Queen of the damned?

I went to see lady gaga live in Belfast last week and i've been trying to write something about it for a while. The truth is I am not sure how i feel about lady g anymore, so I don't know what to write about her.

On the one hand she is clearly different from other popstars: she can play the piano (amazingly even), she can sing like a jazz singer, she is sexually liberated |(like only one other popstar-madonna), she writes her own songs, songs that are about her relationship with her alcoholic father. In the show she proclaimed herself as the queen of the freaks, the little monsters, her fans that she says she loves so much. She said repeatedly that she knows how to feel the odd one out, or feel like an idiot even, and she likes for her little monsters to feel at home with her, in the monster ball.

Now this is highly commendable, especially in a time and age where appearances is the one thing where people care about the most. To have a popstar, a member of the cultural elite of our times tell people that it doesn't matter how they look like is something.

On the other hand, there is no other way to put it: gaga is a shallow popstar. She has rilke tattooed on her arm, and dresses as if she comes directly from a fashion museum, but she is shallow. She writes and produces overwhelmingly shallow pop songs, with pop lyrics. The only thing that saves her is that her shallow lyrics are very sexual, something that is fairly oddball for a female song-writer.

And then it is her show: a weird mixture of theatricality, over the top-ness, wardrobe malfunctions (or not) combined with out of place personal confessions (about her alcoholic father for example and about how she loves us, the little monsters). Such combinations make the show look more mismatched than eclectic and make gaga look more schizophrenic and undecided than brilliant.