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Stefani Germanotta strutted onto the stage in a white dress with a strange Sapphire-esque blue ball on her tummy looking like a foetus made out of gems.
A metaphor for the preciousness of childbirth or a bum-bag for the 21st century? We will never know. It was never explained. It just happened.
There was a lot that was explained later in the show, maybe too much.
This was my first Gaga gig and it was an unpredictable affair.
Everything would stop dead several times to give Gaga the opportunity to go on a diatribe about how we should all live our lives.
Conveniently, she tells us that we don’t need money to be great musicians. She says this with her net worth of over a hundred million.
In all fairness, when she had something to say, it was said with the best of intentions and with a lot of love and affection for her audience and for the world in general.
She espouses a vision where all are equal, able to express themselves in any way they please and feel legitimate in doing so.
This is the theme of her artRAVE and the way the world should be.
It’s just a shame she has to intersperse this positive message with a large quantity of sexual swearwords and a series of sleazy dance routines. But that’s the point, this is how she wants to express herself and darn tootin’, ain’t nobody gonna stop her.
Total freedom is exhibited on stage. The accompanying dancers are free-form in their choreography.
If Gaga feels like truncating her hits and making them more rockier, like she does in You and I, her will be done.
She even does a costume change (one of around 12 I counted) in front of the audience just because she can.
Showing further rebellion and artistic freedom, she broke the 11pm curfew to sing a piano ballad about gypsies explaining she would pay the fine because she didn’t care about money.
Gaga’s breathless eclecticism goes from electro to bubblegum pop, from piano ballad with classical overtones to heavy rock in a flash.
I was beginning to think the only thing that was missing was a bit of jazz.
So what happens? She changes costume to look like Cher and says she used to be a jazz singer, breaking passionately into a rendition of Cher classic Bang Bang.
All bases and genres covered in this gig. Would love to see her do a Prog Rock album combining all these styles.
It could be argued that she glossed over her hits a little too much – the songs that everyone wanted to hear. It was mostly verse, chorus then move onto the next one. The crowd clearly didn’t care. They were Gaga-ing for it.
Before I hang my head in shame after that last pun, it remains for me to say that it would have been much more of a killer gig if she had let her music do the talking.
But if you like Gaga you can’t just take what you want out of it, you’ve gotta have it all like Pokémon, sort of.
She’s made a collector out of me (continuing the laboured Pokémon gag, I’ll never learn) and I’ll see you next time, Stefani!