“Here at the Monster Ball all the freaks come inside and we lock the doors.”
Natasha and I saw Lady GaGa at Radio City tonight. Everyone who goes to this concert comes out spouting hyperbole: “BEST. CONCERT. EVER.” “I am forever changed.” “Gaga chewed me up and spit me out.” Since I always talk like this, you have no legitimate reason to believe me when I say that this is the best thing I have ever, ever seen. So I will spend the next few paragraphs trying to describe exactly why and exactly what was going through my head during this gesamtkunstwerk.
First let’s discuss the crowd. We dressed up but I opted not to wear my wig when I discovered that the wig cap gave me a massive headache. Honestly, I was also self-conscious about going on the subway wearing an obviously fake blonde wig and all my other glarmor. Big mistake. This is NEW YORK. You rarely get a second look for being a freak. As we neared Radio City, we started to see more and more people who looked like we did. Not everyone was dressed up as GaGa (although there were many with bow-tied hair and one amazingly accurate red-hooded, white-lace-tighted “Just Dance” costume), but nearly everyone was DRESSED UP: glitter, sunglasses, pantslessness, feathers, lace and a veritable sea of sequins, sequins, sequins as far as the eye could see. Naturally, I was in seventh heaven. Most notable were two men: one who was wearing bedazzled football shoulder padding and one who was wearing a light-up jacket. Light-Up Jacket Guy may not have impressed my seat neighbor (who, as he showed me on his iPhone, was a constellation for Halloween) but he certainly impressed all the ladies around him; nearly everyone got a photo with him. I don’t think anyone would have freaked out any more if he had been an actual celebrity.
This is pure GaGa and perfectly indicative of the environment of the concert. Lady GaGa fans (particularly in New York, I would imagine) are beautiful freaks. I wanted to compliment all of their outfits and make them all my friends. I now understand why Lady GaGa loves her fans so much. I wish every day were filled with sparkly things and people who strive to stand out, who are as loud as they want to be. I wish I didn’t care so much what people thought of me. The person with the brightest jacket will obviously inherit the earth.
I was told that this concert is more like a Broadway musical than a concert (it was covered in the Theatre section of The New York Times, which I think should make it eligible for a Special Theatrical Event Tony) and it’s absolutely accurate. We almost never see the band. There is the obvious Taboo reference, the Leigh Bowery influence in GaGa's fashion. She also starts the concert alone onstage (“Dance in the Dark” in which she is very aptly dancing in the dark…with a light-up costume, of course) and the set-up reminded me of the greatest solo numbers in Sweet Charity. Her coquettish bad girl speeches are so deliciously scripted (“Why do you guys come to my concert?” GaGa quipped when she realized her fans knew the answers to her rhetorical questions, “You watched the whole thing on youtube!”) that they call to mind Roxie Hart’s in Chicago. Like Roxie, GaGa rarely travels without a gaggle of well-built men to carry her around.
Also like Roxie Hart, Lady GaGa is an unrepentant narcissist. And I mean that as a compliment. As the crowd went insane for her, she yawned, milking it, begging for more. “Do you think I’m sexy?” she asked at one point. “Because I think you’re sexy. People ask me why I spent all my money on my show and I say, ‘Because I think my fans are sexy.’ The question is: do you think I’m sexy? Do you want to fuck me?” Who talks like that? Imagine the confidence it takes to say that to a sold-out crowd at Radio City. Obviously if you sell out Radio City four times, you know that everyone is going to scream at everything you say but I just love how much she lives off the adoration. (“I’m like Tinkerbell. If you don’t scream, I’ll die. You don’t want me to die, do you?”)
Recently she had to cancel a few shows due to illness (it’s easy to see how someone could get rundown doing this show over and over again) and on the eve of the first cancelled show, Lady GaGa recalled hearing the screams of her fans from her dressing room. She was devastated that the doctors wouldn’t let her go on, begged them to let her. I love this story. I have this image of her having to be strapped to a gurney because she just needed to please Her People so badly. Eventually they wheel the gurney onstage and she’s hooked up to an IV (because they had to sedate her, of course) and she just rips the IV out of her arm and glitter spews out of it all over everything.
This is the sort of thing I would expect from Lady GaGa because, despite her jokes at the New York shows that she’s “not gonna go all the way,” she leaves it ALL onstage. She sings live in glorious full voice, she dances like a fiend, she plays piano like Liberace on amphetamines (standing on the instrument, playing with her feet, etc.). She gives her audience everything and we want to give her everything in return. I have never screamed so loud or so hard in my life. I actually gagged a few times; I felt my voice box move in my throat. It’s surprisingly easy to pick up on her choreography so I also danced like a maniac.
I don’t know how anyone can doubt that she is The New Madonna. I have never been to a concert before where the fans actually dressed up like the artist. I would imagine this is what it was like on Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour. Lady GaGa now seems equal to Madonna at her height in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. But I think GaGa is actually better than Madonna, more like Madonna 2.0, because she sings live, she plays piano, and she seems to have a broader scope of ideas.
I get how someone could long to live in a past decade to experience great artists live, but I don’t buy the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” mentality. Often post-modernism is about combining all the art of the past (art that is readily available to us with all the technology we have today) and synthesizing it into something that is brand new. I used to think it had all been done before. Then I took a contemporary art class and my eyes were really opened to the new frontiers of art.
I said before that the Monster Ball is a gesamtkunstwerk and I truly believe that. It is an all-encompassing, multimedia work of art. It combines music, visual arts, dance, technology, theatre, and fashion. And it is sexy, scary, moving, thought-provoking, inspirational, disturbing, and thrilling. It is everything.
You think GaGa’s music is lightweight dance pop, that the lyrics are about sex and partying (I personally like to make up a lot of the lyrics when I don’t understand what she’s singing). That is a misconception. That means you’re taking Lady GaGa at face value. You listen to her music on a flat plane; you fail to see that she exists as a three-dimensional sphere. The music is just one part of what she does and it’s depth cleverly disguised as shallowness. Everything is in quotations.
Lady GaGa is taking over where Andy Warhol left off. She’s incredibly elusive as a person and an artist. She says one thing but means another. She’s constantly contradicting herself. Her album is called The Fame but she said she was much more excited to be performing for her fans than she was for celebrities. She will declare her love for her fans one minute and flip them off the next. She will decry violence and then fire a gun at her audience. At least three songs on her debut album are about money, but GaGa claims to hate nothing more than money. Oh yeah, she hates one thing more than money: the truth. THAT I believe .
Whenever anyone asks me to explain how GaGa is more than a cheap gimmick, more than style over substance, more than shock for shock’s sake, I try to cite things she’s said in interviews about death and celebrity, but I recognize that this is a mistake. It is not the job of the artist to answer questions; it is the job of the artist to ask questions, to provoke. She assaults you with images.
It is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that Lady GaGa is a human being, one who is younger than I am. To me she is more like God. I would like to become one with her. I wish that I could be that fearless. I wish that I could give everything that I think I have inside. I wish that I were an artist. If I were, this is the kind of artist I would be--the kind of artist who views life as the ultimate canvas.
But I will settle for seeing her again on the second leg of her tour, which will be a bigger, better ARENA tour (when I will hopefully be able to afford a cool t-shirt). I have a few suggestions:
1. More female dancers. I loved how the dancers started out as asexual amorphous alien-like creatures that resemble the mascot on “Community” and really enjoyed how they gradually seemed to become more human. The apex of this was “Boys Boys Boys” which was gay-club fantastic with shirtless six packs in suspenders and tights dancing like go-go boys in cages (there should be real cages next time!). But I was shocked by the lack of female dancers. There were a few but they barely registered. I was expecting more lesbianism, especially during “Poker Face.” Maybe next time she will sing “So Happy I Could Die.”
2. Platform in the center of the audience. She should perform in the Rings of GaGa costume in the center, so that not only are the rings rotating around her but so are we. Bonus if she can somehow fly over us or get the entirety of MSG to rotate.
3. Adam Lambert as the opening act. This is a total no-brainer. They have cross-fan appeal. He could use her fans and I think she’d force him to up his game. She’s the only artist he could conceivably open for and it would give him an opportunity to play the huge venues he’s made for.
4. Double-headline with Beyoncé. Because I want to see “Telephone” live. (This can also be done at the Grammys.)
5. Play "I Like It Rough." This is my favorite non-single from The Fame. I recognize that "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)" is like GaGa's "Borderline," but "Rough" is a far superior song.
First let’s discuss the crowd. We dressed up but I opted not to wear my wig when I discovered that the wig cap gave me a massive headache. Honestly, I was also self-conscious about going on the subway wearing an obviously fake blonde wig and all my other glarmor. Big mistake. This is NEW YORK. You rarely get a second look for being a freak. As we neared Radio City, we started to see more and more people who looked like we did. Not everyone was dressed up as GaGa (although there were many with bow-tied hair and one amazingly accurate red-hooded, white-lace-tighted “Just Dance” costume), but nearly everyone was DRESSED UP: glitter, sunglasses, pantslessness, feathers, lace and a veritable sea of sequins, sequins, sequins as far as the eye could see. Naturally, I was in seventh heaven. Most notable were two men: one who was wearing bedazzled football shoulder padding and one who was wearing a light-up jacket. Light-Up Jacket Guy may not have impressed my seat neighbor (who, as he showed me on his iPhone, was a constellation for Halloween) but he certainly impressed all the ladies around him; nearly everyone got a photo with him. I don’t think anyone would have freaked out any more if he had been an actual celebrity.
This is pure GaGa and perfectly indicative of the environment of the concert. Lady GaGa fans (particularly in New York, I would imagine) are beautiful freaks. I wanted to compliment all of their outfits and make them all my friends. I now understand why Lady GaGa loves her fans so much. I wish every day were filled with sparkly things and people who strive to stand out, who are as loud as they want to be. I wish I didn’t care so much what people thought of me. The person with the brightest jacket will obviously inherit the earth.
I was told that this concert is more like a Broadway musical than a concert (it was covered in the Theatre section of The New York Times, which I think should make it eligible for a Special Theatrical Event Tony) and it’s absolutely accurate. We almost never see the band. There is the obvious Taboo reference, the Leigh Bowery influence in GaGa's fashion. She also starts the concert alone onstage (“Dance in the Dark” in which she is very aptly dancing in the dark…with a light-up costume, of course) and the set-up reminded me of the greatest solo numbers in Sweet Charity. Her coquettish bad girl speeches are so deliciously scripted (“Why do you guys come to my concert?” GaGa quipped when she realized her fans knew the answers to her rhetorical questions, “You watched the whole thing on youtube!”) that they call to mind Roxie Hart’s in Chicago. Like Roxie, GaGa rarely travels without a gaggle of well-built men to carry her around.
Also like Roxie Hart, Lady GaGa is an unrepentant narcissist. And I mean that as a compliment. As the crowd went insane for her, she yawned, milking it, begging for more. “Do you think I’m sexy?” she asked at one point. “Because I think you’re sexy. People ask me why I spent all my money on my show and I say, ‘Because I think my fans are sexy.’ The question is: do you think I’m sexy? Do you want to fuck me?” Who talks like that? Imagine the confidence it takes to say that to a sold-out crowd at Radio City. Obviously if you sell out Radio City four times, you know that everyone is going to scream at everything you say but I just love how much she lives off the adoration. (“I’m like Tinkerbell. If you don’t scream, I’ll die. You don’t want me to die, do you?”)
Recently she had to cancel a few shows due to illness (it’s easy to see how someone could get rundown doing this show over and over again) and on the eve of the first cancelled show, Lady GaGa recalled hearing the screams of her fans from her dressing room. She was devastated that the doctors wouldn’t let her go on, begged them to let her. I love this story. I have this image of her having to be strapped to a gurney because she just needed to please Her People so badly. Eventually they wheel the gurney onstage and she’s hooked up to an IV (because they had to sedate her, of course) and she just rips the IV out of her arm and glitter spews out of it all over everything.
This is the sort of thing I would expect from Lady GaGa because, despite her jokes at the New York shows that she’s “not gonna go all the way,” she leaves it ALL onstage. She sings live in glorious full voice, she dances like a fiend, she plays piano like Liberace on amphetamines (standing on the instrument, playing with her feet, etc.). She gives her audience everything and we want to give her everything in return. I have never screamed so loud or so hard in my life. I actually gagged a few times; I felt my voice box move in my throat. It’s surprisingly easy to pick up on her choreography so I also danced like a maniac.
I don’t know how anyone can doubt that she is The New Madonna. I have never been to a concert before where the fans actually dressed up like the artist. I would imagine this is what it was like on Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour. Lady GaGa now seems equal to Madonna at her height in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. But I think GaGa is actually better than Madonna, more like Madonna 2.0, because she sings live, she plays piano, and she seems to have a broader scope of ideas.
I get how someone could long to live in a past decade to experience great artists live, but I don’t buy the “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” mentality. Often post-modernism is about combining all the art of the past (art that is readily available to us with all the technology we have today) and synthesizing it into something that is brand new. I used to think it had all been done before. Then I took a contemporary art class and my eyes were really opened to the new frontiers of art.
I said before that the Monster Ball is a gesamtkunstwerk and I truly believe that. It is an all-encompassing, multimedia work of art. It combines music, visual arts, dance, technology, theatre, and fashion. And it is sexy, scary, moving, thought-provoking, inspirational, disturbing, and thrilling. It is everything.
You think GaGa’s music is lightweight dance pop, that the lyrics are about sex and partying (I personally like to make up a lot of the lyrics when I don’t understand what she’s singing). That is a misconception. That means you’re taking Lady GaGa at face value. You listen to her music on a flat plane; you fail to see that she exists as a three-dimensional sphere. The music is just one part of what she does and it’s depth cleverly disguised as shallowness. Everything is in quotations.
Lady GaGa is taking over where Andy Warhol left off. She’s incredibly elusive as a person and an artist. She says one thing but means another. She’s constantly contradicting herself. Her album is called The Fame but she said she was much more excited to be performing for her fans than she was for celebrities. She will declare her love for her fans one minute and flip them off the next. She will decry violence and then fire a gun at her audience. At least three songs on her debut album are about money, but GaGa claims to hate nothing more than money. Oh yeah, she hates one thing more than money: the truth. THAT I believe .
Whenever anyone asks me to explain how GaGa is more than a cheap gimmick, more than style over substance, more than shock for shock’s sake, I try to cite things she’s said in interviews about death and celebrity, but I recognize that this is a mistake. It is not the job of the artist to answer questions; it is the job of the artist to ask questions, to provoke. She assaults you with images.
It is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that Lady GaGa is a human being, one who is younger than I am. To me she is more like God. I would like to become one with her. I wish that I could be that fearless. I wish that I could give everything that I think I have inside. I wish that I were an artist. If I were, this is the kind of artist I would be--the kind of artist who views life as the ultimate canvas.
But I will settle for seeing her again on the second leg of her tour, which will be a bigger, better ARENA tour (when I will hopefully be able to afford a cool t-shirt). I have a few suggestions:
1. More female dancers. I loved how the dancers started out as asexual amorphous alien-like creatures that resemble the mascot on “Community” and really enjoyed how they gradually seemed to become more human. The apex of this was “Boys Boys Boys” which was gay-club fantastic with shirtless six packs in suspenders and tights dancing like go-go boys in cages (there should be real cages next time!). But I was shocked by the lack of female dancers. There were a few but they barely registered. I was expecting more lesbianism, especially during “Poker Face.” Maybe next time she will sing “So Happy I Could Die.”
2. Platform in the center of the audience. She should perform in the Rings of GaGa costume in the center, so that not only are the rings rotating around her but so are we. Bonus if she can somehow fly over us or get the entirety of MSG to rotate.
3. Adam Lambert as the opening act. This is a total no-brainer. They have cross-fan appeal. He could use her fans and I think she’d force him to up his game. She’s the only artist he could conceivably open for and it would give him an opportunity to play the huge venues he’s made for.
4. Double-headline with Beyoncé. Because I want to see “Telephone” live. (This can also be done at the Grammys.)
5. Play "I Like It Rough." This is my favorite non-single from The Fame. I recognize that "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)" is like GaGa's "Borderline," but "Rough" is a far superior song.