Lady Gaga - Bad Romance
The visual idea of Lady Gaga’s music video to her number 1 single Bad Romance reveals her being auctioned off to the highest bidder, every of the men and women bidding are representations for record labels. For that reason, she is being auctioned off to the record company that wants to sign her onto their label, it’s visualised by Gaga undressing in front of these men and women and appearing to be sold as a sex slave. This concept is extended when Gaga charms one of the men into buying her, and then proceeds to have sex with the highest bidder.
So, the whole video may be interpreted as a metaphor for the music business and how they manipulate their artists. The video itself shows every step Gaga has to go through to turn out to be a renowned star. This consists of company deals, manipulation and also the notion of dark forces. So whilst the song Bad Romance is initially about the easy concept of loving a person for who they and everything about them very good and bad, it is also about the “bad romance” and relationship artists have with the music industry.
However, whilst the video follows this fairly simplistic “narrative” other elements and symbols are included throughout the video. The references to the devil and anti-Christianity are fairly frequent and obvious. The first reference to this is the use of the cross as well as the word “Monster” written underneath; one more is the image of the cross on Gaga’s underwear and lastly, the phallic symbol of the triangle that’s visually drawn in the course of a dancing scene. Together with this, there are plenty of references to the sun including a gold dress worn by Gaga, the golden sunlight streaming into the room and the orbital outfit worn near the end of the video.As a result, the entire video is full of meaning and symbolic references to distinct things. All of this points towards the fact that the video whilst showing the bad and dark side to relationships also represents the dark forces in industry.The video ends with her laying beside a smoldering skeleton, on top of the destroyed bed, covered in ashes. With soot smeared on her body, she calmly smokes a cigarette, although her pyrotechnic bra activates.
The video acquired impressive reactions for its artistic treatment and visual imagery; critics congratulated its provocative and symbolic plot. It was selected for ten awards at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, eventually winning 7 of them, including the Video of the Year. The video also won a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video.
The talk about aspects of a bad relationship but also discuss fashion in the line “Walk, walk fashion baby, Work it move that bitch crazy. In an interview, Gaga pointed out that she was listing Alfred Hitchcock films in the verse, “I want your psycho, your vertigo shtick, Want you in my rear window, Baby when you’re sick.” She said, “What I’m really trying to say is I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.
