Fan Fare

Gaga keeps her “little monsters” screaming, but what’s next?

Lady Gaga’s fans, whom she often refers to as her “little monsters,” were out in force this week in her hometown of New York City.  She enjoyed three sold out concerts and morning chat show “Today” said they had their largest crowd ever with up to 18,000 fans outside their Rockefeller Plaza studios for a performance on Friday morning.

On her second concert tour performing songs from two albums — “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” — Gaga surely knows the money in music these days generally comes more from concert touring than album sales. On “Today,” she connected  directly to her fans, from the “freaks” to the “New York City gay kids,” telling them: “you can be whoever you want to be,  my little monsters.”

But even though her shows clearly are drawn from pop predecessors Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga showed off a rousing rendition of her new ballad “You and I” that recalled her old days as Stefani Germanotta, singing in New York’s burlesque bars. The performance seemed a bit distant from the outlandish, blood soaked Gaga of recent past. (Although, that said, she did bang on the piano in barely nothing and ended up hanging upside down from the piano stool, hardly a piano bar staple)

Yet, while pop stars are always redefining themselves, it seems hard to imagine that on her next album Gaga will stray too far from her glam formula. Recently ranked no. 4 on the Forbes top 100 power celebrity list,  Gaga was reported to have earned an estimated $31 million in 2009 from a 106-date tour that grossed $95 million.

Carrie Prejean calls sex video a solo “mistake”

Beauty queen Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who became the darling of conservatives when she spoke out against gay marriage at this year’s Miss USA pageant, has another work getting her plenty of attention. No, it’s not her memoir, the defiantly titled “Still Standing,” that has people talking. It’s a sex tape that few have seen, but that plenty of people are jabbering about.

On Tuesday, Prejean herself went on television news shows and talked about the sex tape. In this interview with NBC’s “Today” show, Prejean defended herself and said that “nothing is private anymore.”

“It was me by myself, there was no one else with me, I was not having sex,” she told NBC News. “I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I was a teenager, I cared about him, I trusted him.”

She added that it was “for private use” but that making the solo sex video was the “biggest mistake of my life.”

Prejean added that she does not know how officials with Miss California got the solo sex tape, as was reported gleefully in recent days by celebrity website TMZ.

One reason the video is just being talked about — and not viewed on the Web or DVD or any other medium — is that Prejean was apparently 17 at the time, which would make her underage and a crime to distribute the footage.

On “Today,” Prejean said she has been under attack for criticizing gay marriage at Miss USA, and she hit many of the conservative talking points, slamming the news media for being too “liberal,” name checking Sarah Palin and taking a glancing shot at right wing punching bag Keith Olbermann.

“Weatherman” Al Roker, Speidi wage war of words