An Artist Whose Chief Work Is Herself
“They say that I’m pretentious,” Lady Gaga griped from behind the piano Saturday night at Terminal 5.
Lady Gaga at Terminal 5 on Saturday. Her debut album, “The Fame,” was released last year.
Really? Was it the outfit made of bubbles?
Most likely it wasn’t the music, an electro-soul mélange that has made Lady Gaga famous despite its contentedly low aims. Last year she released her debut album, “The Fame” (Streamline/Interscope/Konlive/Cherrytree), which has spawned two singles that topped the Billboard pop chart, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face,” and a virtual cottage industry in tracking this singer’s many fashion miscalculations — or recalculations, depending on your perspective — the garment of clustered clear spheres she wore being just one.
Anyway, who needs music when you’ve got art? Lady Gaga’s main creative act is the act of being Lady Gaga. And tough work that is.
“Lady Gaga is a lie,” she insisted. “I am a lie, and every day I kill to make it true.”
This performance, her first of two shows here on Saturday night, was more glam-cabaret than concert, with the music an odorless, colorless, almost unnecessary additive to the Lady Gaga spectacle, providing form and little more. Upon that rock there was dancing, and strutting, and posing; she held poses for comically long stretches, way longer than it required to take a snapshot.
Her songs fare better on “The Fame,” a concept album about celebrity that is intermittently engaging but only barely conceptual. The songwriting is airy, naïve and bereft of wink, bolstered by savvy nightclub-friendly production that remains true to pop conventions. “Money Honey” is Madonna’s “Material Girl” without the coyness. “Paparazzi” is a love letter from camera to subject but stops short of admitting that the affection runs both ways. Any notion that Lady Gaga is sketching an elaborate stunt is stopped cold at the lyric sheet, a perverse flaunting of simplicity that betrays no cynicism whatsoever.
Still, there is much to recommend Lady Gaga. She has the gumption of vintage Madonna (some of it, anyway), a husky voice kept mostly in reserve, the unlikely pop persistence of Taylor Swift, the unerring peculiarity of Antony: a combination found nowhere else on the planet. And her wardrobe — glam cop, sexy Jetson, walking disco ball, etc. — appears to come straight from a Broadway prop house (or, more accurately, the Haus of Gaga, her styling team).
So if by pretentious, Lady Gaga meant overdressed, then sure. But little else here merited that scornful dismissal. With a stage so busy — “I’ve got no money,” she complained, “ ’cause I spent every dollar to make my show” — there was curiously little going on. When she danced, it was less limberly than her backup crew of muscle boys. And while “Lovegame” and her two versions of “Poker Face” were muscular, they weren’t enough. “Eh Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” was listless, and “Future Love,” a new song about mechanically enhanced intimacy, was overlong.
Last month Lady Gaga performed a simultaneously thrilling and terrifying rendition of “Poker Face” on “American Idol,” five of the oddest minutes in that show’s history. In that sterilized context, she could reasonably play the interloper, but without such an obvious foil Lady Gaga has to be content as the misfit she is in her mind.
“Do you know many times I played clubs in this city and they threw beer at me?” she asked on Saturday night, soliciting sympathy it turned out she didn’t really want. “It was kind of fun.”
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