You'd think that after wearing a meat dress, Lady Gaga wouldn't mind anyone making a parody of her - much less "Weird Al" Yankovic. I mean, wouldn't you be proud that Al made a music parody of your song? That's a milestone, fo sho!
But no. Lady Gaga didn't like it one bit (after she made him record the song, no less):
We send the lyrics to Lady Gaga and wait on figurative pins and needles for her to give us the go-ahead. After a few days, we get our answer: “She actually needs to hear it. Otherwise the answer is no.”
Hmm. Well, this was mystifying to me. At this point she has the lyrics… and hopefully she is familiar with her own song… and the parody is basically her music… with my lyrics. It really shouldn’t be that hard to decide – based on having the lyrics right in front of you – whether or not you’d be “okay” with a parody. But, alas, we’d been given an ultimatum. If she didn’t hear it, she wouldn’t approve it.
Okay then. I decided – based on my belief that people are basically good – to go through the trouble and considerable expense of actually recording the song. Now, I never do that – never. But because I was really excited about this parody, I decided I would faithfully jump through as many hoops as Gaga deemed necessary. [...]
A couple days later we got the final word: Lady Gaga says “no.”
*silent scream*
Even though he could claim "fair use," Weird Al decided to leave the single off his album and released it to everyone for free on YouTube: Link | "Perform This Way" on YouTube
Update 4/20/11: Issue resolved! Turns out that Lady Gaga's manager was responsible for the whole kerfuffle: Link - Thanks TW George!
For crying out loud, just because she's not Hollywood beautiful does not mean she's a man or a hermaphrodite.
I'll bet you believe Obama wasn't born in America, too.
Of course he was. Managers and publicists do this ALL THE TIME, turning down offers for their clients without even consulting the clients.
http://alyankovic.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/gaga-update/