Why Lady Gaga is a Magnificent Creature (Kapital Eins: Alejandro)
I love Lady Gaga. Not ironically, or as a guilty pleasure.. Not even in a casual "yeah, she's pretty cool" kind of way. I love Lady Gaga to absolute death and consider her one of my favorite people on earth. Well, at least in the category of people I don't personally know.
That wasn't always the case. Around the time her first album became popular, I wasn't totally averse to mainstream music, but I generally avoided listening to anything besides metal and classic rock for fear of being "too ordinary". Fortunately, I've gotten past that, and actually now consider 2009-forward pop music to be my third favorite musical genre. But back then, it took me a few months to bother listening to any of her music beyond what my school played at our pep rallies. When I mentioned to one of my best friends that I knew pretty much nothing about Lady Gaga, she just called her “a singer who randomly became popular” and mentioned that she used to be a man. (even then, not knowing who she was, I didn’t believe that.) I finally decided to get over myself one day and download her album, figuring there had to be a reason behind the hype. Again, I have no shame in what I listen to now, so I can happily admit that even then I had a bunch of old Britney Spears and *NSYNC songs on my iPod. If I could rock out to that, I was sure I could rock out to Gaga.
I spent most of the day working on a late art project (I will never attend an art class ever again in the history of my life) and playing the album from my mom’s studio. After every song, I found myself thinking “Well, that was catchy and fun!” I felt generally happy most of the time listening to it (which I definitely needed. Did I mention that I will never again attend an art class in the history of my life?) and after I’d finished, I felt a weird urge to listen to it again. It reminded me of summer and lollipops and it was unicorns and happiness. And I was quite pleasantly surprised. Yeah, she seemed to just write shallow, poppy songs about her drunk antics and adventures with boys, but damned if they weren’t fun to listen to day in and out.
There’s not much to say about the first time I listened to her second album. Again, I was several months behind the curve, and again, it made me bizarrely happy. Though it didn’t take me long to notice that most of The Fame Monster seemed to be taking a slightly darker spin than…The Fame Not-Monster. Over the course of only 8 songs, Gaga recalls the deaths of JonBenét Ramsey and Princess Diana, compares a lover to a brain-eating zombie, and sings a tragic ballad to an apparently abusive boyfriend followed up by a tale of a woman who can only find self-confidence while alone in the dark. That’s a bit of a walk from “just dance! Gonna be okay!”
At some point after that, I realized that maybe it wasn’t so different. A good half of her original songs (the ones about phony-happy relationships, irresponsibility and stalking celebrities-no, that wasn’t actually all of them), now that I re-listened after hearing this darker edge, seemed a bit…obviously satirical. I don’t know for sure if that’s the case, but if it is, it may just be the most brilliantly drawn-out beginning to a real-life stage act I’ve ever seen.
It's a bit strange of me to pick this video as the first to comment on, since it's the third she made for a song off her second album, and still follows all that she made for her first. I picked it because around the time of my second or third viewing of the video was when I finally realized: This woman isn't just someone I casually listen to when doing housework, or a vague inspiration for what wild shade of lipstick I plan on wearing tomorrow.
This woman is amazing.
I don’t know why I realized it then, instead of after her 10-minute Quentin Tarantino tribute or her shiny neofuturistic vision with the Kubrickian opening sequence, because I should really be equally proud of both. Am I? Probably. But for whatever reason, it was this weird cross between fascist and Catholic imagery with tastes of bondage, steampunk and flamboyant homosexuality that really caught my attention on one summer afternoon.
Back in the day, the song was one of her more forgetful ones for me. A love song to either one or three Latin lovers surrounded by word-salad lyrics that probably actually had some deep meaning I didn’t understand. It made me smile whenever I listened to it, but I generally passed it up for some of her more upbeat and catchy tunes. I guess the Illuminati must have hidden more of their reversed brainwashing messages in those.
A few days before the beginning of summer, I loaded up and watched the video, having no idea what to expect (other than the photo I saw comparing her appearance in goggles to Abe Sapien from Hellboy. But I found that promising.)
The beginning displayed title card credits, interspersed with dark, gritty ambient noise and clips of…crossdressing soldiers asleep wearing fishnets? (I’ve heard several suggestions that the video is partially a commentary against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Maaaakes seeeense...) The scene drifts off after 30 seconds to show dancers on a futuristic metal set of sorts performing choreography that looks like a cross between Riverdance and Nazis goose-stepping while carrying some sort of fragile wooden sculptures. As they dance away, it then moves to a snowy funeral in Russia. The song itself doesn’t start until 2 minutes in - though I think that beats Telephone - when the Lady speaks the opening lines while wearing a goth veil and a Russian accent. As the music begins, it changes to the most epic pose I’ve ever seen her in, as a queen towering above her shirtless minions, wearing lace-covered steampunk goggles and deep red lipstick and clasping a smoking pipe between her fingers as she overlooks them from a position of leadership. During the entire scene, a black and white 3-D screen in the background displays some sort of burning chaos. Then Gaga is a nun in a pearly white habit decorated with red crosses, lying on a bed beside a collection of rosaries that almost rivals mine, clasping one to her chest as she begs Alejandro to let her go. A second later she’s much less of a religious figure as she dances in her underwear among half a dozen half-naked men with bowl cuts tied up to beds, but in another moment she’s once again dressed as a nun, both being tossed in the air by the now-freed men and standing before the burning destruction shown on the screen, which seems to have made its way into the real world. And lying back on the bed, swallowing the rosary she held before. Swallowing it. And as the video transfers to an extra chorus that wasn’t included in the original song, Gaga is dancing in a…weirdly normal black outfit dancing in the center of a black-and-white shot, surrounded by two rows of dancing gay Nazis. Now they’re all dancing together and she’s wearing a bra with machine guns attached. And in the extended ending, Gaga sings into a microphone wearing pretty sunglasses while standing in front of a wooden cross, and on the screen of bleakness, we finally see images of the titular Alejandro, a bitter and stony-faced 20-something man in what I swear is an SS hat and trenchcoat who glares out into the world from in front of what seems to be some sort of city-wide riot displayed on that gritty screen. More dancing Nazis and machine guns. Gaga the nun is being undressed by her shirtless bowl-cutted minions. And now she lies motionless on her bed next to a sitting man, both of them tied to strings like marionettes. As the camera zooms in on her face, the image breaks apart and tears a la destroyed film, with the biggest holes forming around where her eyes and mouth were, forming a disturbing face.
I blinked. I thought “maybe I’ll get it after I watch it a few more times.” I watched it again. And then I loved everything about it. It was that quick.
The video for Alejandro was released around the time Gaga first began to transform her image from quirky but fairly typical pop princess into…whatever she could be called now, and oh boy, does it ever show. A sad amount of her fans before that point titled it “creepy” and went on about how they wish she’d done it differently. At the same time, some people who are bigger fans of “creepy” became more drawn to her than they had been before. Nope! I wasn’t alone, and I’m glad.
(A weird, fun fact about me that I generally don't let people know until they know me well is my bizarre but innocent fascination with anything related to Nazi Germany. Pre-war, post-war, propaganda, ideology, uniforms-it’s in a non-supportive way, OF COURSE, but I find it all just incredibly historically fascinating. I’ve actually concluded that if I get a PhD studying anything, it would be that, despite the fact that I’ve never planned to major in anything else history-related. Fun, right? I blame a lot of my fascination with this piece on that, which I'm sure isn't something most people can relate to. But you never know.)
Something that's always amused me about official VEVO-supported videos on YouTube is that, for whatever reason, the two "top-rated" comments that usually appear at the top of the comments list are always two random comments with only a few thumbs. I don't know if it's a glitch because of too many comments, or what, but the first time I checked the comments on this video, the "top comment" was someone lamenting over how Gaga has achieved fame by selling herself to Satan. Oh, Internet. Don't ever stop being funny.