Forbes has released its annual Celerity top 100 list. Opera is usually at the top of the list. This year however, the ”Day Time Talk Show Queen” has been toppled by Lady Gaga. This might be because she is retiring her talk show, or she hasn’t put as much effort into trying to be popular. I guess a Diva needs a break every now and again. Maybe the real key is the social media presence Lady Gaga has compared to Opera. Whatever the reason Opera in no longer on top; at least for this year.

If you ask me the reason why Opera has been dethroned is a generational gap. Opera has earned a hell of a lot more money in the past 12 months compared to Lady Gaga. As a matter of fact $200 million more. However, when Opera became popular television was the medium that everyone turned to, and she knew exactly how to work it. These days the internet and social media are the platforms of choice to rake in popularity points. Lady Gaga has cornered the market on how to turn social media into cash. She uses clever tricks like calling her twitter followers “Little Monsters”. So all hail the new “Popularity Queen Super Star”. I guess she was just born that way. Opera will be back on top before you know it though. After all you can’t keep a good queen down. Trust me I should know

YouTube is broken. This morning I was going to post Lady Gaga Judas video. When I went to get the embed code from YouTube I found it was not there for any video, even a video of a dog. YouTube WTF? How do you expect videos to be shared if we cannot get the embed code to share them?

I know this is a rant, but being able to share videos from YouTube on FlyNews is critical. How can I do my job if the damn tools are broken? Ok time to turn the mic. over to the readers. Share with me your stories on broken technology and how it screwed your day up. I will choose the best response and winner will get to write an article for FlyNews on any topic they want.

Today Lady Gaga Daily posted on twitter the anticipated video of JUDAS will be aired and uncut by E News tomorrow night May, 5 2011 at 7 and later 11:30 pm. An abridged version of the video will be aired during American Idol’s top five elimination episode. We will post the video on flynews when it is released.
Here is a teaser video produced by Tony Danceaholic to tide you over.

Weird Al Yankovic has finally had a dream come true. He is finally able to do one of his famous parodies on a Lady Gaga song. The song that gets to be made fun of is of course (drum roll) “Born This Way.” When Weird Al first approached Gaga to do a parody he was turned down flatter than a pancake. It turns out her manager was the dumb ass who said no without even letting Lady Gaga listen to the song. Lady Gaga as is turns out is a Weird Al fan. When she heard the song she gave her full support. Her manager has humbly apologized. Now that she has listened to and approved the song its full steam ahead for Weird Al and his newest master piece “I Perform This Way.” Yankovic said: “I’m thrilled on many levels to hear this, because 1) I truly respect and admire Gaga as an artist and it pained me to think of her as having less than a great sense of humor, and 2) it means I GET TO PUT OUT MY ALBUM!”

A few of the lyrics are:

“I’m sure my critics will say it’s a grotesque display
Well, they can bite me, baby — I perform this way
I might be wearin’ Swiss cheese or maybe covered with bees
It doesn’t mean I’m crazy — I perform this way”

Listen to the song below:

Tonight flynews went to the Lady Gaga concert here in Tampa FL.  There was one part of the show where people were throwing things up on stage.  Gaga went to collect them.  The first item she picked up was pizza, and she said “Pizza I can’t eat this.”  She continued to collect all the little trinkets and said she appreciated them all.

There was one item however Gaga did not appreciate.  She said “What I don’t appreciate is this horrible excuse for a woman someone threw at my stage,” and proceeded to pick up a naked Barbie doll.  Next Gaga put the dolls head in her mouth and bit it off very slowly as if she were savoring every moment.  Afterward she held the decapitated head to the side and talked about how the audience shouldn’t conform to any idea of beauty that the public projected onto us.

I cannot help but find that a little hypocritical.  Lady Gaga is skinny, fit, and is what most people would consider to be sexy.  Everyone on stage is the same.  Both the men and women are muscular and oozing with sex appeal.  There was not one single fat person on the stage with her.  How can Gaga say we all should reject society’s idea of beauty while she is endorsing it by choosing people to be on stage with her who are the very epitome of that ideal.

Gaga don’t be such a hypocrite.  You and everyone you work with fit society’s idea of beauty.  If you are going to tell the whole world to reject what the public considers to be beautiful, then hire some fat dancers, or people who don’t look like they belong in fitness and fashion magazines.  I do not see that happening though because you know just like everyone else skinny beautiful people sell a lot better than fat ugly people.

See the video we have posted of the decapitation below.

Ok cover photo not to bad. Showing Gaga looking some what sexy even with her facial ridges.

This must be her rendition of Death Becomes Her in F…Me pumps.

Hanging from the chandelier. Kinky, but not all it’s cracked up to be. Trust me I know.

Meow! All I need now is a ridding crop.

Move over Big Bird you have competition. Also be careful this birdie may bite.

Alice you and the Mad Hatter make suck a lovely couple. You both are freaking nuts.

Everyone has heard Lady Gaga’s new hit Born This Way. Did you know she has released a country version of the song? It is called Born This Way (The Country Road Version). A month ago Lady Gaga announced on The Gayle King Show she would be releasing two versions of the song.

The country version of Born This Way starts has a deep harmonica intro. and Lady Gaga slows down to emulate a southern drawl. About two thirds of the want in to the song she sings “If I want to make it country baby that’s ok because I was born this way.” To me making a country version of the song indicates Lady Gaga truly believes everyone is equal and should be accepted for who they are. In many parts of the United States “being country” has a stereo type of being uneducated and dimwitted. Of course that is in accurate. My partner and I both are “country” and we both are very intelligent. Most people say we are smart as a whip. When my best friend first meet my partner his initial thought was “this is a country hick” based just upon his southern drawl, but when they began to converse my best friend told me if he was gay he would be trying to swoop my partner up. So Lady Gaga making a country version of Born This Way shows me she is reaching out to everybody and views us all as equals.

Proceeds from this second version are being donated to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN’s mission is “to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.”

Listen to the second version of Born This Way below.

Yesterday was Lady Gaga’s 25th birthday. What has stumped most of her fans is what her real name is. Search terms like “lady gaga real name” and “what is lady gaga’s real name” spiked to record levels during her birthday. All her fans would have to do is a Google search and Wikipedia would bring it up for them as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Lady Gaga got her stage name in a weird way. According to her producer, Rob Fusari, he sent her a text and meant to put Radio Ga Ga. The text auto corrected itself from Radio to Lady. When Gaga got the text she loved it and the rest is history.

Another spotlight for Lady Gaga’s birthday was when Ellen DeGeneres called her up to wish her a happy birthday. Ellen had a truly Gaga style cake made. This sucker had Kermit the frog, two humongous bows, smoking cvc pipes, and some crown thing on top. Ellen said it could be a hat, a dress, or whatever she wanted to wear it as. Lady Gaga was thrilled. I hope she had a great birthday.

Watch the video of Ellen’s cake below.

Google VP, Marissa Mayer, landed an exclusive interview with the Mega Super Star Lady Gaga. The interview was 70 min long, and discussed her album Born This Way, speaking out against bullying and answering questions from her fans.

What a match, the biggest pop star and the biggest search engine teaming up to chat for a bit.

Watch the video below.

The video for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” now has more YouTube views than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at around 26 million versus 22 million for Gaga. For those of you that haven’t been playing along with the meme, Rebecca Black is a 13-year-old aspiring singer whose parents paid $2,000 to have a “professional” music video made by a YouTube popstar factory called, appropriately enough, ARK Factory.

The video then went viral after gaining traction for all the wrong reasons on music blogs, tech blogs (yeah we’ll cover anything these days), Reddit and 4Chan, turning its star into both a meme and into fodder for mainstream media outlets like ABC.

So why all the media attention? In part because Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black are two sides of the same Internet fame coin: Black is like the anti-Justin Bieber, her “Friday” video has all the trappings of pop star gloss, with none of the talent.

Bieber on the other hand, had the talent, and enthralled fans with that despite the rawness of his homemade YouTube music videos (nice Simpsons poster Justin), which he posted before putting out a more polished album and becoming the online and mainstream fame tornado that he is today.

Bieber and Black, like the Artic Monkeys and Lilly Allen before them, are a sign of the power of alternative distribution channels in our time. But Black is a tipping point, as her video was engineered to go viral (And it did! If not exactly in the way she intended …).

To give you a micro-example of how much becoming a YouTube celebrity is now considered a viable, respectable way of  gaining traction in the music industry, even for those beyond their teen years; Earlier today I had lunch with a musician friend who was lamenting the trouble her band was having booking shows in San Francisco. When I asked her how she planned on getting the word out she said, “Get a publicist, or have a video go viral.” Then she mentioned something about Twitter followers.

“Basically the content doesn’t matter at all. Only the fact that other people are sharing it,” Gawker’s Adrian Chen, who has followed the Rebecca Black story and is pretty much an expert on how people become Internet-famous, explained to me over Skype. “I don’t know if it’s a tipping point. But more like the most extreme example of something that’s already happening in music and entertainment stuff.”

Indeed the focus of Rebecca Black’s ABC/Good Morning America interview was the extreme negativity of the comments (“I hope you get an eating disorder so you’ll look pretty. I hope you go cut and die”). In an age of readily available tools for discussion, the value of our pop-stars is now in the extent to which we can use them as topics for social media blathering (Rebecca Black is trending on Twitter, of course) whether or not that blathering is positive.

The most fascinating part of the Black story is that she’s actually famous now, which was exactly the reason her parents gave $2,000 to ARK Music Factory in the first place. From Black herself on her unlikely fame, “I think that’s an accomplishment you know, even a person who doesn’t like it, it’s going to be stuck in their head. So that’s the point of it, it’s a catchy song.” Exactly.

Get used to this kind of stuff. As society advances technologically, culture becomes a parody of itself, and we enjoy the parody, intentional or not, more than anything sincere. But what becomes of the Antoine Dobsons and the Rebecca Blacks, our Internet culture folk heroes?

Says Chen, “From an industry standpoint. I think if you’re an Internet phenomenon you get put in this meme box, which means you can only do certain meme things, like put out merchandise related to your meme, or appear on talk shows joking about your meme. The mainstream industry kind of picks them up gingerly, with slight disgust, and throws them into stuff until they’re sick of them.”

The pop culture ringer hasn’t got sick of Bieber quite yet, and we’ll just have to wait for Black to put out her next song to gage her expiration date. Best case scenario: It’s a duet, with Bieber himself.