Lady Gaga has a new music video out for her song “Bad Romance.”
The singer-songwriter-pianist-provocateur seems to be one of the few pop stars these days who really understands spectacle, fashion, shock, choreography—all the things Madonna and Michael Jackson were masters of in the 1980s.
It’s particularly hard to resist the Jabberwockian catchiness of the “Bad Romance” hook: “Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!”
It may not be the new “Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa,” but it’ll do for now.
The “Bad Romance” music video, which takes place in the “Bath Haus of Gaga,” shows us a new side of the singer-songwriter by actually showing her more clearly and closely than we’ve seen in some of her past clips—there are lots of intimate shots of her naked face, unveiled, unobstructed.
The costumes in the “Bad Romance” music video are particularly striking—sort of haute couture meets “Where the Wild Things Are,” with boots, form-fitting white jumpsuits, a polar bear cape, and some sort of headgear that resembles a crown as re-imagined by Salvador Dali and H. R. Giger.
The theme of the video seems to be something about how fame seduces, addicts and perverts those that attain it. It’s an ongoing concern of Lady Gaga, and the idea is all the more curious because she seems to have been obsessed with it even before she was actually famous.
In an age when everyone is one tweet away from a TV deal, one reality show away from celebrity, and one sex tape away from a downfall, why wait for stardom to arrive before you start worrying about it?
Most of all, the clip does what good videos do—it makes you like the song more after seeing it.
And the final image of Lady Gaga on some sort of burned-out bed with what appears to be a corpse is brilliantly twisted.
You can read an interview with Lady Gaga here.
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/11/11/lady-gaga-bad-romance-plus-crowns-kinkiness-and-choreography/
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