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‘I’ll sit at the drum machine, you sit at the piano,’ ” Fusari says of their initial experiment. “What the hell? We don’t have to use it.”
    “The first few songs weren’t her sound,” Starland says. “I really want to credit Rob with devising . . .” She pauses. “I might have talked about creating a focus more on her body than her face, and because of that, dance seemed like a very natural way for her to go.”
    That initial experiment with dance tracks, Fusari says, was “the lightbulb moment. Everything just started to make sense. But we didn’t have the name yet.”
    Meanwhile, Stefani was also learning how to navigate the Lower East Side. Ever since the 1980s, the neighborhood, right below the aesthetically similar East Village and right above Chinatown, had been home to the city’s vanguard in art and debauchery. Much like today, the East Village and Lower East Side in the eighties overlapped; Keith Haring did a one-night show on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village in 1980, and shortly after came the Fun Gallery, two blocks over on East 10th Street, where kids and the curious would go to watch break-dancers and hear hip-hop and look at graffiti sprayed on the walls. Also good for music, dancing, and general troublemaking were the Mudd Club, CBGB (which opened in 1973), and ABC No Rio, a collective space for artists and activists on Rivington Street that still hosts everyone from silkscreeners to anarchists. Jean-Michel Basquiat was there then, too, crossing paths with Andy Warhol and dating a very young Madonna.
    In the early-to-mid 1990s, the Lower East Side became just gentrified enough to attract kids from Columbia University and NYU looking to slum it and likely score some really powerful heroin. Ludlow Street was becoming a main artery, with the opening of the venerable dive bar/art space Max Fish; a few doors down was the Alleged Gallery, which showed outsider art and exhibits of skateboard decks, and kept a back room for visiting artists to crash on the floor. (Its founder, Aaron Rose, would later be immortalized as a caddish young playboy on Gossip Girl, which one season later featured Lady Gaga in a cameo, performing “Bad Romance” at a school dance.) Cult bands like Jonathan Fire*Eater, which would spawn the more successful Walkmen, were living and playing down there, as was a very young Beck, who could often be found playing coffee shops on Avenue A.
    By 2006 the Lower East Side had long been transmogrified into something of a theme park for hipsters. Tourists found their way to Max Fish via Lonely Planet guidebooks, and stars like Jude Law were investors in the infamous grown-up sex house the Box. Famed restauranteur Keith McNally opened Schiller’s, a shabby, sophistiated brasserie serving the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and inspiring the locus of the action in Richard Price’s best-selling 2008 novel, Lush Life . The neighborhood is so well branded that an artist like Santigold can release a song called “L.E.S. Artistes,” and not only will it become a hit, but almost everyone who hears it will know what L.E.S. stands for. By the time Stefani took up residence there, the Lower East Side was almost as safe as the Upper West Side, if filthier. But that’s part of the appeal, and this Lower East Side was still where all the cool kids were. Members of the Strokes, Interpol, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs ran around down there; the city’s best music venues, like the Mercury Lounge and the Bowery Ballroom, were there; it was where A&R people scouted new talent, fashion editors sourced trends, and where the bulk of the city’s most-read art and music bloggers lived and worked.
    “That period of my life,” Gaga has said, “was about me trying to be cool, being the queen of a very small scene, getting my picture taken, dating the hottest bartender. Bartenders are like movie stars down there.” (As absurd as that may sound, she’s right.) “On the Lower East Side, being Queen of the Scene