Lady Gaga: Why Rocky IV Inspires Me

Lady Gaga’s inspiration comes from … Rocky IV? Apparently so: "My favorite part is when Apollo's ex-trainer says to Rocky, 'He is not a machine. He's a man. Cut him, and once he feels his own blood, he will fear you,’” she tells Rolling Stone. “I know it sounds crazy, but I was thinking about the machine of the music industry. I started to think about how I have to make the music industry bleed to remind it that it's human, it's not a machine." (In other Gaga-related news, Mashable reports that Amazon is clearing up this week's little problem by again offering her album for 99 cents.)

In the RS cover story, Gaga also reveals that she knows what it’s like to be bullied. In high school, she was teased for “being ugly, having a big nose, being annoying,” she says. “'Your laugh is funny, you're weird, why do you always sing, why are you so into theater, why do you do your make-up like that?’" And it didn’t stop when she first became famous: "Being myself in public was very difficult," she says. "I was being poked and probed and people would actually touch me and touch my clothes and be like, 'What the f**k is that,' just so awful.” Click to see Gaga’s Rolling Stone cover, complete with bleached eyebrows. (More Lady Gaga stories.)