Closest You’ve Been to Unstanning Gaga?

[DontCallMeAlice 931]

It started when I first heard Perfect Illusion. I thought "Man, this is a total disaster." Like, it was the very first time I was really dissapointed by Gaga. The months following Joanne’s release were even worse, I almost thought it was the end for her. But thank god, the superbowl, coachella and the JWT proved me wrong. 

What happened is that I wasn’t ready for it at that time. I was used to the old crazy Gaga, yet she started hanging out wearing semi croptops, cowboy hats and a ponytail,  signing Million Reasons all over the place wich was awkward for me back then. I felt like all of a sudden that Gaga we were so used to was "gone" and replaced by that Joanne b*tch lmao. 

That’s funny because tbh I have to admit that I like her more that way now, especially because she seemed more mature during the JWT than her previous tours. 

[drunkfrank 91]

On 3/20/2019 at 10:29 PM, AJRocketMan said:

I questioned myself during the ASIB era. When she did that whole “You made me find Stefani again” speech dedicated to Bradley at the very end of last year, I seriously questioned if I still stanned her. She seemed like a totally different person through the A Star Is Born era, especially at that moment. Where was the bold, articulate, passionate, fiery, angry, original, hardcore chick that we fell in love with that truly stood head and shoulders above everyone else in the entertainment industry and even the world? She made an entire career based on her individuality and her subversiveness. Her innovative artistry and progressive, forward thinking ways are what made her an icon of the 21st century and the legend of our generation.

I’ve come to hope that that was just a one time thing in terms of her public persona and image. I seriously don’t get why so many people loved her so much during that era. She acted just like every other white celebrity (in the acting business, pop stars tend to be more interesting), not the revolutionary that changed the world one sequin at a time. I hope that passionate, state-of-the-art spirit is still inside of her and comes out with LG6.

yea thats how i felt about her as well. She seemed very fake. She used to have this attitude of **** the world, **** Hollywood, **** pop culture, im my own bitch, suck my donkey ****. but now she's in a movie thats very successful and important and has a lot of potential for major awards, and its like she put on a mask and suddenly she's this perfect hollywood star that does no wrong and never says anything bad and would never say anything inappropriate on social media and she loves everyone, and shes grateful for everyone that ever existed, etc.

but we gotta remember that people change and shes getting older and more mature. that or it was a phase for the ASIB era.

[AJRocketMan 2,684]

On 3/21/2019 at 1:56 AM, Ktaylor99 said:

I don’t understand why people find vulneralbility so inauthentic. 

 

It’s not. Gaga has been vulnerable plenty of times over the years. Anytime she let us in on a tidbit of her past, whenever she would cry while performing at the piano, in some of her acceptance speeches, in the music, etc. The classic Gaga years had plenty of vulnerability. Even in Joanne her vulnerability felt authentic.

With A Star Is Born, she changed her whole demeanor, and the way she conveyed herself was jarringly different from her previous eras. It felt like a totally different person, not Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is bold, outrageous, fearless, and rebellious. It’s in the name. 

She never said anything that we hadn’t heard before. We didn’t learn anything new about her. Also, you don’t necessarily have to be emotional in order to be vulnerable, and emotionality doesn’t necessarily equal vulnerability.

[Diamond heart99 5,262]

1 hour ago, drunkfrank said:

yea thats how i felt about her as well. She seemed very fake. She used to have this attitude of **** the world, **** Hollywood, **** pop culture, im my own bitch, suck my donkey ****. but now she's in a movie thats very successful and important and has a lot of potential for major awards, and its like she put on a mask and suddenly she's this perfect hollywood star that does no wrong and never says anything bad and would never say anything inappropriate on social media and she loves everyone, and shes grateful for everyone that ever existed, etc.

but we gotta remember that people change and shes getting older and more mature. that or it was a phase for the ASIB era.

Or maybe she just grew up...

[Interlude 3,694]

After her SXSW set was the first time I felt close to unstanning. For the first time I didn't understand the reference or why, it was just irrational to me.  The era had been quite frustrating leading up also with single choices and waiting so it didn't help when she did her set. I watched the keynote the day after and it kind of explained it to me.

[drunkfrank 91]

On 3/25/2019 at 2:57 PM, Ktaylor99 said:

Or maybe she just grew up...

yes as i mentioned in that same post.

[Diamond heart99 5,262]

2 minutes ago, drunkfrank said:

yes as i mentioned in that same post.

Yes you did. I didn’t see that part at first, sorry!

[MonsterofFame 1,758]

For me it was a combination of things during the ARTPOP era:

1.) Her cringeworthy YouTube Awards performance of Dope where she is hysterically crying. It made me realize that perhaps a 100% genuine performance isn't really what we want or need.

2.) Her performance with the Muppets during ARTPOP (not the first performance during TFM). She was so out of it acting like a lunatic. She was clearly not in a right state of mind, as we later found out.

3.) Her 2014 SXSW performance. Again, she was acting strange and the puking part was just disgusting. Contrast that with the artful puking from her video interlude during the Monster Ball -- it conveyed emotion and a message. The live puking was a desperate attempt to be shocking.

4.) Encouraging fans to buy multiple copies of her ARTPOP singles and bribing us with potential ARTRAVE tickets. At this point I was like "okay, now she's really desperate."

5.) DWYW leaked video snippets and her AMA performance with R Kelly. Just disgusting - especially from someone who always championed women's rights.

 

This made me step back from her for a while, even during the C2C era. Between C2C, Oscars performance, Joanne era, and Super Bowl - I've returned to being a big fan. But whew it was a close call.

[MonsterofFame 1,758]

On 3/20/2019 at 10:29 PM, AJRocketMan said:

 When she did that whole “You made me find Stefani again” speech dedicated to Bradley at the very end of last year, I seriously questioned if I still stanned her. She seemed like a totally different person through the A Star Is Born era, especially at that moment.

Anddd now Gaga is going back on this, making a big effort to distance her real self/Stefani from Ally. She snapped back at Jimmy Kimmel hard when he mentioned that Ally's story was a close portrayal of herself. Make up your mind, Gags.

[Inferno 2,880]

Theres times where im just indifferent, I found her entirely boring throughout most of 2015/2016. Till It Happens to You....AHS (even though she looked dope in hotel)...that whole run of random tribute performances and others that she did (Bowie, Oscars, Sinatra) I was just like meh. I didn't like her style at all during the time period either, Brandon Maxwell is talented and all but he takes her edge away sometimes. For awhile shes just been a little too Hollywood, spray tan, fillers, visible wig line for me.

[Inferno 2,880]

On 3/25/2019 at 11:38 AM, AJRocketMan said:

It’s not. Gaga has been vulnerable plenty of times over the years. Anytime she let us in on a tidbit of her past, whenever she would cry while performing at the piano, in some of her acceptance speeches, in the music, etc. The classic Gaga years had plenty of vulnerability. Even in Joanne her vulnerability felt authentic.

With A Star Is Born, she changed her whole demeanor, and the way she conveyed herself was jarringly different from her previous eras. It felt like a totally different person, not Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is bold, outrageous, fearless, and rebellious. It’s in the name. 

She never said anything that we hadn’t heard before. We didn’t learn anything new about her. Also, you don’t necessarily have to be emotional in order to be vulnerable, and emotionality doesn’t necessarily equal vulnerability.

I agree. However, I think a lot of the ASIB promotional cycle with how hard she was campaigning for the awards had a lot to do with Bradley not really being down to campaign that hard for himself. So I think because she liked and respected him so much, she kind of decided to take on some of that weight to try and help him get the nods she believed he deserved as a director. Which meant campaigning hard af and kissing ass. Thats my take on it anyway. That being said, I maybe only could watch one or two interviews for ASIB because they were just so repetitive and phony to me. Love her and I don't think she was inauthentic in her intention or in how she felt, just that she was selling this classic hollywood leading lady vibe for the campaign and I didn't really care.

[AJRocketMan 2,684]

On 3/26/2019 at 5:31 PM, MonsterofFame said:

For me it was a combination of things during the ARTPOP era:

1.) Her cringeworthy YouTube Awards performance of Dope where she is hysterically crying. It made me realize that perhaps a 100% genuine performance isn't really what we want or need.

2.) Her performance with the Muppets during ARTPOP (not the first performance during TFM). She was so out of it acting like a lunatic. She was clearly not in a right state of mind, as we later found out.

3.) Her 2014 SXSW performance. Again, she was acting strange and the puking part was just disgusting. Contrast that with the artful puking from her video interlude during the Monster Ball -- it conveyed emotion and a message. The live puking was a desperate attempt to be shocking.

4.) Encouraging fans to buy multiple copies of her ARTPOP singles and bribing us with potential ARTRAVE tickets. At this point I was like "okay, now she's really desperate."

5.) DWYW leaked video snippets and her AMA performance with R Kelly. Just disgusting - especially from someone who always championed women's rights.

 

This made me step back from her for a while, even during the C2C era. Between C2C, Oscars performance, Joanne era, and Super Bowl - I've returned to being a big fan. But whew it was a close call.

1.) I thought that performance was beautiful. People will never be happy. They want Gaga to be "authentic" and "vulnerable" and "emotional" as if she wasn't already, and then when she finally does bare it all people say "maybe we don't need or want an authentic human performance after all."  She was so emotional because she split with her longtime manager Troy Carter that day. A man who she used to see as family saw her as a commodity and abandoned her when she no longer benefited him. She channelled that heartbreak into the performance, which was already fueled by the very emotional song.

2.) This doesn't make any sense. There was never a Muppets performance during The Fame Monster era. The only connection The Fame Monster era ever had to the Muppets was when the Monster Ball Tour 2.0 featured creations by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, which was The Living Dress that she wore during "So Happy I Could Die" and the giant angler fish monster that she 'battled' against while performing "Paparazzi". Prior to that, Gaga wore a Kermit Dress back in the summer of 2009 and brought Kermit the Frog as her date to the 2009 MTV VMAs.

          And "acting like a lunatic"? Really? I just watched the whole 90 minute special just to see what was so "psychotic" or "neurotic" about it. The reality is: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She seemed a little odd or socially awkward at parts, like during Venus and when she was talking to Kermit before singing Gypsy, but her demeanor and her behavior was appropriate for the music and the theme of the special. It was campy holiday treat for her fans in an effort to promote ARTPOP, which had just came out by that point. It was never meant to be a state-of-the-art television movie. Gaga has always acted like this, especially in the Classic Gaga years. She wasn't being a lunatic, she was just being extra. That's who she is. And a good example of a performance where she actually did act unnecessarily over-the-top is when she performed "The Sun is Down" with Yoko Ono at the Orpheum Theater back in 2010, and  I still liked it.

3.) This is the most unintelligent point of your entire post. I just watched the Monster Ball Tour Puke interlude again for the first time since I was in high school back in the early 2010s just so I can make an informed reply. It was in the MBT interlude that the puking was unnecessary. Millie pukes all over the dress, she doesn't even do it on Gaga's chest. There was nothing "artful" about that puking segment because it doesn't even symbolize anything. The rest of the interlude, on the other hand, actually was brilliant. The fake bovine heart that she eats represents Gaga's fears regarding her father's open heart surgery that he had back in late 2009. The last segment of the interlude was a re-imagining of Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight's 2002 project "The Bridegroom Stripped Bare". I don't need an explanation for that one. So out of all three clips in that one video interlude, two of them were "passion" segments that she shot just for fun and only one of them was a "statement" segment that actually had a message attached to it. That entire video was choppy because all three of those clips were completely disconnected from each other and there was no theme connecting all three of them together.

          The SXSW 2014 performance that incorporated Millie Brown's vomit art, on the other hand, actually was artful. It was art conveyed in a raucous manner (because art's not supposed to be classy ) that was appropriate in the context of the given situation at the time; both in terms of Gaga's reputation amongst the general public and in terms of the song that she was performing when it happened, Swine. Vomit is seen as grotesque (which it honestly isn't, it's a natural bodily reaction); when someone vomits on you, it is seen as degrading to the victim because of vomit's public perception amongst the general human population. In the case of the "Swine" performance, it's seen as almost equivalent to being raped, as the song is about rape. Rape is the biggest injustice one could possibly commit against a woman—she's being sexually penetrated against her will. It is the most derogatory act of physical violence there is in all of humanity. Victims will live with the trauma for the rest of their lives and it changes their psyche forever. With the SXSW performance, Gaga stood up to her critics and detractors and proclaimed that she would rather be vomited on than be raped as she has truly experienced the lowest lows a human being could be subjected to by a man who is nothing but a swine on the inside. That was real art that conveyed emotion and a message. It was real art, full stop. It was not "a desperate attempt to be shocking". As for the rest of that concert, nothing she did or said was unusual or out of character for her. I actually found it to be deeply moving and inspiring. It motivates me to be my most authentic self every day. It seems more that you're just a socially conservative person who only values freedom of expression and individuality in lip service rather than in practice.

4.) Shameless self-promotion isn't new or unique to Gaga, and it's not even exclusive to ARTPOP Gaga. When she performed "Just Dance" on Ellen she literally pointed her disco stick to the screen at the back that said The Fame on it while she was singing the bridge. During Joanne she made news headlines for buying her album at Wal-Mart. It was ubiquitous on Snapchat and it was even featured on Five Foot Two. Second of all, you can't even buy multiple singles, as once you download the song off of iTunes (streaming wasn't popular yet), it won't let you buy the song again. You'd have to purchase it from a different online service, such as Amazon Music or Rhapsody, as CD singles were long dead by 2013.

          As for bribing fans with concert tickets, that is absolutely nothing new or aberrant or unique to Gaga's case during ARTPOP—plenty of musicians do that. Bundling albums with concert tickets has become quite the marketing gimmick in recent years and is a smart way to give your product a chart boost. Also, there's nothing wrong with shameless self-promotion; Macy Gray did it at the 2001 MTV VMAs. As long as you can pull off the act with your own individual flair then you can make it work effectively.

5.) The clips from the music video are odd, and the only part of the AMA performance that is iffy is the fake blowjob scene. However, the AMA performance overall was lovely. The end was beautiful. I remember one user said something about the DWUW music video possibly being Gaga's own strange way of confronting her trauma (this kind of stuff isn't unusual). The AMA performance was a take on the President having an affair with his mistress (JFK and Marilyn Monroe, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky) and turning it on its head, using that specific interpretation to further the message of the song. It's art, dude. I looked at your previous posts displayed on your profile and you're obviously a very moralistic person. You straight up said you're ashamed Gaga worked with Terry Richardson, an admittedly deeply problematic man, who made some of the most beautiful, intimate, and revealing photographs ever taken of Gaga. In other words, pure art. Are you even aware that art and morality are pretty much constantly at odds? There's a reason why the "art is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted" quote exists. It's true.

 

It's one thing to have opinions, I respect that. But I will not respect opinions that are dismissive, condescending, uninformed, and one-dimensional. Critical thinking and intellectuality are all I need to respect an opinion that is different from mine, but I did not get that here. Literally everything you have criticized about Gaga is everything that she stands for as an artist, or at least stood for. You find Cheek to Cheek and The Sound of Music tribute to be more deserving of respect than her own actual art, and you see sexy makeup and glamorous dresses as more respectable than individual expression and using ugliness as a metaphor for taking back the power from those who have wronged you in your life. Your points straight up revealed to me that you were not using your critical thinking skills to intellectually decipher the numerous social commentaries made during the ARTPOP era, especially at SXSW.

[Inferno 2,880]

On 3/26/2019 at 3:31 PM, MonsterofFame said:

3.) Her 2014 SXSW performance. Again, she was acting strange and the puking part was just disgusting. Contrast that with the artful puking from her video interlude during the Monster Ball -- it conveyed emotion and a message. The live puking was a desperate attempt to be shocking.

This was the only moment in the ARTPOP-era that I felt actually conveyed the artistic rebellion she kept on about. Her using Millie for The Monster Ball was more attractive from an aesthetic standpoint, but to paraphrase Gaga, Swine is a song about rape and rage and demoralization so she wanted to ride a mechanical bull (which in her words could be interpreted as one of the most degrading things a woman can do in her underwear) while Millie vomited paint on her to say "no one can degrade me as much as I can degrade myself and look how beautiful it is when I do". I think its easy to see the state of her popularity at that point and the puking as this reaching desperation for clickbait but in actuality when you watch her performance its so intense and raw and I feel her explanation completely makes sense. It was literally the only "punk" (using that term loosely here) moment of the entire era which I felt is what she really wanted ARTPOP to be in the first place. It was a huge f*ck off to everyone, including the fans, and for that I came to respect it quite a bit. I arguably think its one of her most impactful performances ever, albeit one of the ugliest and most controversial. I put it up there with Brit Awards 2010 as a passion piece. You can feel her anger throughout that entire SXSW set honestly, the only non-ARTPOP song she performed was Bad Romance. It was like she was telling the entire viewing public to suck her d*ck.

[freebit 6,069]

Probably Born this Way - I didn't care for the aesthetics of the live performances and stage outfits, and she was starting to act a bit odd in interviews (the *reaches for Marilyn Monroe lighter* interview for instance). I liked her and was still a fan, but I checked out of following the media coverage of her and only listened to the album.

It's kind of weird how I couldn't stand BTW, but stanned and supported her hard during her messiest era to date, ARTPOP. I think I liked that she was playing with different aesthetics that I thought were cool (minimalism and 70s kitsch) and I actually did enjoy the album in all its messy glory, but it also had to do with her getting such an unfair spin by the media too. It just made me want to support her even more. 

23 hours ago, Inferno said:

Theres times where im just indifferent, I found her entirely boring throughout most of 2015/2016. Till It Happens to You....AHS (even though she looked dope in hotel)...that whole run of random tribute performances and others that she did (Bowie, Oscars, Sinatra) I was just like meh. I didn't like her style at all during the time period either, Brandon Maxwell is talented and all but he takes her edge away sometimes. For awhile shes just been a little too Hollywood, spray tan, fillers, visible wig line for me.

For me, these were the easiest and most peaceful times to follow her. She was always doing something, but the stakes relatively low, and all things surrounding her were just chill for once, lol. 

[gagashookergirl 2]

After the New York monsters treated everyone else like ****, and failed to embody the values gaga preaches.  Instead being so self absorbed and needy for their pictures and feeling that they are more important then others.  They even stole mine and my friends foil covers of ARTPOP.