I wasn’t expecting much from The Ball, to be honest.
I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I was expecting to have a blast, but I’d
been so immersed in Gaga’s visual and aural catalogue that I felt nothing could
compete with that kind of hypersensory flow. The digital mirrors and semiotic
smoke she blows out through her online content channels can be edited into
wholly self-contained worlds. No mistakes, just her perfect vision. That’s the
glory of twenty takes.
I’ve always felt Gaga’s primary vehicle were her videos, really. She’s an
audiovisual package, and so are they. They can frame her narrative in rapidly
shifting formats, now living a mythology, now breaking the fourth wall, now
surrounded by special effects. I was deeply skeptical that a show constructed
in clumsy material reality could match that frame-rate, could pummel me with
the same razor precision. So I was looking forward to some really solid live
music and some great costumes and choreography, and I wanted to dance a lot and
have a good time. I was psychologically prepared for that.
The part I forgot was that Gaga would actually BE there.
Let me explain what I mean by that. I had deluded myself into believing
that the point of going would be to see the SHOW. In other words, to see Gaga’s
work. I was making the mistake of looking at all this as a traditional “art
project”, where a creative person builds a product external to themselves and
shows it off. Since she and her work and the production of her work were all
rolled into one multimedia package in her videos, I had taken for granted that
interacting with external product was, as in most cases of mediation, the core
of the Gaga experience. I was to View The Works. I was to Sample The Dish.
What I discovered that night is that that is not the point of Gaga.
The only experience I could effectively compare the show with was a massive
evangelical rally at a megachurch. The people crammed into the pit with me
weren’t there to listen to music; nothing quite so simple or banal. They were
there to participate in a movement, to experience an ideology. “I hope she
talks to us.” “I love her so much.” “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”
“I’m going to cry.” That was the kind of language I was hearing. I didn’t hear
a single hint of speculation about what the show was going to contain or what
songs were going to be played. I’ve been to many, many concerts, but this was
an alien environment for me.
No, it wasn’t about a movement or an ideology. That’s not quite right.
The pounding military march of “Highway Unicorn” started, the portcullis of
the castle (yes, the castle) clanked open, and a glossy black cyberpunk
regiment of gorgeous girls, glinting halberds held high, led her on a stomping
plod around the catwalk on horseback (yes, a real horse) like an advancing
beast from the Book of Revelations.
She was crusted in wires and cages vomited up from the antediluvian bowels
of H.R. Giger’s subconscious but it was still her. She was bound and
blindfolded and subjugated by an army of dancers but it was still her. She
could barely move but she commanded the attention of every human being in the
jam-packed Staples Center.
It was starting to become clear to me. But I needed to see more.
After the electric demons dragged her into the dungeon, the operatic
strains of “Government Hooker” started echoing across the ceiling. The wall
slammed open, and here she crouched, skeletal armor still in place, screaming
HOOKER into the microphone implanted on her face. She crawled out like an
animal, gyrating, sweating, screaming. At some point during all this, her
helmet was ripped off, or she ripped it off. She threw back her head and
roared, and I stared into her face across the open air for the first time, and
I finally got it.
I was discussing Gaga with a friend once. This friend has a television show
and has worked in the technology and culture industries in various capacities
for a very long time. I mentioned that I was interested in her and he was
momentarily quiet. Then he said, “you know, I didn’t take her that seriously at
first. I thought she was just another Madonna, or Christina Aguilera, or
whatever. But then I watched her performance on Howard Stern. Have you seen
it?” I had, just her alone with her piano, singing “The Edge of Glory.” He paused
for a moment, then said “…there’s a dragon in there.”
I watched the veins in her throat as she screamed HOOKER at the sky again
and I thought, yeah, there really is.
It’s HER. That’s why we make the pilgrimage to this massive stadium and
camp out in line for an entire day. It’s not the sets or the pyrotechnics or
the confetti cannons or the costumes or even the movement or the ideology. We
want to be close to her, to touch the hem of her garment. We live in the
economy of personality, where produced media experiences are just loss-leaders
for the real sale – the sale of the self, uninterrupted by the compression of
digital bandwidth.
The thing is, not everybody can place themselves at the center of that vast
entertainment infrastructure and act as its reactor core. Most people would be
buried. You need somebody with fire in their belly. You need a dragon. And that’s
what I started to realize, as I watched her – no matter how insane the
spectacle that surrounds Gaga, she has our eyes, our love. There could be an
ACTUAL fifty-foot dragon on the stage and everyone’s gaze would be locked on
her small, human body, pounding on the stage and roaring and pouring sweat. So
many people would be lost up there, among the trained, costumed dancers and
massive set-pieces. But she burns so brightly, and so fiercely, that we barely
see them.
She knows it, too, and she knows how the system works. She built it. Right
before the chanting bridge in “Bloody Mary,” she dropped to her knees in the
center of the stage, stretched her slick arms out toward the audience with
hands twisted into claws, and shrieked, begged, “SAY MY NAME! I CAN’T LIVE
WITHOUT THE FAME!” We obliged her, intoning GAGA…GAGA…along with the song,
while she convulsed, absorbing the energy we fed her. This was a transactional
relationship.
It goes both ways, though. That was the real message she was there to
preach. Because between every song, she preached to us. She said things like
“listen – sometimes you’re afraid. You stop yourself because of your fear. You’re
afraid of what will happen if you pull out all the stops. Well, I’m here to
show you what happens. THIS…” …she gestures at the surrounding spectacle,
sweeping her hands back in to gesture at her own body… “…is what happens.”
This kind of rhetoric was repeated between every song. Sometimes she
pleaded through her quiet, sibilant Italian nose, sometimes she crouched on the
catwalk and yelled it directly into our faces. DON’T GIVE UP. DON’T BE AFRAID.
DON’T LISTEN TO THEM WHEN THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN’T DO IT.
She’s an evangelist for believing in yourself. After all, Stefani believed
in herself, and that’s where Lady Gaga came from.
Now, however, Gaga’s body is temporarily broken, the engine’s piston
overheated; it can’t channel the fire right now. This is evidence, if we needed
it: she really is the point. Without her, everyone on that tour is out of work.
The entire massive multimillion-dollar machine must grind to a halt because one
person injured her hip.
This is evidence too, though, of the truth of her message. We are bodies
too, and we have such a small, limited idea of what those bodies can do, of the
energy that can come from them, and of where that energy can take us.
Perhaps Joanna Newsom put it best:
“The meteorite is the source of the light,
And the meteor’s just what we see –
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of
the fire that propelled it to thee,
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light,
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived –
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void
that lies quiet in offering to thee.”
Devin O’Neill is a performance artist, branding
practitioner, and storyteller. He enjoys things he shouldn't, on purpose, and
tries to convince other people to enjoy them too.
