Los Angeles hospital at the age of ninety-eight.

After a press conference, Christina Aguilera walked into a back room, sat on the floor next to a fireplace, and zoned out again. Suddenly, she turned her face up to me and, in a girlish pout, asked . . .

CHRISTINA AGUILERA: What did that woman [reporter] say about Britney?

She said that a Baptist organization had named her role model of the year or something.

AGUILERA: But what did she say Britney did to get it?

She promised to keep her virginity until marriage.

AGUILERA: Oh? (Rolls her eyes and looks into the fire, then turns back again, perturbed.) I can’t believe that.

That bothers you?

AGUILERA (scrunches her face, disgusted ): She’s not a virgin!

Aguilera’s publicist rushes in to prevent her from saying too much in front of a reporter.

PUBLICIST: Maybe it’s Jessica Simpson. She’s like that.

The publicist whisks Aguilera away. When night falls, the interview continues in Aguilera’s Toronto hotel room as she snacks on pizza, Coke, and Chips Ahoy cookies.

AGUILERA: The secret to eating junk food is to only eat a little at a time.

I’ve heard you talk about spirituality a few times. What are your beliefs?

AGUILERA: I’m Christian, and I believe in God. I wish I could go to church more often on Sunday. I really do. That’s also a reason why it’s so important to stay grounded, because it could all be taken away tomorrow. All of this [success] isn’t something that I did. I don’t view it like that. It’s something that is totally there for a purpose. He wants me to do what I’m doing for good, do you know what I mean. But I think my personality fights with that sometimes. (She switches on all the lamps in the room.) I’m afraid of the dark. I have nightmares.

That makes sense for you.

AGUILERA: Really? I’m afraid of spirits and things. Especially with living in hotel rooms. You never know who was in there before you, or what happened exactly in this room. I hear these stories. It freaks me out.

Did you see spirits when you were a kid?

AGUILERA: I used to see my guardian angel when I was very young. My mom and I were playing hide-and-go-seek one time. I ran up the stairs and my mom was saying, “I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you.” And all of a sudden, I looked up and stopped dead in my tracks. There was this guy and he was in an all-white outfit, just kinda glowing. He was looking down at me. He had a white beard.

Was he looking over you benevolently?

AGUILERA: Yeah, he was looking down at me calmly and very peacefully.²²

So that should help you sleep at night, knowing someone’s watching over you.

AGUILERA: It should. But usually I can’t, so I end up just writing in my journals. I’ve been on my own, and it’s kind of lonely and crazy when so much stuff is thrown at you. Sometimes you feel like the whole world is waiting for you to mess up (pauses). I kind of wrote a song about what I’ve been going through this year. Want to hear it?

Sure.

She rolls off the couch, staggers sleepily into the bedroom, and returns with a small, lined notebook.

AGUILERA: I wrote this song, and it has kind of a gospel feel. Have you heard Mariah’s first album? It’s kind of like “Vanishing,” but it’s more personal. I wrote it with Heather Holley, who wrote “Obvious.” I wish I had a tape with the piano part. It would mean so much more with the music, but maybe you can just imagine it.

(She turns her head away, so that she’s gazing out of the picture window, and sings:) “The world seems so cold / When I face so much all alone / A little scared to move on / And knowing how fast I have grown.” The piano gets really soft here. (Singing again, her voice crescendoing:) “And I wonder just where I fit in / Oh, the vision of life in my head / Oh yes, I will be strong . . .” Then there’s this whole belting thing in the chorus.

She finishes the song and sinks into the sofa exhausted. Minutes later, she is under the covers in bed, curled on her left side in a crescent shape.

True to her word, years later, Aguilera spoke at several women’s shelters, donating $200,000 to one of them.

More than most other musicians, you’re under a microscope all the time. Why is it that other entertainers can discuss doing drugs, but—

BRITNEY SPEARS: But if I go out and have a drink, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, Britney went and had a drink. What’s going on?” I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why. It’s really bizarre.

Maybe the reason is because early on you set up an image for yourself that people are holding you to?

SPEARS: See, that’s such an irony. People are like, “You were so innocent, da da da da,” and all that. And I’m like, “No, I wasn’t. You guys said I was too sexual when I first came out with ‘. . . Baby One More Time.’ ” You can’t win, man. You know what I mean?

Well, we can probably figure out why everyone held you up to that standard.

SPEARS: I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because—

SPEARS: I don’t know. I have no idea.

Maybe it’s because you did play a part in making your virginity an issue and telling teen magazines that you wouldn’t drink or—

SPEARS: I’m growing up. I’m twenty-one. I can’t play with dolls forever. I mean, I love my dolls and I still collect them. But you understand what I’m trying to say.

So how do you keep people’s expectations and criticisms from getting in the way of just living your own life?

SPEARS: Well, I try not to read anything, because it’s all bull at the end of the day. It’s really silly. I mean the stuff about me, personally. Trust me, I’m such a victim of going and sitting there and buying Us Weekly. I find it so interesting. I do, I do. But I choose not to read stuff about me. It’s just weird. I try to make it basically about my music and that’s it.

It’s interesting how every record you make, people always say it’s your “grownup record.”

SPEARS: I think you never grow up. If anyone says that they’re completely full-grown, what’s the fun in that? It’s like every day you want to learn something new. Every day you want to challenge yourself and get better. It’s not like this one’s the grown-up record: This was just a moment in my life that I’m going through. I’m not grown up and I’m not a little girl. I just am.

With his catchy single “Dur Dur D’Etre Bébé!” (“It’s Tough to Be a Baby”) at number one in multiple countries—and sales of one record for every minute he’d been alive—Jordy, France’s five-year-old dance music sensation, seemed to be succumbing to the decadence of stardom. When Details magazine assigned me to meet him, the first thing he did was ask the translator to take him to the toilet, where he peeped under occupied stalls in the women’s bathroom. When he returned, he demanded that a young girl be brought into the room.

What do you want a young girl for?

JORDY: Pour jouer au docteur.

TRANSLATOR: To play doctor.

What about Alison [his girlfriend]?

JORDY: Oui, j’ai baissé ses pantalons et j’ai dessiné des fleurs sur ses fesses.

TRANSLATOR: Yes, I lowered her pants and drew flowers on her butt.

Do you ever play with boys?

JORDY: Je n’aime pas les garçons. Ils se battent.

TRANSLATOR: I don’t like boys. They fight.

When Jordy’s parents enter the room, we discuss his fame as he sketches a picture of a fire engine on a piece of paper. Oddly, beneath the fire engine, he begins drawing a row of lines dangling to the ground.

What are those lines there?

JORDY: Des zizis.

TRANSLATOR: Penises.

Ten minutes later . . .

Do you think all this attention is affecting his development?

PATRICIA CLERGET [Jordy’s mother]: He’s a very normal child. All the attention hasn’t affected him at all.

CLAUDE LEMOINE [Jordy’s father]: He still wants to be a policeman or a fireman when he grows up.

As his parents speak, Jordy jumps on the table, grabs his crotch, and proclaims . . .

JORDY: Je suis Michael Jackson!

TRANSLATOR: I am Michael Jackson.

Less than a year after this interview, the French government banned Jordy from television and radio due to concerns that he was being exploited by his parents. Jordy later legally emancipated himself from his parents and formed his own rock band.

Artist is an overused term when it comes to musicians. Most are primarily entertainers, giving the public what it wants. Their motivation is not self-expression but attention and acclaim. If no one were watching, they wouldn’t be making any noise. When I met PJ Harvey—one of the most important rock musicians of her generation—at a London hotel, I pretty quickly discovered she was not an entertainer.

Do interviews serve any purpose for you?

PJ HARVEY: Well, I don’t enjoy them.

Oh yeah?

HARVEY: I hate interviews. I don’t particularly want to sit here and talk about myself. I’m not thinking about my fans. I do them because I feel like I have to do them.

Why do you have to?

HARVEY: Because it’s good for people to know that I’m here and because maybe someone that hasn’t heard the music before will pick the article up and will want to buy the record.

But the interviews don’t serve any purpose for you, even as far as getting to talk out ideas or thoughts?

HARVEY: No.

Because you—

HARVEY: They mean nothing to me.

I had heard that you were very open in your first interviews but then regretted it.

HARVEY: I think to begin with, I was. I tried to answer every question as best as I possibly could, and then you learn slowly not to trust anyone. And you learn you have to put barriers up and give only what you want to give.

I think people do that because they’re worried they’re going to be judged for communicating what they really think.

HARVEY: You know, I’m not sitting here talking to you being myself at all. It’s very guarded, and I’m just giving you exactly as much as I want to give and what I’m comfortable with today. Maybe if you’d interviewed me tomorrow, it might be different.

I actually am interviewing you tomorrow, too. But I get what you’re saying. For me, the point of an interview is not necessarily to promote someone’s music, but to let people know who someone is beyond their music and maybe enable others to learn from their experiences or outlook or creative process.

HARVEY: Yet people who write these things form their own kind of opinion. And none of it is right. I mean, I hope one day I get to the point where I have to do very, very few interviews, because I do feel it’s an intrusion of my privacy.

Yesterday, when you were talking to those two Japanese girls, they were saying that they had sent you a couple of letters. Do you read your fan mail?

HARVEY: No. Some people have managed to find my home address and they send it there. But I find it a bit intrusive, so I tend to not read those out of principle.

So you’ve never corresponded with your fans at all?

HARVEY: No.

Not even—

HARVEY: No.

What’s written on your hand, by the way?

HARVEY: Serum. I’m not going to explain that for you.

Maybe I don’t want to know.

HARVEY: It’s my personal notepad. Everything I have to remember goes there. And when I see this person, I have to talk about serum. [. . .]

Could you record what you felt was the greatest album you’ve ever made, and then bury it in the ground somewhere afterward—knowing no one else will ever hear it—and still be satisfied?

HARVEY: I don’t know. That’s a very interesting question. It’s very much a need I have, to write music and to make things. Not just music things, but little pieces of artwork that mean nothing to anyone else, that I never show to anybody else. I keep sketch pads I’ll never show to anyone. I write loads of words I’ll never show to anybody. It’s for me—and I need to do it. It’s part of my learning process and part of my life, of being here and experiencing as much as I can. So, yes, I think I could make an album and never play it to anyone, and it wouldn’t really make much difference.

Midway through the interview, Lady Gaga asked me to stop recording. She sang a new song, “Born This Way,” a cappella, then opened her MacBook and played demos of half a dozen other tracks she was working on. Wendi Morris, her tour manager, shook her head in disapproval, since the album wasn’t supposed to be released for at least nine months. “He’s going to write about other stuff,” Gaga protested. “I just want him to know who I am.”

I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked a few other artists: If you finish this album and you feel it’s the greatest album you’ve ever made, could you then go bury it somewhere and know that no one is ever going to hear it, but still feel artistically satisfied for having completed it?

LADY GAGA: No! No way!

So far, only one person has said they could do that and feel satisfied.

LADY GAGA: Whatever artist said that is lying to you.

I’ll tell you the one person who said yes. It was PJ Harvey, and I think I believe her.

LADY GAGA: I would believe PJ Harvey. But you know, to be totally honest—and I don’t like to say anything bad about other artists at all—but I will say hypothetically, any artist that’s on a record label that’s putting out music that tells you they don’t care about fame is lying to you. Because you can always just make music in your room at home by yourself for no money.

Right, and she was doing an interview.

LADY GAGA: And you’re doing an interview, so why? Even if they don’t really believe they’re lying, they’re lying. I think it was John Lennon that used to say anyone who says they don’t make music for people to hear it, they’re full of shit. Go make music in your room. It’s so dumb to me. Are you thirsty?

I’m fine. Your fans seem to really like what you stand for, because some people need to be reminded that it’s okay to be different.

LADY GAGA: I love what they stand for. I love who they are. They inspire me to be more confident every day. When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure twenty-four-year-old girl. But I say, “Bitch, you’re Lady Gaga, you better fucking get up and walk the walk today,” because they need that from me. And they inspire me to keep going.

On her tour bus that night, she discusses finding a mentor in the writer Deepak Chopra, and crying hysterically to him before a recent show about a dream in which the devil was trying to take her to hell.

Do you have any recurring dreams?

LADY GAGA: I have this recurring dream sometimes where there’s a phantom in my home. And he takes me into a room and there’s a blond girl with ropes tied to all four of her limbs. And she’s got my shoes on from the Grammys. Go figure—psycho. And the ropes are pulling her apart.

I never see her get pulled apart, but I just watch her whimper and then the phantom says to me, “If you want me to stop hurting her and if you want your family to be okay, you will cut your wrist.” And I think that he has his own like crazy wrist-cutting device. And he has this honey in like Tupperware, and it looks like sweet-and-sour sauce with a lot of MSG from New York. Just bizarre. And he wants me to pour the honey into the wound, and then put the cream over it and a gauze. So I looked up the dream and I couldn’t find anything about it anywhere. And my mother goes, “Isn’t that an Illuminati ritual?” And I was like, “Oh my God!”

You definitely have a martyr thing going on in that dream. Instead of bleeding openly, you take it all inside and cover it up.

LADY GAGA: You know what’s so funny is that’s what Deepak said to me. He said that I was recognizing my own cultural death and resurrection. I wrote that song I played for you right after I had that dream. So my dreams do induce my creativity.

They have to come from somewhere.

LADY GAGA: And they gotta go somewhere. I can’t leave them in my brain or I’ll go crazy!

Her tour manager serves her white wine and chicken strips, which she dips copiously in ketchup. She discusses her recent diagnosis as “borderline lupetic,” which means that she is at risk of developing lupus, the autoimmune disease her aunt Joanne died from before Lady Gaga was born.

So what changes did you make in your life once you found out?

LADY GAGA: I make much more of an effort now to minimize the drama or the stress in my life. I take care of myself. I drink and I still live my life, but I could never let my fans down. That would kill me to have to face that extra obstacle every day to get onstage. It’s completely terrifying, so I’m just really focused on mind, body, and soul. And also, Joanne—I believe that her spirit is inside of me. So, you know, my closest friends have told me that it was just her way of peeking in to say hello.

That’s an interesting way to think about it.

LADY GAGA: And I’ve got her death date on my arm.

Next to the Rilke quote?

LADY GAGA: Yeah. She was a poet and a writer, and I guess I truly believe that she had unfinished work to do and she works through me. She was like a total saint. So maybe she’s living vicariously through a sinner (laughs).

Minutes later, the bus stops in front of a hotel to pick up Lady Gaga’s assistant and continue to Manchester for the next concert.

I’ll let you get to Manchester. Let me see if I missed anything.

LADY GAGA: What are you saying? You got way more than anyone. And you saw two shows. I feel raped (laughs)!

You have given me a lot of good stuff . . .

LADY GAGA: Use the stuff that’s going to make me a legend. (To her tour manager:) I want to be a legend. Is that wrong?