No Journey With Lady Gaga Is Ever Wasted

I used to run the following tally for famous people with whom I shared a birthday: Vince Vaughn, also tall, famously made a movie where Las Vegas plays a big role; the poet Ada Limón, not so tall, whom I only learned of after high school, not that my friends at the time would have cared anyway; and Lady Gaga, not tall at all (see: her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two), famously one of the few pop stars who loves Vegas and seems to take it on its own terms. To this day, at the mention of any of these people, I mutter “Birthday bestie.”

I believe we are all linked in some way, but reality has yet to bear this out. Once, Vaughn was shooting a movie down the street from my job, but I never saw him. I’ve not met Limón, though I know other poets who know her. As for Lady Gaga, the closest I’ve gotten thus far was the second night of her Mayhem Ball tour, which started this month. I felt a thrill of vindication that she chose to start the tour here, though it’s not so surprising. Gaga and Vegas go hand in hand. 

Vegas’s reputation has been picked over so often as to be clichéd, but what people who don’t live here might not understand is the way that talk of celebrities gets metabolized by locals. For instance, I’ve seen and been near Nicolas Cage enough times for the occurrence to be banal. In person, he looks like a wax figure of himself. Seeing Nicolas Cage in Vegas is mentioned the same way you’d almost forget to say that you ran into an old classmate. It’s nearly inevitable. The other week, he held a private screening of some of his films a stone’s throw away from where I work; I helped deliver the hors d’oeuvres. Nicolas Cage is someone who buys into the kitsch of Las Vegas and as such, you often hear people go, “Oh, he really loves it here.” That’s one context. 

The other is when you hear about celebrities who come to Vegas because they like to gamble, or they’ve been tyrants to hotel workers on the Strip. “So-and-so has a ridiculously specific rider.” “I once did a private dance for them and they didn’t tip.” “They’re really good at counting cards.” “They love the Bellagio, they’re always staying there.” These all function as reliable hearsay, depending on who your source is. Rumors about celebrities reconfigure the way locals think about their city, and the stereotypical elements and landmarks associated with it. Sometimes it’s idle gossip. Sometimes it’s difficult not to relate to the fact that nothing brings someone down to the level of the common man, even and especially a rich person, like a gambling addiction. 

From what I hear, Lady Gaga likes to stay at the Park MGM hotel. On Gaga’s (our) birthday this year, a florist friend made a flower arrangement addressed to her room at the Park MGM from (we assumed) someone close to Gaga. When she announced her Vegas residency, which featured a more traditional pop show and a separate jazz and piano performance, Gaga explained her decision, saying what had been on my mind regarding Vegas residencies for a long time: “I’ve always hated the stigma around Las Vegas—that it’s where you go when you’re on the last leg of your career. Being a Las Vegas girl is an absolute dream for me. It’s really what I’ve always wanted to do.” It’s true that you never know who is going to announce a residency here or why. Sometimes it’s a legacy thing, like Celine Dion, or an exciting but logical twist, like Adele. More often than not, you get Maroon 5 or Rod Stewart. 

It’s not that the Vegas residency isn’t lucrative or potentially cool, but that ever since Elvis and Sinatra respectively spent their twilight years crooning in long-gone hotel lounges, an air of senescence has clung to it. One is immediately suspicious of that particular act’s financial situation or the health of their career. One thinks of Vegas and is hard-pressed to come up with life-affirming reasons for prolonging their stay. To a lot of people, the city reeks of all kinds of death. Fortunately, Lady Gaga isn’t one of them. Rarely does it appear as if she openly frets about the unflinching arrow of time the same way other musicians seem to. Staying relevant remains secondary to a love of performing, though why not succeed at both? Lady Gaga is a theater kid, a proud nerd. Her various guises and postures are melodramatic, exaggerated, highly visible, and, above all, earnest. Of course she fits in here. 

For the Mayhem Ball tour, Gaga embraces dueling gothic personas: a recognizable version of herself, and a character called the Mistress of Mayhem, a red-clad alter ego she battles throughout the show. The corresponding visual schema is recapitulated constantly in the set design and costuming: black outfits, red candles, lightning, interstitial projections animated in a Tim Burton-esque cutout style, a proscenium made to look like an opera house, and an endless array of bones. During “Killah,” Gaga was rolled onto the stage inside a giant skull. “Zombieboy” was performed, like Chromatica Ball’s “Monster” rendition, with Gaga’s backup dancers as fashionably undead revenants stalking her around the stage. Mayhem’s second single “Abracadabra” contains a lyrical reference to The Phantom of the Opera, a production of which ran at the Venetian for six years; music from the show has been somewhat of a recurring theme in Gaga’s performances. She made this reference even more explicit at the show I attended when, during Act IV, she sang to the Mistress of Mayhem clad in a black cloak before stepping onto a boat ferried down a platform that extended into the audience. 

At one point during the show, Gaga addressed the crowd, saying she hoped to still be on stage into her 80s. Immediately, I thought of her two jazz albums with Tony Bennett, Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, where Gaga showcases an entirely different vocal style and range, placing herself alongside an entirely separate legacy of musicians, Michael Jackson traded for Cole Porter. Gaga projects herself as many things, but foremost is that of a student of music and performance. While it’s always heartwarming to see young upstarts pay homage to their living influences, rarely does that tribute cross genres or last longer than a guest appearance onstage. I imagined Gaga eventually trading places with Bennett as the elder statesman. I could see it quite clearly. 

So much of Gaga’s career and music has revolved around how she’s perceived, how she does or doesn’t fit into the mold of a traditional pop star, and what this means for her longevity as a viable artist. On the new record Mayhem, Gaga has a song, “Perfect Celebrity,” which she performed live in a pit of sand surrounded by skeletons. Beyond the more obvious line “You love to hate me,” I dwelled on the lyrics “Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high/Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.” It’s not necessarily the commentary on spectacle that compels me, but the sense that, like the majority of her album Artpop, the problem of fame for the person who is famous is both consequential—Gaga has documented the degree to which she has suffered through her art due to chronic pain from fibromyalgia—and a matter of high camp. 

What makes Gaga’s vast body of work so refreshing is her lack of self-consciousness when it comes to naming her influences, all of whom navigated the thorny path of fame with varying degrees of success. It’s the mark of a confident artist to acknowledge that originality springs from imitation, from following common patterns and behaviors, from mining depth from artifice. To that effect, Gaga’s performances always follow a narrative, some more legible than others, and that arc tends to be a variation on the theme of perseverance, of rediscovering joy in what she does. This theme is borderline unimaginative in the hands of most pop stars, an inelegant melange of therapy-speak and craven publicity touted as a fully formed thought. Everyone overcomes adversity; it’s not inherently interesting when famous people talk about doing it, too. Rather, it’s how that narrative is sold and whether the celebrity in question can make people stop thinking cynically about their motives. With Lady Gaga, the concept of rediscovering herself is difficult not to see. Aesthetically, sonically, editorially, each album cycle is a radical shift away from the last, even as there are clear links between them. If Gaga is selling a character off-stage, it’s a familiarly cryptic but believably vulnerable one. 

I thought a lot about Gaga’s chronic pain during the show, the degree that it shapes the way she moves, particularly when and how. Mayhem Ball will certainly change as it tours around the world, but key aspects carried over from the Coachella set she debuted before the tour officially started: bursts of strenuous, coordinated dancing and singing, followed by set pieces where Gaga was nearly immobile. Two tours ago, Gaga’s chronic pain truncated the Joanne World Tour. Though she’s since recovered, there’s no reason to assume the pain magically went away. Perhaps my proximity to people who suffer from similar afflictions renders me susceptible to a level of emotional manipulation in this regard. If that’s true, it doesn’t bother me all that much. What draws me to Gaga is that she chooses chaos over coherence, and at the center of her various idiosyncrasies is the openly acknowledged truth that, from record to record, from tour to tour, even from movie to movie, she loses her way a little bit. The challenge, and eventually the pleasure, is finding out how she comes back.