Jesus, Esquire Magazine has an EPIC profile of Lady Gaga, and they just put it online. It’s actually not a traditional profile, as there is nothing in the way of a traditional interview with Our Lady of Gah. It’s written by Brendan Sullivan, a self-described “old friend” of Gaga’s, from before she was even Gaga. Brendan also gave these never-before-seen photos of a young Gaga (circa 2007-08) to the magazine. The full piece is here, and here are some of the highlights, including “remembered” quotes attributed to Gaga, but from back in the day:

Lady Gaga has work to do. She’s a manager, and the client she manages is Lady Gaga. She is obsessive, a style she learned from people like her friend the late Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer for whom she was a muse. She spends hours on many days constructing and fine-tuning what designers call mood boards — collages of artwork, fashion inspirations, and drawings meant to direct the stylists and artists (wardrobe, hair, and makeup) who execute her vision of Lady Gaga. A mood board develops into a storyboard, and it all morphs into a live show. The music is just one element of the presentation.

The most important thing you should know about Lady Gaga is that she has just started. The four number-one singles on her debut album (five if you count the deluxe version with “Bad Romance”), the sold-out world tour last year at age twenty-three — she doesn’t see these as her moment. To her, this is the foundation.

“There is a musical government, who decides what we all get to hear and listen to. And I want to be one of those people.” The girl who said that didn’t yet have the number-one hits (although she had already written most of them). She was not yet the creative director of the Haus of Gaga, which is what she calls the machine of more than a hundred creative people who work for her. She didn’t make that statement in an interview or from the stage. She made it in 2007, when she was a go-go dancer sewing her own outfits and I was her DJ. She wrote it in one of my notebooks.

In those days Stefani Germanotta was what you would call a struggling artist — a go-go dancer who wanted to take over the music world. On Saturdays we would sit on the floor of her bare Lower East Side apartment, drinking wine from pint glasses. I would read drafts of my novel to her while she lay on the floor, head in my lap. Every once in a while we’d take a Springsteen break. (She loves “Thunder Road.”) She would use the drafts as blank pages to write notes, workshopping her career plan.

Once she told me that she wanted to be the “grandmother of pop music,” bringing up new bands, nurturing their talents, watching them grow.

Back in the summer of 2007, there was a night when she popped out of a cake and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” for my then boss, the owner of Beauty Bar Manhattan. It was fitting, somehow — the Marilyn reference. I’ll quote something she said to me one day around that time as directly as I can: “No one in the world knows who I am, but they are going to want to know who I am. My first time ever on TV I want to be on a huge show where I play one song. I’m going to come out onstage in my underwear and show the world that here I am and I don’t give a ffff-ck what anyone thinks of me.”

The difference between Lady Gaga and every other young singer is that most of the others ask the world, “Do you like the way I sing? Will you buy my record and come to my show?” Gaga tells the world, “I am famous. I was famous before even I had heard of me.” She didn’t dream of fame. She announced it.

Suddenly she is a star. That happens to a lot of people, and then suddenly they aren’t stars. But flashes in the pan often disappear because they follow what they think are the rules of becoming famous — or what someone else tells them the rules are. Nobody tells Lady Gaga anything. The same bright girl who popped out of cakes and who created her own way of being famous once helped me understand something important. I was stressing out about how to end my novel, and she stopped me. She grabbed the draft, flipped over the final page, pulled the cap off a Sharpie, and wrote, “No story should ever end in resolution.”

[From Esquire]

Gaga is such a crazy bitch – and once again, here come the Madonna comparisons. But there is the whiff, the ghost of Madonna with this too, isn’t there? Madonna plans things out like Gaga. Madonna is OCD about her image too. But, like others have noted with the Madonna-Gaga comparison, Gaga has whimsy, humor, there’s a wink there, buried underneath the sparkles and the lobster headpieces. With Madonna, it’s all business, it’s all cold underneath. Just my take!

Photos courtesy of Esquire, full slideshow here.