In a weird marriage of pop culture and political asylum, Lady Gaga recently swung by the Ecuadorian embassy in London for some quality time with Julian Assange. Apparently, the singer and the hacktivist dined together and posed in a grainy photo opp before parting ways. And MIA was there too? Well, that's a very weird dinner party, isn't it?
But really, what was that all about? Like many things in Gaga's world, the short and long answer to that question is, "Who knows." We do, however, know a little bit about how the pop star ended up at the embassy. Lady Gaga was already in London for a "personal appearance and tea party" to promote her new perfume Fame. Perhaps having caught wind of the visit, MIA tweeted at Gaga on Sunday night, "if ur at harrods today , come visit Assange at the Ecuador embassy across the st. im there. ill bring TEA and CAKE." A full 24-hours later, Lady Gaga posted a photo of her and the Wikileaks founder with a stain on his shirt. Somebody even snapped a couple of photos of her leaving the embassy. It's unclear if MIA showed up.
Who knows what the two of them talked about. However, thanks to the enthusiastic droves of Lady Gaga fans on Twitter, we're reminded of the time that Bradley Manning kind of sort of gave the pop star credit for helping him yank hundreds of thousands of classified documents from U.S. Army servers. From Manning's chat logs with hacker Adrian Lamo:
I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.
Are they in cahoots? Is Lady Gaga an enemy of the state? Is this why she threw up four times on stage in Spain last week?
We have no idea! But we do hope they had a nice chat, and frankly, it's quite nice that Assange is getting some visitors. Having lived in the embassy for months now, we're sure any familiar face would make for a friendly dinner date.