Pop megastar Lady Gaga says she is toning down her provocative image during her first trip to Israel and is excited about seeing “sacred and holy” Jerusalem.

The songstress born Stefani Germanotta says her visit to Jerusalem will be “an emotional and spiritual experience.” She also has plans to swim in the Dead Sea.

In a nod to local fans at a press conference Monday, Lady Gaga covered her skimpy top with a black leather jacket emblazoned with a Star of David made of silver spikes on the back.

Lady Gaga said she is more excited to see Jerusalem than to “get drunk in a bar,” though she also said she might “get drunk in Jerusalem.”

Lady Gaga will perform the last show of her Fame Ball tour in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

Source: The Tel Aviv, Israel Associated Press

Lady Gaga is laughing off “ridiculous” rumours she has both male and female reproductive organs.

Recent internet footage of the ‘Poker Face’ singer onstage has sparked fresh debate as to whether or not the hitmaker is a hermaphrodite – because a bulge can clearly be seen.

And now gossip website HollyScoop.com reports Gaga actually addressed the rumours of her sexuality with a blog entry at Christmas.

The website claims the singer wrote, “It’s not something that I’m ashamed of, just isn’t something that i go around telling everyone. Yes. I have both male and female genitalia, but i consider myself a female.”

However, the star’s manager tells ABC News, “This is ridiculous.”

Things weren’t going well for young Stefani Germanotta, an 18-year-old from the Upper West Side, at the Bitter End. It was Friday night at the famed Greenwich Village club and the chattering NYU kids in the audience — there because the place didn’t card — outnumbered the handful of misfit East Village friends who had come to see her play. “See the lonely girl,” she sang in her agile and slightly husky voice, letting her fingers fly up and down the keyboard of the beat-up house piano like the child prodigy she once was, “out on the weekend, trying to make it pay.” Set up on the piano’s soundboard, Germanotta’s own portable disco ball spun tiny shards of light and her laptop spat out beats, but no one was listening.

There are many things Laurie Ann Gibson is great at. She’s a world renown choreographer and dancer who has worked with artists like Beyonce, Lady GaGa, Brandy, Jordin Sparks, and Michael Jackson. She’s already jumped into movies, choreographing Paramount Pictures’ Alfie and Universal’s Jessica Alba dance flick Honey, which she also has a starring role in. She’s responsible for creating the eye-popping stage shows for Danity Kane and Day26, and showing competitors how it’s done on Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance.

Biting her tongue, however, is not really her strong suit.

Laurie Ann is known for being an intense force. She’ll waste no time telling you you’re wasting her time or you have to toughen up if you plan to get into the music business — and she won’t use those sweet words. That fiery passion was widely displayed when she joined Diddy on his hit MTV reality show Making the Band. While some are afraid, it’s that fierce intensity that makes Laurie Ann a sweeping success, and by extension, anyone she lends her wisdom to.

MTV.com – OK, so Kanye West and Lady Gaga probably have not actually gotten married, as Gaga jokingly said. However, they are apparently working on their first baby.

By “baby,” we of course mean the super-ambitious set design they’re collaborating on for their upcoming co-headlining tour, which, although it is yet to be officially confirmed, is reported to be kicking off on October 4 in Buffalo, New York.

In an recent interview with the BBC, Gaga said that she and Kanye have been working together on the look and feel of their tour, and, from the sound of things, it’s shaping up to be a big production — if not, as she says, one of the biggest of all time.

“I love Kanye … [he] is my very dear friend and we are creative kindreds,” she said. “It’s been fun to work on the design of the tour with him — we’re finishing each other’s sentences.

“It’s going to be one of the most groundbreaking moments in touring history,” she continued. “I am sure of it.”

In another interview — this one in the September issue of Out magazine — Gaga made another claim.

She said she told Kanye, “I just want to be clear before we decide to do this together: I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is gay. And I love that it’s gay,” she told the magazine. “And I love my gay fans and they’re all going to be coming to our show. And it’s going to remain gay.”

Before Gaga hits the road with West, she’ll get the chance to work out the live show kinks at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. She’s up for nine Moonmen, and earlier this week, it was announced that she’ll also be performing at the big show, alongside the likes of Jay-Z, Green Day, Taylor Swift, Pink and Muse.

Roisin Murphy has denied reports that she accused Lady GaGa of badly copying her style.

The former Moloko frontwoman issued an official statement to refute the comments, saying that the press had taken some remarks out of context and “completely fabricated” others.

Murphy said:

“I NEVER said ‘Lady GaGa is a poor imitation of me’. That was a completely made up quote. I respect Lady GaGa’s work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon. She is a very talented performer, playing the piano, singing live and dancing too.

“I don’t care about shoulder pads! Not every female artist needs to be at odds with their contemporaries – I prefer to focus on the wonderful things happening in my life, which are plentiful. All the best to Lady GaGa – she is fantastic.”

In an interview with the Arjan Writes blog, she added: “All my answers were my honest answers, which was that she is really talented, a great performer and that she wrote her own songs and that she is a more than worthy popstar.

“So I was really surprised when I saw the article and those nice things I said weren’t put in there at all. I did say that perhaps [Lady GaGa] is inspired by my style a little bit, but I said that after I praised her and how fantastic she is.”

Imagine, for a second, that Lady Gaga didn’t dress like a member of wrestling team Demolition, pose for fashion spreads wearing nothing but the rings of Saturn around her head or give interviews dressed in the carcasses of Kermit the Frog. Imagine if she didn’t speak her mind, delight in tweaking the media or treat her fame as one gigantic, Warholian art project. In other words, imagine if she were just another boring, bottle-blond, midriff-bearing pop star.

I know all that is pretty difficult to consider — without any of the flair or the insanity or the nudity, Gaga just wouldn’t be Gaga — but if you somehow managed to strip away all the ephemera, what would you have left? Would Gaga still be interesting? Would she still have sold 1.3 million copies of The Fame here in the U.S., or have been nominated for nine MTV Video Music Awards? Would she be announced, in the same breath as Jay-Z no less, as a VMA performer?