The authenticity of pop music stars is so often measured by how much they do or do not write their own material (or pretend to) — so how do you judge one who has songwriting cred yet chooses to present herself as shameless artifice?
Lady GaGa, NYC-club-kid-turned-chart-topping electro-pop-diva, parachuted into Toronto on Sunday night for a charity gig at CIRCA benefiting Virgin Mobile’s “Re-Generation” programme (which funds youth-at-risk programmes such as our own Eva’s Phoenix). She came in a fake platinum blonde wig, a gold glam-meets-GWAR sci-fi attire that could easily have been ripped from one of the club’s own exhibits, and, of course, her “disco stick,” a glowing white crystalline staff she wielded like the grand marshal of a Mardi Gras float.
GaGa proceeded to sing breathily over five tracks from her self-penned debut album, The Fame, while performing a dance routine that mostly involved pogoing in her high heeled boots and draping herself over her two back-up dancers, themselves costumed as black Mad Max warriors. It would probably look great on TV but it was difficult to imagine how GaGa (née Joanne Stefani Germanotta) once made her name in Manhattan doing raunchy rock 'n’ roll burlesque performance art, having now transformed herself into a facsimile of a vacuous pop tart — unless this too is performance art, conceived as a temporary state for the singer/songwriter.
The young and primarily strait-laced audience (drag queens, where were you?) crowded every vantage point — from the moment she appeared in a glass VIP box above the stage and scrawled “I [heart] U!! GaGa” in red lipstick nearly 30 minutes before show time, through her completely tuneless throwaway tracks, and then into the Boney M-bop of “Poker Face” until, finally, her No. 1 single “Just Dance.” GaGa gave them little to take away other than cell phone pics, offering the following command as way of charitable inspiration: “Buy some cell phones. Do the right thing!”
While running through “Just Dance,” GaGa leapt into the audience and, for a moment, was absorbed into dancefloor. Perhaps she should have stayed there, or eschewed the illusion of a live performance altogether and simply hosted a party — you know, just danced. Instead she ended with a feigned fainting spell before being pulled from the throng and carried off stage limp in the arms of a bodyguard. No doubt she wrote that scene in herself, just another part of her earnest embrace of the culture of fake.