Songfacts®:

• Lady Gaga was intrigued by fame long before she was famous. On this song she plays the part of a stan who follows a singer around like a member of the paparazzi, that gaggle of photographers always on the hunt for celebrities. She started performing the song in 2007 when she was a little-known singer on the New York City club scene.
  
  Regarding the song's meaning, told About.com she intended it to have a few different interpretations. She explained: "The song is about a few different things – it's about my struggles, do I want fame or do I want love? It's also about wooing the paparazzi to fall in love with me. It's about the media whoring, if you will, watching ersatzes make fools of themselves to their station. It's a love song for the cameras, but it's also a love song about fame or love – can you have both, or can you only have one?"
• The song was released on Lady Gaga's debut album, The Fame, on August 19, 2008. As her first single, "Just Dance," took off a few months later she did a lot of press and often cited "Paparazzi" as her favorite song from the album. She told Arjanwrites.com that it "really defines me as an artist in a lot of ways," adding, "It's a real pop record but still kind of twisted too. And it has a really intelligent pop art message behind it. That's one of my favorite songs on the record. I'm really proud of that song."
• The epic eight-minute video for this song was helmed by Swedish director Jonas Akerlund, the man behind The Prodigy's controversial "Smack My Bitch Up" clip. It stars Lady Gaga and Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård, who played Meekus in the 2001 Ben Stiller movie Zoolander and the vampire Eric Northman on HBO's True Blood. Lady Gaga explained to The Canadian Press: "It has a real, genuine, powerful message about fame-whoring and death and the demise of the celebrity, and what that does to young people. The video explores ideas about sort of hyperbolic situations that people will go to in order to be famous. Most specifically, pornography and murder. These are some of the major themes in the video."
• The video won the awards at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects. She delivered a dramatic performance of the song at the ceremony that ended with her hoisted above the stage, covered in (fake) blood.
• When "Paparazzi" topped Billboard's Pop Songs chart, it made Gaga the first artist in the 17-year history of that tally to have four straight singles from a debut album reach #1. Her three previous chart-toppers were "Just Dance," "Poker Face" and "LoveGame."
• The word "paparazzi" is the Italian term for press photographers who pester celebrities. It is derived from the name of a news photographer, Paparazzo, in Fedrico Fellini's famous movie, La Dolce Vita (1960). None of these celebrity photographers were interested when Gaga was singing the song in clubs back in 2007, but they sure were a few years later when her career took off. Gaga made her life very pubic and was always seen wearing something eye-catching, to the delight of the paparazzi. She didn't hide behind a character, explaining that Lady Gaga was really her - an attention-seeking fashion maven who was born to perform.
• The song wasn't released as a single until July 2009, nearly a year after it appeared on The Fame. It reached its chart peak of #6 that October when Gaga mania was in full swing. That November she released her next album, The Fame Monster, with the lead single "Bad Romance," which went to #2 in December.
  
  Gaga's rise to stardom made "Paparazzi" a piece of performance art in a way, a look at celebrity culture from the inside, even though she wrote it long before she was a star.
• Gaga wrote and produced the song with Rob Fusari, one of her earliest collaborators. He's the guy who came up with her stage name (a play on the Queen song "Radio Ga Ga"). They had a falling out in 2007 that turned into a legal battle, but three other songs they worked on together landed on Gaga's debut album, The Fame.