Lady Gaga - Hair

This 10-plus minute solo piano performance, from a Gaga appearance on French TV last summer, is kind of stunning in its constant teetering on the line between epic grandeur and total ridiculousness. I know a lot of people would probably scorn that, but for me, the fact that Lady Gaga is so over-the-top at times is one of the great things about her. The same sense of a musical theater background that I get from Gerard Way’s scenery-chewing vocal performances in My Chemical Romance comes through in Gaga’s stage presence as well—I can tell they were both high-school drama club kids. The maudlin displays of emotion that come through performances like these are to many people unseemly, but to me they seem to reflect a kind of radical honesty. The constant artifice of not only Lady Gaga’s performances but indeed her entire life—she wears the same kinds of extreme outfits to catch a plane as she does when she performs—seem to me like a way for her to make clear the uncomfortable fact that there’s no real line between performance and reality. You’re always onstage. I almost added the qualifier “for celebrities” about a dozen words ago, but it seems to me that it’s true even for those of us who aren’t famous. Regardless of what it means in our everyday lives, we’re always being watched, we’re always being judged. We may as well always be onstage. And if you go the Gaga route and treat every supposedly-humdrum moment of day-to-day reality like its an extension of your public life, it also allows for slippage in the other direction—honesty can come through a completely artificial performance. I mean, look at this video—she’s got a scale-model Eiffel Tower tangled in her hair, and she at times makes wry comments in French to amuse the audience, but at other points, she seems near tears. During the brief interview segment, she at one point (just after the 8 minute mark) takes full ownership of the teenage-diary-entry quality of “Hair“‘s lyrics: “My hair is my pride.” So are the lyrics role-playing, or are they how she really feels? What I was trying to say in my last post, what I may not have made clear, is that for me, the only honest answer is that both are true. I feel like that’s something Gaga gets as well.

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    thoughts on She Who Must Not Be Named (No, The Other One).

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