Lady Gaga’s Seven Greatest Music Videos, From ‘Bad Romance’ To ‘G.U.Y.’
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Lady Gaga knows the power of an excellent music video. To watch all 26 of them is to watch her evolve across eras and budgets, building upon the understated oddness of early videos like ‘Just Dance’ and ‘LoveGame’ into the otherworldly epics of ‘Bad Romance’ and kitsch pastiches of ‘John Wayne’.
Her videos encourage deep dives, uncovering every film and fashion reference squeezed into the spectacles. Or they can simply be enjoyed on a surface level — Gaga just lives for the applause, after all.
Picking Gaga’s best music videos is a hard, thankless task. We haven’t picked a few obvious hits, like ‘Poker Face’ or ‘Born This Way’, as we tried to offer a mix of ‘iconic’ videos and the lesser known that deserved, in our opinion, to be bigger.
Overwhelmingly, when we asked around the Music Junkee office for people’s picks, they gravitated towards releases from The Fame and its composite EP, The Fame Monster.
Which we understand: Pitchfork writer Chris Molanphy rightfully describes 2009-10 as Gaga’s “imperial era”, a time when she was completely untouchable. Nowhere was that clearer than with her music videos, where outfits and outrage could prompt an onslaught of headlines — and a horde of Little Monsters instantly learning the moves and replicating looks. You might even want to, too.
‘Just Dance’ (2008)
Considered against what was to come, Gaga’s first music video’s pretty tame — directed by Melina Matsoukas, it’s set at the wind-down of a house party, where things can turn really hedonistic.
While some of it hasn’t aged well — like the Native American headdress on a background actor, or the ~edgy~ portrayal of two women making out — there’s something to be said for the way Gaga’s personality shines through without the big budgets that dominate her later videos. ‘Just Dance’ is a smart, tongue-in-cheek banger about getting a little too intoxicated but keeping it together because you don’t want the night to end, and the video captures that vibe.
Even if she’s just throwing a disco ball or dancing alone in a corridor, there’s a sense that she’s not taking herself too seriously. And when she humps an inflatable whale in a kiddie pool, it’s hyper-sexual to the point of parody: a glimmer of the campiness to come on the horizon.
‘Paparazzi’ (2009)
At eight minutes, twice the length of the song itself, ‘Paparazzi’ was Gaga’s first indulgent music video — one which was content on being considered nothing less than event.
But when it was released, The Guardian ran a piece calling it “a complete waste of eight minutes”: set to a song about the dark dangers of craving fame and a lover’s gaze, the video’s extravagance was deemed narcissistic and pointless.
Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the video is a dazzling, reference-filled revenge fantasy of fame, murder and fashion. When Gaga realises her hot Swedish boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård) is more concerned with the paparazzi’s snapshots than their love, they fight. He pushes off their luxurious balcony to near-death and tabloids run gauche headlines saying “Gaga is over”, but she recovers (via dance breaks, duh) before poisoning her boyfriend as revenge. She goes to jail, but the tabloids lap it up: now she’s the biggest star in the world.
In interviews, Gaga’s talked endlessly about how fame is performance art, and despite what The Guardian says, ‘Paparazzi’ was provocation with purpose. It was a statement: Lady Gaga proved she was always curated the conversation.
‘Bad Romance’ (2009)
Earlier this year, Billboard called ‘Bad Romance’ the best music video of the ’00s. While it’s not Gaga’s boldest or biggest, they argue the video for the The Fame Monster opener elevated the game, creating “a glimpse into an entire cinematic world that thrilled and disturbed in equal measure, expanding the possibilities of what a music video could achieve”.
Directed by Francis Lawrence, ‘Bad Romance’ is set in a futuristic, white-walled sterile facility, one where Gaga is held captive by Russian men for sexual slavery. According to Gaga, it’s an allegory for the abuses of fame, and the risks of idolising or fetishising a figure — and similar to ‘Paparazzi’, Gaga gets her fiery revenge.
The video is a rush of Gaga’s most iconic looks — and we mean rush. While each tell a story — the white crowned PVC body-suited Gaga seems to be an alien experiment breaking free of its lab, while elsewhere Gaga seems to be stuck within a bathtub, her CGI-enlarged eyes creating an uncanny valley effect — they are only given brief moments to live. The video is a confluence of 1000s of images, alluring and oddly disturbing. Like Billboard argue, there’s a whole world here, and perhaps its for the best we only get a glimpse.
‘Telephone’ (2010)
The video that spawned 1000 costumes, ‘Telephone’ is a sequel of sorts to ‘Paparazzi’. In this Åkerlund-directed 10-minute epic, Gaga is bailed out of jail and goes on a Thelma & Louise-style joy ride and poisoning spree with Beyoncé, complete with plenty of Tarantino references and overwhelming product placement.
It’s the final of Gaga’s unofficial revenge trilogy, joining ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Bad Romance’ as a clip about women killing their captors. Here, it’s Beyoncé who poisons her cruel, chauvinistic boyfriend — Gaga’s the best friend along for the ride.
Where most of Gaga’s film clips dissect fame and celebrity, ‘Telephone’ is driven by a desire to honour female relationships. From the butch prison scenes to the joy ride in the Pussy Wagon ute, Gaga’s universe is world where women call and count on another, die for each other. And unlike Thelma & Louise, this was only the beginning of Bey and Gaga’s joy ride.
‘Alejandro’ (2010)
Fashion photographer Stephen Klein directed ‘Alejandro’, lending an editorial severity that stands out from Gaga’s usually bright, kitschy tone.
The song is an aggressive rejection of a lover’s call, but one that flirts with the temptation of giving in: the violin that opens it signposts that the severing is still fresh. Suitably, there’s a residual mourning throughout the video, which sees Gaga work with and against a group of militant dancers in a cold, industrial space. Their moves are a war, and as they pull at her body and wrestle on beds, it’s unclear who’s in control.
When asked to elaborate on the video, Klein told MTV it was about “the pain of living without your true love”, while Gaga said it was a testament to gay men and pride. Given its homoerotic, Cold War tone, its mournful tone stretches outwards: it seems to account for the queer lives lost to a disease created in love, then turned into an epidemic by hate.
‘Marry The Night’ (2011)
While ‘Marry The Night’ is rarely included in conversations about her greatest videos (or even of the Born This Way era, which included ‘Judas’, ‘Born This Way’ and ‘The Edge Of Glory’), it’s the closest to a thesis statement we’ve ever had from Gaga.
It’s also the first video she directed herself: suitably, it’s an expression of self-determination, a hyper-romanticised reimagining of the struggles of her early career, when she was signed then dumped by Def Jam in 2006.
In a Girl, Interrupted meets The Bell Jar moment, the video begins with Gaga in hospital, recovering from a breakdown. It’s eight minutes before the song begins: in the meantime, we see her crumble and writhe around her dive apartment before she pulls it together. The whole thing is incredibly melodramatic, a pastiche of references that encase Gaga within a canon of artistic suffering — highlights include Gaga faux-crying in hospital and writing around naked in her room, bleaching her hair to fix her life and pouring Cheerios over herself with just black bars providing modesty, à la Madonna’s Sex coffee-table book.
Then, suddenly waking up from a fiery car crash, the song begins. Gaga begins to reclaim herself, featuring Fame-like dance class montages where she slowly masters the choreography. By the song’s end, a proto-Lady Gaga is carrying herself through the world, pushing giant key-tars down her stars and struggling to get into cabs because her outfit’s too big.
It’s gauche, ridiculous and overtly indulgent, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. It also gave us the most perfect line of all time: “You may say I lost everything, but I still had my be-dazzler.”
‘G.U.Y.’/’Artpop’/’Venus’ (2014)
Our last on the list is also the most batshit. Directed by Gaga, this pop-odyssey covers three songs from Gaga’s maligned 2013 album Artpop, ‘G.U.Y.’, ‘Artpop’, and ‘Venus’, and encapsulates everything excellent and awful about the era.
Namely, it’s abundantly expensive: filming at California’s legendary Hearst Castle doesn’t come cheap, and it seemed like yet another splash of wealth in an album cycle that included a flying drone dress and commissioned artworks from Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic.
The video is abundant, telling the story of a winged-Gaga being shot down by a sea of grey suits and, you guessed it, taking her revenge. She’s restored in a pool by a chorus of Grecian worshippers — aided by the Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills and the head of Andy Cohen in the clouds — and takes her revenge by cloning an army of male models to take the suits down. Sure!
In-between, there’s elaborate synchronised swimming numbers, clones of Michael Jackson, Ghandi and Jesus, and a weird blink-and-you-miss it shot of Minecraft. It’s very much a throwing of things against a wall to see what sticks, and while it lacks some of the purposefulness of earlier videos, it’s still jaw-dropping to watch.
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Jared ‘Boys Boys Boys’ Richards is a staff writer for Junkee, and can’t stop listening to Lady Gaga. Follow him on Twitter.