Lady Gaga @ Tacoma Dome
I have to say Gaga's fans are quite unique - of the kind I've never seen in a concert ever before!
Bad Romance http://www.youtube.com/
Alejandro http://www.youtube.com/
Poker Face http://www.youtube.com/
Telephone http://www.youtube.com/
Just Dance http://www.youtube.com/
LoveGame http://www.youtube.com/
Paparazzi http://www.youtube.com/
CONCERT REVIEW: Lady Gaga makes triumphant return to Tacoma Dome
Lady Gaga has come a long, long way since her first performance at the Tacoma Dome in 2008 as opening act for New Kids on the Block.
During her overwrought set, she kept shouting, “Hello, Seattle,” apparently unaware of where she was.
But in her triumphant return to the Tacoma Dome Saturday night (Aug. 21), Gaga was keenly aware of her location – and of its significance to her career. Just weeks after performing with NKOTB, Gaga was a pop star with her first hit.
“There must be something magic about this room,” the singer told a capacity crowd dressed in wild costumes (yellow caution tape and spike heels were popular accessories).
At the moment, Lady Gaga is the biggest pop star on the planet, with multiple hits and lavish tour that requires nearly two dozen tractor/semi-trailors to haul all her stuff. And that stuff includes a multi-level stage, two video screens, a piano that sends up a plume of fire, and giant LED chandolier and enough costumes to challenge the director of a Broadway musical.
The day began with a pre-concert party at the Dome’s Exhibition Hall, where merchandise was sold for lofty prices and a small stage offered musical performances. Local radio stations were on hand to pump up the crowd, which needed little pumping.
After a flamboyant opening set by fellow New Yorkers Semi Precious Weapons, Lady Gaga made her explosive entrance.
Her two-hour show was loaded with hits: “Just Dance,” “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” “Vanity,” “Boys, Boys, Boys,” “Speechless,” “Monster, “Alejandro,” “Poker Face,” “Paparazzi” and the mega-hit closer, “Bad Romance.”
Lady Gaga paid tribute to the fans she calls “monsters” that have taken her into the pop stratosphere, the misfits that reflect her own over-the-top persona.
-------------
The last time Lady Gaga was in Seattle, she performed at the Showbox — a theater that would be hilariously small for her now.
She'll have a bigger home this time.
The 24-year-old, belligerently glamorous dance-pop diva (Stefani Germanotta) brings her blockbuster tour to the Tacoma Dome Saturday.
In the two years since her last Northwest appearance, Gaga has achieved international stardom and become a music/fashion media mainstay. Her architectural hairstyles and outfits have become events. Her anger-tinged, arena-sized electro-pop songs have become modern karaoke classics, especially these anthems to a gritty kind of personal acceptance — "Just Dance" (yes, I am this drunk at the club right now), "Poker Face" (yes, I am having sex with a man but wish it were a woman) and "Bad Romance" (yes, I like things that are bad for my health).
She brought a gleefully ambiguous sexual presentation and geometric/gothic fashion sense to the global cultural forefront, and significantly informed the turn-of-the-aughts' psychosexual/aesthetic zeitgeist.
A major fashion figure even though she's not especially attractive, an insanely popular singer without the best voice, a fame-obsessed artist who called her last two releases "The Fame" and "The Fame Monster," Lady Gaga is who she is by force of will. When she says stuff like, "I am a lie. And every night I kill to make it true," there's some awesome bootstrappiness there, not just provocative obscurism.
Her rise coincided with the fall of Auto-Tune software in mainstream pop, and there's a case to be made that her breasty alto voice altered the pop music landscape, that Gaga made it unfashionable for singers to digitally add a robotic whine to their voices. She was bold when everyone else was slinky, flaunted a certain admirably failed Broadway-ishness, was more fun to sing along with.
But weekly/daily print/Internet headlines lately inform more and more about Gaga's appearance-related antics (clothes-less crowd surfing, crotch-held sparklers) than conceptual performances or actual music. And because the spectacle that is Lady Gaga moves so fast, her 2010 artistic victories seem somehow further behind her than they might for another pop star (the "Telephone" video with Beyoncé in March, and the Gaga-themed "Glee" episode in May). Both events celebrated songs that came out on albums one or two years previously. Her current fame is dominant but vaguely tenuous, entwined with shock value, perched at maximum bloat.
The trick now will be for her to keep cresting, perhaps with persona/aesthetic reinventions à la Madonna, the pop star she most closely resembles, and likely with another installment of music that advances her personal narrative past the superheroic, glam-dance place it currently is.
Perhaps a return to basics is in order. Unlike most pop stars, Gaga can hold down an intimate concert with just her voice and a piano, can communicate the same dogged, energizing vibe that sells her records and normally pumps out of gym/nightclub speakers.
But the next chapter is not yet upon us. We're still in the extended portion of Gaga's year-long tour, still lining up to see songs that already saturated our cultural climate.
Bad Romance http://www.youtube.com/
Alejandro http://www.youtube.com/
Poker Face http://www.youtube.com/
Telephone http://www.youtube.com/
Just Dance http://www.youtube.com/
LoveGame http://www.youtube.com/
Paparazzi http://www.youtube.com/
CONCERT REVIEW: Lady Gaga makes triumphant return to Tacoma DomeLady Gaga has come a long, long way since her first performance at the Tacoma Dome in 2008 as opening act for New Kids on the Block.
During her overwrought set, she kept shouting, “Hello, Seattle,” apparently unaware of where she was.
But in her triumphant return to the Tacoma Dome Saturday night (Aug. 21), Gaga was keenly aware of her location – and of its significance to her career. Just weeks after performing with NKOTB, Gaga was a pop star with her first hit.
“There must be something magic about this room,” the singer told a capacity crowd dressed in wild costumes (yellow caution tape and spike heels were popular accessories).
At the moment, Lady Gaga is the biggest pop star on the planet, with multiple hits and lavish tour that requires nearly two dozen tractor/semi-trailors to haul all her stuff. And that stuff includes a multi-level stage, two video screens, a piano that sends up a plume of fire, and giant LED chandolier and enough costumes to challenge the director of a Broadway musical.The day began with a pre-concert party at the Dome’s Exhibition Hall, where merchandise was sold for lofty prices and a small stage offered musical performances. Local radio stations were on hand to pump up the crowd, which needed little pumping.
After a flamboyant opening set by fellow New Yorkers Semi Precious Weapons, Lady Gaga made her explosive entrance.
Her two-hour show was loaded with hits: “Just Dance,” “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” “Vanity,” “Boys, Boys, Boys,” “Speechless,” “Monster, “Alejandro,” “Poker Face,” “Paparazzi” and the mega-hit closer, “Bad Romance.”Lady Gaga paid tribute to the fans she calls “monsters” that have taken her into the pop stratosphere, the misfits that reflect her own over-the-top persona.
-------------
The last time Lady Gaga was in Seattle, she performed at the Showbox — a theater that would be hilariously small for her now.
She'll have a bigger home this time.
The 24-year-old, belligerently glamorous dance-pop diva (Stefani Germanotta) brings her blockbuster tour to the Tacoma Dome Saturday.
In the two years since her last Northwest appearance, Gaga has achieved international stardom and become a music/fashion media mainstay. Her architectural hairstyles and outfits have become events. Her anger-tinged, arena-sized electro-pop songs have become modern karaoke classics, especially these anthems to a gritty kind of personal acceptance — "Just Dance" (yes, I am this drunk at the club right now), "Poker Face" (yes, I am having sex with a man but wish it were a woman) and "Bad Romance" (yes, I like things that are bad for my health).She brought a gleefully ambiguous sexual presentation and geometric/gothic fashion sense to the global cultural forefront, and significantly informed the turn-of-the-aughts' psychosexual/aesthetic zeitgeist.
A major fashion figure even though she's not especially attractive, an insanely popular singer without the best voice, a fame-obsessed artist who called her last two releases "The Fame" and "The Fame Monster," Lady Gaga is who she is by force of will. When she says stuff like, "I am a lie. And every night I kill to make it true," there's some awesome bootstrappiness there, not just provocative obscurism.
Her rise coincided with the fall of Auto-Tune software in mainstream pop, and there's a case to be made that her breasty alto voice altered the pop music landscape, that Gaga made it unfashionable for singers to digitally add a robotic whine to their voices. She was bold when everyone else was slinky, flaunted a certain admirably failed Broadway-ishness, was more fun to sing along with.
But weekly/daily print/Internet headlines lately inform more and more about Gaga's appearance-related antics (clothes-less crowd surfing, crotch-held sparklers) than conceptual performances or actual music. And because the spectacle that is Lady Gaga moves so fast, her 2010 artistic victories seem somehow further behind her than they might for another pop star (the "Telephone" video with Beyoncé in March, and the Gaga-themed "Glee" episode in May). Both events celebrated songs that came out on albums one or two years previously. Her current fame is dominant but vaguely tenuous, entwined with shock value, perched at maximum bloat.
The trick now will be for her to keep cresting, perhaps with persona/aesthetic reinventions à la Madonna, the pop star she most closely resembles, and likely with another installment of music that advances her personal narrative past the superheroic, glam-dance place it currently is.
Perhaps a return to basics is in order. Unlike most pop stars, Gaga can hold down an intimate concert with just her voice and a piano, can communicate the same dogged, energizing vibe that sells her records and normally pumps out of gym/nightclub speakers.
But the next chapter is not yet upon us. We're still in the extended portion of Gaga's year-long tour, still lining up to see songs that already saturated our cultural climate.
Comments
Post a Comment