Comment: Gaga Lady

Okay, I've got another minor obsession to go with my major obsession (Glee): Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video. It’s, in a word, compelling.

Is it something I’d let my kids watch? Hell no.

But this new and clearly dominant pop star is the first female since Madonna to do what she did back in the eighties: grab her crotch, crawl sensuously on the floor while scantily clad, and dance, dance, dance.

However, a few differences between the performers do come up: Lady Gaga appears to be a better singer at the outset. It took Madonna awhile to get some real chutzpah in her pipes. (That didn’t come out right.)

Also, Lady Gaga, in keeping with the zeitgeist, is not just sexual, but uber-sexual. She’s also so skinny in some of the video’s shots she seriously looks deformed. She’s emaciated at the best of times. You can count the knobs on her spine.

What’s also different from Madonna, is Lady Gaga’s willingness to look creepy. Madonna never really went that route. She just transformed herself successfully year after year (no small feat). But Lady Gaga, in this video alone, goes from a dilated-eyes psycho in a bathtub to a white plastic-wrapped dancer to a gold-studded freak who says as much in her lyrics (something along the lines of “I’m a freaky bitch”). She doesn’t mind looking really gnarly.

Besides, she always counters the creepfest with her looking hot in a different way: corsets, capes, essentially naked. She goes farther than Madonna because she has to. It’s 2009. We were amazed and titillated/scandalized by Madonna’s simulating orgasm in a wedding dress on TV back in the 80s. Now, in our hyper-over-stimulated culture, apparently, we need more. More and longer crotch grabbing, more wigs, less clothes, so very, very few clothes. And even more costume changes. I would NOT like to see Lady Gaga's drycleaning bill.

She even shows what she looks like without the wigs and plastic wrapping: she’s quite pretty. But she’s not afraid to make herself look ugly. Kind of like Charlize Theron in “Monster”, but with less dialogue and more dry humping.

She also ends the video made up to look so much like a blonde Amy Winehouse it makes one wonder if she was the inspiration for the song. It’s perverse and kind of funny.

There’s no question that this woman is a performance artist. It’s been obvious from the get-go.

And it isn’t only the visuals. The song’s all right too. Granted, it’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but it sticks with you. And it’s perverse enough to please a wide range of deviants, both closeted and out.

So all hail Lady Gaga. She is the new shock mistress. I wonder what she'll do next.