Deconstructing "Bad Romance"

When Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” hit a few weeks ago, it was an event in a way that is rare nowadays. For one thing, her video not only got coverage—lots and lots of coverage—but it was actually anticipated, actually viewed, multiple, multiple times. “Bad Romance” exceeded hype, and the love for the freaky, weird, psychologically confounding, hyper-symbolic, sexy video only continued. Deconstructions of “Bad Romance” are all over the Internet, with many including a play-by-play using screen captures. “Bad Romance” has symbolism and sex written all over it, and really, the video is just incredible.



So what is Gaga saying? Like many of her other songs, the theme here is hard love—rough love, a bad romance, wanting something so badly that she’s caught up in something terrible but she doesn’t care. She’s upfront about her freaky side, and in her wanting, there is anger: “I want your everything / as long as it’s free.” The low growl of her voice, the thumping tone of the music, underscores her feelings. James Montgomery of MTV calls “Bad Romance” the bridge between the old “The Fame” Gaga and her new “The Fame Monster” Gaga, now with additional sex and spookiness. Some focus on the "sex slavery" aspect of the song and video or the occult imagery. Still other interpretations play off her quote, “That tough female spirit is something that I want to project. It's meant to be, 'This is my shield, this is my weapon, this is my inner sense of fame, this is my monster,' “in that she embodies different facets of womanhood through the stories she devises.

“Bad Romance” is practically several videos at once, and that makes it so wonderful and so difficult to deconstruct. There’s a basic narrative—in the singer’s words, she is “kidnapped by supermodels. I'm washing away my sins and they shove vodka down my throat to drug me up before they sell me off to the Russian mafia," but she escapes by blowing up the head guy in a fiery blaze—which is intercut with various other Gagas, each with its own look, every one easily a separate video. I love Gaga dressed in black, her yellow stringy hair falling down, those big black sunglasses obscuring her face. I love the babydoll Gaga, Kewpie doll eyes, innocence in a tub. I love Gaga, vulnerable, broken down, hysterical with (nearly) no makeup on, crying “I don’t wanna be friends!” There’s the alien Gagas, in Alexander McQueen ensembles, in diamonds and white latex and shiny gold, with snazzy headpieces and razor-blade sunglasses, in fabulous black lingerie and only-acceptable-in-a-music-video-this-artistic white thong underwear. Gaga, at various points, is all of many things: alone, vulnerable, innocent, dazed, wistful, childlike, terrified, satisfied, sexy, powerful, defiant, strong, beautiful.

Despite the diverse Gagas, she uses many of the same symbols and motifs as she has in earlier videos and public appearances—encasing her body in shiny orbs, spikes on her head and heels, weird lines on her body, either through clothing or through effects, faces and eyes covered, surrounded and studded in diamonds. The video itself borrows from many sources—some of her choreography, like the crawling, is directly from Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video, and in the opening there are allusions to her other videos and to “True Blood”. In the lyrics, there is a nod to Hitchcock: “I want your psycho / Your vertical stick / Want you in my rear window / Baby you’re sick”, though the whole song is about wanting in a psychologically damaging romance. She ends her performance on "Jay Leno" by grabbing her crotch, another move defiantly done in “Express Yourself”. She knows how crazy she is—she does call herself a “freak bitch” several times—and she wants all sorts of freaky things besides love, hard to quantify things, not to mention that she trills her own (stage) name in the cheers that surround the song. Then there are the animals—the dog that has appeared in all her videos, the bare cat hissing away, the goats on display over the bed, the bear peignoir she wears to present herself to her captor—and the death, violence, and alcohol that have shown up in other works.

The video moves between gray, dark lighting and bright white. The darkness finds her hidden away, in alien mode, but the blinding brightness is her exposed, in the man’s world, until she claims it. Gaga follows the same pattern, extremely pale to note her vulnerability and innocence, ending outfitted with red lace and strips of cloth, with black boots and gloves to symbolize the breaking away (Viva la Revolución!), her own power. The dancers clap around her, in celebration.

She has performed “Bad Romance” in a number of venues, and they all feature similar choreography, not only making it easier for the performers but also tightening her message. On "The Jay Leno Show", she opens dressed in a black bodysuit with huge shoulders, like a pillow growing out of her upper back. Her hands turn into claws, and her dancers, lying down, now start to claw awake and alive. Lady Gaga claws at the air, at herself, and then holds her hand out as if she wants a ring or a kiss as she sings “I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand”. “You know that I want you, and you know that I need you, I want it bad, your bad romance” she intones, and all the dancers form behind her, clawing their way forward. It’s creepy and cool. As the chorus continues, the dances go psycho, waving and clawing around. All the dancers are male, and they all are wearing masks. Even the musicians in the background are dressed this way.

She twists and stomps, and she shoots off an imaginary gun during “’Cause you’re a criminal as long as you’re mine”, just like in the video. The bridge is more clawing, baring her chest, and her dancers move closer, behind her. They dance in unison, before the lead dancer, a wire cage over his face, lifts her up through her legs, his hand on her stomach. It gives me the willies every time. His teeth are bared, his face menacing. These guys really are creeps. The final chorus, Lady Gaga’s right hand is a fist, and she pumps it up and down, determined.

The entire performance is aggressive, but it’s not just her movements that personify this, it’s her songs themselves. The French lyrics that open the second bridge don’t just rephrase the central lines of “I want your love/ I want your romance”, they demand. She is not polite, she does not use the polite form of “to want”. “I demand your love” is followed by her wailing “I don’t wanna be friends” with “caught in a bad romance” swirling in the background, building up the pain. In a sense, the main storyline and the song don’t match up, because she has no interest in the man at the center of the story. But the choreography of her movements, some of her other selves—mainly the close-up of her face, crying—do fit with the song, and the consistency of her choreography throughout multiple performances suggest something else. As in other songs, she is aggressive and shameless, and the clawing, marching, and twisting only further the interpretation that this is her definition of a “tough female spirit”.

I'm in the business of misery

I love “Misery Business”. I cannot remember another song that is just so gleeful, so damn gloating with every word. Maybe she never meant to brag, but she’s sure going to do it now, and I can’t blame her.

Although I’ve been rocking this song since the summer, it’s only been the last few months that it’s really done well, hitting radio where it’s on quick rotation. "Misery Business" is essentially the story of a girl finally getting the guy with whom she’s in love…and throwing this in his ex-girlfriend’s face. But the song is not about the boy at all. It’s about the girl—the girl who first stole her man, and how much she is disliked by the narrator for causing so much pain. It makes perfect sense that the song was written by a teenager—19 year-old Hayley Williams.

"Misery Business" is the perfect companion to Avril’s "Girlfriend", basically a continuation of that song. "Girlfriend" is bratty, childish, daring; "Misery Business" is defiant, confrontational, yet boils down the truth succinctly and eloquently. Both songs are rooted in a high school mindset and are loud, passionate, and candid, but it’s "Misery Business" that captures the frustration, the elation, the pure passion of the moment. I love the little details: "when I thought he was mine she caught him by the mouth", "she's got a body like an hourglass, it's ticking like a clock", how the narrator belts out “I told him I couldn't lie he was the only one for me”. It doesn’t matter that the other girl has it out for her—that line is delivered quickly, emphasis on how now she wears the biggest smile, a line that cannot be delivered without that gleeful, gloating smile.

Overthinking this song, one day I was struck by the chorus, how she was basically bragging that she had the boy wrapped around her finger now…the same thing that Avril said she could do, but “better”. This bothers me. It implies that the boy will be whipped, that she now would have the power over the boy that his previous girlfriend had. It cast the song in a darker, sinister light, and I was uncomfortable with it. She refused! She wasn’t going to be that girl! But I guess we all fall into that pattern once in awhile, becoming what we hate. Besides, she’s just trying to prove a point…and it’s against the woman who stole her man originally, so stealing him back is justice. Yes? Who also cannot help but wonder if they are among the millions of girls who have looked innocent but really weren’t? Maybe it wasn’t their modus operandi, but it could be still part of their psychology, a mode of behavior internalized knowing that if they act coy they can get what they want. That’s the kind of behavior I saw in high school all the time.

Although the video keeps the high school theme, it doesn’t use the story but the emotion of the girl who ruins lives. The mean girl in question just acts like a complete bitch throughout, doing hurtful things for no reason other than to assert her own power, something Hayley alludes to in her LiveJournal (June 27, 2007 entry) and in the second stanza: "Well there's a million other girls who do it just like you /Looking as innocent as possible to get to who /They want and what they like it's easy if you do it right/Well I refuse, I refuse, I refuse!"

It’s this part that especially feels very high school. The “I refuse, I refuse, I refuse!” is a knee-jerk, automatic reaction against this girl, whose every fiber antagonizes her, and so she essentially vows never to be a such a coldhearted person, without regard for others. But she does go after what she wants, and she gets it in the end, too--not caring about anyone else's feelings except her own. After all, she waited eight long months (which really isn’t that long) for the relationship to be over so she could pounce.

The video for "Girlfriend" also features Avril pouncing on her rival, this time her with a wig, intercut with performance shots and also partly set at a high school. Here the girls are reversed: the mean girl is the one who wins the guy in the end. She also gives a “yes!” at the end of it. It’s the innocent girl who loses, also in a comic fashion, of being dumped and knocked around, just like the bitch in "Misery Business" has her padding swiped from her chest and her makeup smeared. Paramore has been compared to Avril, because they sing in a similar pop-punk style, and because there are few girls doing that type of music that has hit the mainstream. Neither song, because they are speaking from the girl's point of view, explores how it is to be the new girlfriend of a guy who'd just been with someone else. They only focus on the winning.

Speaking of girls and songs, "White Houses" to me is another song all about girls and their relationships with each other. The first time I saw the video I was intrigued not only by the concept of one Vanessa Carlton dancing to another playing, but that they were both in some sort of standoff. BalletVanessa opens the video by giving PianoVanessa a smoldering look of dismissal and contempt, but she narrows her eyes and gets up and dances. PianoVanessa watches her, cautious and fearful. I wonder if they are actually watching each other, or if what they are looking at is a reaction to what they are thinking about, and the other is a manifestation of that. But watch PianoVanessa’s movements: She moves with the mood of the song. She is happy and fast when the character she sings about is in love and falling with the boys; she rushes through during the part when the narrator explains losing her virginity, but pauses on the last line about it being her first mistake. She’s thinking, and then she gets up to do more thinking, evidenced by her body movements and the way she walks away. She comes back as the piano starts again, and is filled with the memory of her friends, happy that she has, momentarily at least, found peace. Yet BalletVanessa continues moving, and in her last move she stumbles slightly. She stops and looks away from PianoVanessa.

The song is a synopsis, with few details, of a period in the narrator’s life: It starts with her moving in to a new apartment with five girls. They become tight. Life is fun. She meets boys, and falls in love. All of a sudden she’s in a new world, one that she’s losing grip on. Everything’s moving too fast, and the friends are gone and the boy is gone. She is now older, and is mulling over what happened: “Maybe you were all faster than me/We gave each other up so easily/These silly little wounds will never mend/I feel so far from where I've been/So I go, and I will not be back here again."

Boys have key words in their songs—whenever a boy is talking about a girl he likes and she’s with someone else, he always references that he is a better lover. They use the same words: faster, stronger, better. (No, this has nothing to do with the Kanye West song, incidentally.) But while the girls sometimes do incorporate that in (see examples above), their attitude toward the other woman isn’t always flaming hatred: Taylor Swift genuinely seems to be nice to her, at least in her head: "She'd better hold him tight, give him all her love/Look in those beautiful eyes and know she's lucky cause/ He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar." She’s too charitable. In that state, how can you think nice? Sadly, thanks to those pretty girls, both Taylor and Rachael Yamagata can’t sleep at night. Poor kids. Brandon Flowers was starting to drift off when the girl of his dreams had to ruin it by fooling around with someone else. *Shakes head.*

(I’ve been working on a mixed CD featuring songs that are all about the narrator being in love with someone who is in love with someone else. Most of the above songs are included, with a few more, including Rilo Kiley’s “Does He Love You?” and Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl". I’m also sad to say that the Pussycat Dolls’ “Dontcha” fits into the mold too. Feel free to add some--I barely have half a CD at this point!)