There are so many reasons why I love Lady Gaga. Let's review: She's from New York and she's relentlessly bold as all people ought to be. When I went to see her concert in Boston a while back, I really felt like I was watching some sort of twisted visionary do her thang. She got to me because she's always been so insistent on being out of the box. It's kitschy and trashy and campy but it's never just because she's a stereotypical rebel. All of her craziness actually serves a purpose: to point things out to us about our culture. This is a young woman who wears costumes made entirely of Kermit the Frog puppets and who often wears masks that cover her entire face. For a woman in the entertainment industry to obstruct her face and to present this crazy image and to STILL be successful is a huge feat. She pulls all of these crazy stunts and we don't tire of them (or at least not yet) because, oddly enough, they offer us a bit of information about ourselves.
During the concert, for example, she had one screen that showed all these crazed images of her in bizarre, "high fashion" outfits. Then, out of nowhere, there was one clip of this girl blatantly shoving her finger down her throat to make herself vomit. There's no turning away from something like that. As an audience, we all had to confront this large image of what some people do "to be beautiful." In the midst of all the fun of the concert, she compelled us to see that the entertainment world is not all glitz and glamor. There's more to the story than what we think of when we look at certain popularized images of women.
That's also why her "Bad Romance" video is so damn amazing. She plays with all kinds of images, freaks us the hell out and still exposes us to things we never want to think of. In the video, there are these bug-like images of her and her back up dancers. She frowns and grits her teeth. At some points she even has these creepy, huge doll eyes that left me weirded out for the duration of the video. In some ways, it seems like she does everything in her power to violate the rule book of what a sexy, commercialized artist should do. She then twists that, though, and strips down to a dark bikini. She is still compelled to be a sex object for the men bidding on her.
It's interesting because the set up of the video implies that in the future rather than doing away with the way the objectification of women's bodies (like some of us might hope), women will still be used as playthings for men in the year 2500. She messes with us so much and we never know if we should be repulsed, worried or turned on by this. That's the magic of Lady Gaga: she knows there's no black and white to anything and so instead she messes around in that gray area. She's not going to entirely accept the role of a rebel who's attacking portrayals of the female body but she's not saying they're great either. We know she doesn't think these images are perfect, though, because at the end what happens? The male bidder gets what coming to him! He feels the burn.
Now all of this might seem like an over-the-top analysis and it might be. But I do think Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video was crafted with much more detail and innovation than the average music video out there today for a reason. It's no accident that it turned out to have all these odd little details (e.g. a frozen, raining diamond scheme, excessively large eyes, a corpse, intentionally tacky red masks for her backup dancers) that are so meticulous. It seems like everything is designed to paint a picture for us. It makes me upset when people can't see any of this because a) it makes me wonder if I'm crazy and just seeing what I want to in a 5 minute music video and b) it makes me wonder if people only want to watch what they can understand at a quick first glance. Why do people overlook your amazingness, Gaga? I mean really. What's up with that?
