Lady Gaga : My Beloved Monster and Me
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy…?
If you go out in the dark tonight you’re in for a big surprise. If you go out in the dark tonight you better go in disguise. There is only one dresscode for this eve’s masquerade Ball: platinum blonde Cleopatra meets Flash lightning bolt, with sunglasses… and leotards. Ask anyone so attired at Glasgow’s SECC who or what Stefani Germanotta is, responses may include: a Godfather character, an ice cream flavour, the Italian Prime Minister… In 2010, that which is real (including names) matters not.
Ask who the Belle of this Ball is, however, and you’ll have 10,000 of her brutally hysterical “little monsters”, to answer to. For most of us dressing up is something reserved for Hallowe’en and hen nights. For Queen Frankenstein, fantasy is life. As she would later reveal (with remarkable integrity), the only thing more loathsome than money is the truth: “I hate the truth so much I’d take a giant dose of bullshit any day.” With that in mind, I impart some sound advice: for those of you who think there are nine planets in our solar system, think again. There are ten. Welcome to Planet GaGa.
For one night only, behold the GlaGla’s (Glasgow’s very own Ladies): ginger GaGas, obese GaGas, GaGas with Haribos, GaGas with ASBOs, even GayGays. Suffice to say, you haven’t lived until you see a six-year-old girl impersonating a psycho-sexual dominatrix Superfreak. Seriously, why debate the merits of introducing sex education in primary schools when you can escort your child to watch a former burlesque performer cavort around a Warhol-inspired backdrop of multi-coloured dildos singing lines like “Inject me… I like it rough… take a bite of my bad girl meat”? ‘What’s that mummy?’ is not a question easily avoided when you’re staring a 50-foot projection of a leather-clad gimp in the face. Thunder bolt and lightning, very very frightening me!
Like some operas, The Monster Ball is a pop concert in four movements. As decadence goes, the Lady who also has a moniker for her own design team – Haus Of GaGa – is up there with Liberace, the works of Salvador Dali and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Drawing most inspiration from the Glam Rock era, the show is at once self-indulgent, highly creative and a helluva lot of fun. Only ever mentioned in the same breath as Madonna, Prince and Freddie Mercury, GaGa pre-empts her show with a stadium jukebox of Michael Jackson’s greatest hits that’s of no coincidence. No sooner is one Thriller dead, than a new Fame Monster rises from the ashes. And only a disco dwelling diva of the highest order could make her crowd wait 45 minutes too long for arrival.
I see a little silhouette of a man. Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango?
Man, woman, whatever; the outline of a tiny Egyptian God is before me, propelled onto a gigantic screen. In an attempt to mimic Michael Jackson circa Dangerous, Lady GaGa poses completely still to rapturous mass shrieking that grows ever more deafening with each second of paralysis. GaGa later recalls that it was just 9 months ago that she was here last, opening for the now comparably irrelevant Pussycat Dolls. Articulate to a fault, GaGa’s reaction to that titbit of perspective-offering information would be: “Holy fuck!”
Before you can utter a single spoken word of Madonna’s Vogue, the Monstress is shape-shifting to hits such as Just Dance and Beautiful Dirty Rich in a style that, like everything GaGa, is in a league of its own. The signature moves here displayed include the Convulsive Pharaoh body throw and the Epileptic Clawed Swan hand gesture. If image is everything, GaGa holds the key to the meaning of life. She’s like a walking art gallery: The GaGa-nheim Museum, New York City – above the stage is a video installation featuring humans vomiting blue paint.
The outfits are beyond the parameters of vocabulary. Alas, here is my attempt to make eloquent the garb of GaGa: jester-meets-Count Dracula, black Spider-Man plays the Perspex Eiffel Tower keyboard, Wonder Woman moonlights as a psychotic dentist, Omar Sharif discovers leopard print, and, my particular favourite, the Sound Of Music’s Frau Maria does Bond Baddie Rosa Klebb on a silver subway carriage: “Climb every mountain… take a ride on my disco stick.” Not in my convent you won’t! Oh to be a fly on the wall at those brainstorming sessions with costume designer Giorgio Armani.
For GaGa, however, fashion is but the motivation for her main passion – music. And when it comes to egomaniacal pop attitude, she’s the man. Between numbers, a techno-house superclub to rival Ibiza’s finest takes over the hall. In pop terms, it’s the closest thing to euphoric hedonism. As the sets grow ever more luridly garish (the Beyonce collaboration Telephone looks like an exhibit from Berlin’s famous Museum Of Erotica), GaGa unveils her electro-pop best with a slew of tracks from her second album.
Beelzebub has the devil put aside for me. With a thorned version of Central Park taken straight from the final dragon-slaying scenes of Sleeping Beauty surrounding her, Lady GaGa belts out Monster – a song about a man who “ate her heart”. Romance ain’t dead; it just got slightly sado-masochistic. Swiftly onto Alejandro, during which she frolics around a fountain of blood while male Trojan dancers in hotpants tempt her to engage in a Pasodoble that would send Arlene Phillips into cardiac arrest.
Spectacle apart, there is a supremely talented girl at the heart of it all, never more apparent than when her GaGa-ness turns all barroom balladeer-cum-Judy Garland (granted at her most drugged up and deranged) for the highlight heart-melting performance of Speechless. Self-aware and with a cracking sense of humour, she regales
stories of her nutcase fans and life as a star. Magnifico-o-o-o. Tickling a 1930s-esque coda on her ivories, this ultra-contemporary maestro is stripped bare in a manner ill-afforded by the likes of Madonna and Britney Spears. “They say alcohol will kill you? I’d rather not die alone. Here’s to death and company.” If you momentarily discount the piano, which is currently ablaze, there appears an image of a woman who is – dare I say it – unnervingly and quite potentially normal. Well, as normal as beautiful freaks come…
The truth is that in the cold light harsh of day, it’s the real world that’s the monstrous place. Through crazy stage constructions, mental costumes and ghoulish lyrics, Stefani Germanotta has found a way to overcome it all. Thus, Lady GaGa needs no explanation. She’s just a free bitch, so she says. If that’s “a giant dose of bullshit”, that’s also entertainment. Like Freddie Mercury before her, GaGa takes us to a planet where we can be free, too. Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters.
