Monsters Conquer the World!: Lady Gaga

Monsters Conquer the World!: Lady Gaga

Inside Television 558
Publication Date: 6-17-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn

It may seem that I’m arriving late to the party that is Lady Gaga, but really I’ve just been waiting for the appropriate television-related angle to serve as an invitation. Last Saturday it arrived in the form of The Monster Ball Concert on HBO. Verdict? It was the best concert I have ever seen, either live or on tape. Easily the best.

Bear in mind that I go back a ways with this music stuff. I vividly remember The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan show in 1964 that turned empty barber shops into busy record stores almost overnight; much as I still remember in a more dreamy fashion Stevie Nicks singing a song about ‘an old Welsh witch’ named Rhiannon on The Midnight Special in 1976. In the years since there have been rock, blues and jazz shows seen from living room chairs, festival lawns and peering through the sweet and happy blue haze rising from the audience at Maple Leaf Gardens. All memorable in their own way.

Stevie Nicks ... because it's my web page
and I love Stevie Nicks

Lady Gaga gets it, or should I say It? Let me explain. I was sent an indie novel/memoir the other week called 33 Days written by a guy named Bill See, about his rock band’s first road tour back in 1986. 33 Days should become a huge book in a year or so because Bill See gets It.

‘It’ is the truth of live music and the need to play. Pushing yourself out of the basement and onto a stage is born of both an escape from whatever private hells there are lurking and snapping in the basement corners or in the kitchen upstairs; as well as a need for the love that might await from an audience. Love me - I will play for you. Love me - because I need you. Love me - and I will love you back.

That is Lady Gaga in a nutshell. It’s not about the meat dress, penis shoes or sparklers flaring out of the crotch. Sinatra was wearing all those on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, but that was on radio so who knew? (Just wanted to see if you’re paying attention.)

But those are just the attention-grabbers. The late poet and mentor to Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton came to Queen’s University for a week when I was a student there around 1980 or so. He told us that if we wanted to be poets and make a living out of it we should put a sandwich board over our heads and stomp up and down the street blowing a trumpet. Draw a crowd, get noticed, then let the art show its worth. Gaga lacks the trumpet so instead she plays the strumpet. Same difference.

She is not ‘a Madonna rip-off’ as some would have it any more than Madonna was a Carmen Miranda rip-off. If an actor plays the Harlequin role in a commedia, is he ripping off the previous actors who played the part or is he just putting on the costume the role calls for? The answer is obvious.

Lady Gaga works incredibly hard during her concert, proudly and profanely saying that she wasn’t doing any damn lip synching. Her voice is strong, her song-writing catchy, and while she is not a great dancer she is smart enough to cover her moves with great dancers around her.

But beneath the spectacle, the light that forms the shadow, is the It. The very end of the HBO show, behind the credits, is Gaga warming up with her back-up singers on Born This Way. Cynicism is my best defence in this world, but if the joy and love and passion I heard in a voice, stripped-down in a room is fake...well then Lady Gaga is the greatest hypnotist of all time.

Music is not about the notes. That’s for American Idol, X Factor, The Voice etc. etc. etc. Music is about the artist. Gaga reminds us of that. And the reward for the true artist is that the audience willingly lets them conquer the world.

Be seeing you.

- passion - anger - love