Check out this great interview Apartment Number 9 did with DJ White Shadow:

Paul Blair’s career can be split into two time periods: BG and AG (before Gaga and after Gaga). The transition began on an average Sunday night back in 2009, when Blair was djing at a club in LA and a random guy asked if he had any mix tapes. “In Hollywood, people are always asking you for that, and most of them are full of shit,” he says. But blame it on divine intervention—or on the fact that he’s just that nice of a guy—Blair emailed over a link.

The guy then asked Blair on two separate occasions to compile mixes. “I didn’t know who he was or why I did it,” he says. The second time around, the guy—a creative director for Gaga—asked if Blair would be interested in making beats for her new album. So during a plane flight on that very same day, Blair created 10 tracks on his laptop to send over when he landed. Two days later, She (you know who) called and said: “Hey, I wrote a song to one of your tracks. Can I play it for you?”

From the start, their relationship was rare for industry standards. “Nine times of ten, you never talk to, let alone meet the person you’re writing a song for,” Blair swears. “You could win a Grammy without ever meeting each other.” He began skyping with LG—as he fondly calls her—and they finally met in Chicago over Lollapallozo weekend in August 2010. “She said to me, ‘Do you wanna go on the road?,’“ he says. “And I haven’t been back since.”

In 2011, Blair produced nine songs on “Born this Way,” which received three Grammy nominations. And now Team Gaga is polishing up her newest album, ARTPOP, which will be released in two volumes. The recording process is fast and dirty, and according to Blair, Gaga is always game. Blair continues his praise: “Everything that you ever see from her is her idea, like even that dress of meat.” And when Gaga gets flack for her idiosyncrasies, Blair’s been known to go postal via Facebook and Twitter. “I’m trying to realize that responding to that crap makes you just as big of a douche bag,” he says. “But I’m from Detroit, and if you pop shots at any people in my life, I want to call you out.”

The Motor City actually played a pivotal part in Blair’s path to being a dj. Although he grew up on a farm in Ohio, Blair’s family moved to Detroit when he was in 6th grade. As a teenager, he’d sneak out of his parents’ house to go to huge techno parties, and then during his freshman year of college while abroad in Japan, he spun some records for the first time in public. Back in the States, Blair started playing local clubs, and about that time, a promoter dubbed him DJ White Shadow—a nickname that most people still know him by. “It was a black club, and I was a super skinny, 6’4”, white kid, so the promoter thought it was hilarious to name me after this old basketball TV show called “The White Shadow.” Those were the glory days, he says, when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a dj. “I was the dork that came to the party, and I’d feel uncomfortable if I wasn’t playing the music.”

So for 14 years, Blair club-hopped from gig to gig all over the country. He picked up tattoos along with the way, which are now “all lumped into one.” Among them, a phrase stretching across his upper chest that reads: fortune favors the brave. “I got it back when I was young…when I wasn’t as fortunate,” he says. “To me, if you’re more brave and fearless than the next person, you’re more likely to achieve your goals.”

And while those goals have inevitably grown with success, what enriches Blair’s life goes beyond the studio or the Grammy stage. “It’s so important to be nice and work hard,” he says. “I was 33 when everything changed, so I’d been working hard for a long time. I don’t go out and buy a Ferrari and bottles—I don’t even care about the money.” What does matter to him: maintaining relationships with family and friends and supporting aspiring musicians, i.e. answering a phone call from a random kid in Houston with production questions (like he did on the day we talked).

“A lot of people think we go out and party and do crazy things,” Blair says. “I’m not saying we don’t know how to have a good time, but our work is an intense labor of love. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t feel like work.” We couldn’t agree more.

Source: Apartment Number 9

During her interview with 20/20 on Saturday night, Cher revealed that her long anticipated collaboration with Lady Gaga, titled “The Greatest Thing” may not make the cut, telling 20/20 (video coming soon):

There is a track with Lady Gaga, but it’s very on the line right now…she may not want to be on album.

While a rough demo of the RedOne produced track has been circulating since 2010, the two met up in 2011 to record a brand new version, originally slated to be the second single off of Cher’s 25th studio album, due in September.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced on Thursday that they will be including on-demand audio and/or video song streams to it’s gold & platinum certification program. With the launch of this new rule, the RIAA announced that “Bad Romance” has now reached Diamond certification status (10x platinum). Other titles that earned a new certification include Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”, Kanye West’s “Stronger”, Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” and Calvin Harris and Rihanna’s “We Found Love”.

Comedy supergroup, The Lonely Island announced this week that their 2011 collaboration with Lady Gaga, titled “3-Way (The Golden Rule)” will be featured on the group’s upcoming LP, due out June 11th.

The viral track which also includes frequent Lonely Island collaborator, Justin Timberlake, originally made it’s debut in May 2011, when Gaga was a musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

Our friend, Emil had the opportunity to attended Richard Jackson’s (Gaga’s choreographer) Dance Down class in Houston a couple weeks back, and sent us the details about the class and little bit of what went on during the Q&A session afterwards. Check it out:

When the class started, Richy gave a little pep talk, followed by the chorus choreography to “Telephone” with Asiel and Montana. After that, we spent about two hours learning a 1.5 min routine to a “Judas/Schieße”. It was hard as hell, even just watching them go through it had me out of breath.

Afterwards, Richy spoke about Gaga’s journey for about 10 minutes. One of the stories he told was how when Gaga first showed up to rehearsals in 2008, he laughed at her and told her the industry was going to have a real problem with her (in a good way!).

Finally, the dancers sat us down and opened the floor up to questions. Some boring questions were asked at first, but things got interesting when somebody asked Richy and the dancers if they had heard ARTPOP, or if they had started choreographing and working with Gaga at all. Richy smiled and said they had been working on a few things, but that it was secret and we would find out “sooner than you think.”

Richard swiftly moved onto the next question, which was if he was still friends with Laurieann Gibson, or Boomkack, as we’ve all grown to know her as. The entire room, including Richy and the dancers, laughed and he finally said that we all probably knew the answer to that already.

Richy also mentioned that the Born This Way Ball is about Gaga’s life before The Fame. We asked if that meant ARTPOP was her first album and he smiled and proceeded to the next question. We knew he wasn’t able to talk much about ARTPOP, so we asked him about the video of Gaga allegedly tearing her hip while performing “Scheiße” in Montreal, the week the tour was postponed and eventually canceled. He explained that over time, muscles don’t cooperate the way we want them to and that’s what happened with Gaga. He said that fans were saying that she tore her hip in that performance, but that wasn’t the case at all. He said as the tour progressed, the existing injury got worse and she was in a lot of pain, which forced Gaga to cancel “everything.”

After the open floor questions ended, everybody else took photos, while I spoke to Montana and Asiel about if they have normal lives until Gaga decides to call them up to fly out and work on ARTPOP. They simply looked at each other and smiled.

“Next question!”

Richard Jackson’s Dance Down has two more stops left: one in Washington, D.C. on June 1st and the final date in Seattle on May 4th. Ticket and registration info can be found at richysquirrel.com/tour.

Photos and text Courtesy of Emil Jraissati.