Before I write anything let me confess that I am no Lady Gaga fan. Okay, I can begin now.
So the other day I was surfing youtube. And I came across the latest video of Lady Gaga-“You and I”. I pressed the play button and here I saw Lady Gaga, dancing, prancing, getting electrocuted, as a mermaid, as a child of the corn, in her male alter ego Jo Calderon, doing the same outrageous acts as her previous videos.
She makes these videos to shock and like her faithful little monsters you get shocked. But what shocked me more than her histrionics was the sampling that they used for this song. “We will rock you”. Yup. The sampling was from this. Brian May can be heard playing in this song. And let us not forget Lady Gaga is a QUEEN fan taking her name from “Radio Ga-Ga”.
[youtube_video id=X9YMU0WeBwU]
The video is presented in a non-linear fashion. The song is itself inspired from her failed relationship with Luc Carl. We see Gaga in various poses and stages. Green wig and leatherdress. Spooked me out. But she was dancing well. Now I know nothing about dancing. But her on scree gyration can be converted into “yes she was dancing well”. The song itself was catchy. The solo by Brian May, of course stands out. You cannot expect more. If I may say so, Gaga is adding more shock value to her video just for the sake of being outrageous. My question is, will we see Lady Gaga anytime soon without her outrageous self? Will she be able to discard this image of hers and present something calm and edgy?
It’s nuts talking like this. The only way she can make her way up the charts is to present herself didactically absurd by doing something so preposterous that you won’t be able to neglect her uber-morality. Remember “Telephone”? You do. Think of Judas or any other video she produced. I feel, the meat dress was her more shocking adage to her starving fans who go “ga-ga” seeing her, well, like this:
Because you just HAD to see it again
The video itself has a very surreal setup. Lady Gaga with mechanical parts, and a very nasty ice cream seller, inspiration from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and of course as I mentioned Children of the Corn. A pastiche of all her favourite things, she goes on like a ronin let loose in a field full of dead bodies. We expect something very very bleary from her and she delivers without batting a (prosthetic?) eyelash. She knows, she knows that she needs to shock. The most exaggerated portion of this video is her male alter ego Jo Calderon who we see is kissing Lady Gaga over an ecstatic piano solo. So much for self-gratification. Huh.
Oh, FYI, the song is from the album Born this way. Please don’t download the album. Buy it. Yes, this is my way of doing Annagiri.
So if you really want to see some shocking videos, try Rammstein. Lady Gaga falls flat for me, maybe not for you. And yes, maybe I will write my next piece on Rammstein.
Sayantan Mondal is writing about Rammstien right now. He wants you to dress up like a black metal fan, slaughter a goat to the alter of Cthulhu. Or you could watch these awesome movies.
