LA Times — “A year ago this month I was opening for Natasha Bedingfield and the New Kids on the Block — at this theater,” said Lady Gaga on Monday night during the first of her three sold-out performances at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live. She was posing as usual, her body elegantly contorted to show off a dazzlingly weird outfit. But she was also smiling, cracking a warm and surprisingly unaffected grin.
Gaga has arrived. She knows it, even when she sprawls on the floor in her cruelly shiny black bustier and declares herself a gothic Tinkerbell, in danger of dying unless her fans scream. They all know it too; they arrived Monday in homemade versions of those signature haute-art costumes and danced and screamed throughout the nearly two-hour show with the fervor of those whose team is headed for a championship.
Their loyalty and sense of community is a major theme of the Monster Ball tour, which celebrates the supernatural power of the pop headliner while mulling over its validity.
This is Lady Gaga, though, so the cultural theory is dressed up in red vinyl and crushed-rhinestone glitter, set to the beat of hits such as “LoveGame” and “Bad Romance,” and fleshed out by dancers in white bodysuits or black feathers and by the singer-dancer-writer-clotheshorse herself.
She began the evening alone onstage, dressed in a lightbulb-festooned cat suit behind a graph-paper screen that made her look huge and vaguely robotic. As the show progressed, she sported crow feathers, a disco-ball hump and a red leather bikini, each costume meant to both fulfill and subvert various pop clichés.
Lady GaGa was exactly right to convince her label Interscope to focus on the eight new songs of The Fame Monster and not just toss them off as add-ons for a re-issue of her debut album The Fame. The new songs make a cohesive work of pop art on their own. The Lady Gaga aesthetic here combines the catchiness of the best in pop songs with pure, exposed emotion of some of the most enduring dance music classics. It’s a no holds barred musical journey into the demons and monsters that haunt Lady Gaga’s psyche.
Resonant Concept Played Out Through Incredibly Catchy Pop and Dance Songs
On The Fame Monster Lady Gaga moves past songs about getting drunk in the club or simply celebrating rough sex. Here she takes on her own personal monsters whether it’s the artifice of appearance on “Dance In the Dark” or the incessant desire for “Bad Romance.” Most listeners are likely to find a number of their own emotional issues and concerns somewhere in this suite of eight songs. However, nowhere does Lady Gaga forget the importance of pop songs being catchy and memorable. It’s possible to simply revel in the beautiful wistful musical atmosphere of “So Happy I Could Die” and ignore the thoughtful meditation on caring for oneself physically and mentally when things are going awry.
More Hit Singles On the Way
There seems no doubt the hit singles will continue to flow for Lady Gaga beyond “Bad Romance.” At least half the songs here would sound great on pop radio. “Alejandro” is a bit like Madonna’s classic “La Isla Bonita” with a contemporary edge. “Monster” with the “He ate my heart” catch line is pure electronic dance pop heaven in sound. The Beyonce assisted “Telephone” is a club stomper that will draw in R&B and Hip Hop fans as well on the radio. 2009 may have been the year of Lady Gaga with five top 10 pop hits, four of them radio #1′s, but 2010 should continue that momentum.
Top Tracks on ‘The Fame Monster’
* “Bad Romance”
* “Monster”
* “Telephone”
* “So Happy I Could Die”
Lady Gaga Proves Herself a Compelling, Evolving Artist
There is nothing about The Fame Monster that sounds like Lady Gaga is interested in making The Fame part 2. Less than a year after “Just Dance” first topped the charts, she has dropped a set of songs that are a major stride forward in maturity. The conceptual approach here often seems reserved for rock and alternative albums. The Fame Monster is the most compelling pop concept piece in recent memory. There are clear signs of influence from some of the top pop women of the past including Madonna, Annie Lennox and Debbie Harry, but Lady Gaga makes it emphatically her own. If this is the direction of contemporary pop, we are in good hands indeed.
Lady Gaga is the out-of-the-blue planetary pop phenomenon of 2009. At the age of 23, Stefani Germanotta, the funny-looking girl from Yonkers, has established herself as a self-created autonomous star, an avatar of avant-garde freako fashion and the queen of state-of-the-art electronic dance-pop.
And, given that she writes or co-writes her material (unlike the majority of rivals in her field), a frighteningly prolific artist.
Contrary to initial reports, The Fame Monster is not the average “deluxe” edition of a hit album hastily pitched at the Christmas market. This eight-track stand-alone disc is a whole new piece of art in its own right. (That said, if you wait until 15 December, you can buy Gaga’s debut The Fame and The Fame Monster packaged together as one purchase.)
TFM kicks off with the phenomenal current single “Bad Romance”, whose Boney M-ish refrain is the most fiendish earworm of the year. Its first line proper – “I want your ugly, I want your disease…” – sets the tone for an album whose dominant atmosphere and aesthetic, from the monochrome cover shot and the crucifix logo onwards, is small-g gothic. Examples include the zombie metaphors of “Monster” (“He ate my heart…”), the strange Cossack pop of “Teeth” (“Take a bite of my bad-girl meat…”) and “Dance in the Dark” (“Silicone, saline, poison, inject me…”) which gives shout-outs to deceased females such as Monroe, Plath, Princess Di and even JonBenét Ramsey.
Darker still is “Speechless”, a 1970s rock-inspired number that touches upon abusive relationships (“I can’t believe how you slurred at me with your half-wired broken jaw…”). There are one or two pieces of pop fluff, but there’s always a suggestion of something interesting going on behind those glitter-encrusted eyes, such as the lesbo-erotic “So Happy I Could Die” in which she confesses to a secret girl-crush on her best friend: “I love that lavender blonde/ The way she moves the way she walks/ I touch myself, can’t get enough…”
If this is her idea of a stopgap release, we’re looking here at a major talent indeed. On the evidence available so far, Lady Gaga isn’t flesh and blood like the rest of us. She is made of amazingness.
