I’ve been hearing the name Lady Gaga for quite some time now but I chose to ignore it because she didn’t sound like the kind of artist I wanted to invest any time in.

The press blew her up into this kind of strange, bizarre, oddity in the same mold as a latter day Grace Jones or even a Bjork. I simply had better things to do than to waste time on that kind of stuff.

That all changed when I took up a Facebook friend’s challenge to watch her video Bad Romance, all five minute, seven seconds of it. Somehow I felt I was going to be disappointed, but here goes…

It looks like one long commercial, echoing shades of the previously mentioned Grace Jones (and Madonna) in its wackiness, with elements of Village People and socio-erotic imagery strewn throughout amd at specific points. I largely don’t really understand it and feel that the images and the lyrics are at counterpoints to each other. In other words we’re not really seeing what is being sung about.

Such juxtaposition usually hints at something deeper and darker behind its structure which seem to be confirmed with the final shot at the end where Lady Gagy, cigarette alive in her hand, lies on a bed that looks like it’s been bombed with the charred, skeletal remains of a male the victim of whatever did the bombing, lying near Gaga. It’s quite disturbing yet visually interesting to watch.

Creepy…