ARTPOP, Lady Gaga's third studio album, came out yesterday, and with it we are sure to get a slew of new music videos. (Lady Gaga likes making music videos a lot, and we already know that Terry Richardson is directing her next video for "Do What U Want".)
Her music aside, Lady Gaga has made some really interesting music videos over her relatively short career. Today let's take a look at one of our favorites, "Born This Way" 2011, dircted by Nick Knight.
The thing about Lady Gaga videos is that they always have to be put in context of her general output at the time to really make sense. "Born This Way" was the title track of her second studio album - and while her early output concentrated more on colorful and images and a pop sensibility, the songs and videos that came out of the Born This Way era were considerably darker and dealt with things like religion, birth, addiction, and death. The videos also got longer and more esoteric.
One of the distictive things about this video is the way its use of a sort of mid-late 1980s film style, down to the slight shifting of the image from the film not staying exactly in line. It's a style the concentrates on white light and giving the appearance of "old school" film techniques like painted mattes and practical mirroring effects, and gives the video a retro style look without being campy.
But maybe the most distinctive feature of this video is the 2:30 intro that plays out before the actual song starts and features a fable-like story about the birth of good and evil. (It reminds me a lot of the intro to the first Lord of the Rings film.)
This intro seems mercifully short next to the interminable 8:40 short film that was attached to her video for "Marry the Night", but this intro is also more or less coherent and provides some sort of setup for the images we see later on in the video. As far as videos go, this may be the point where Lady Gaga got as close and she'll ever get to bringing together pop accessability and artistic vision.
This video also features some really great dancing as well as Lady Gaga seeminly grooving to her own music, something she rarely ever does in music videos.
But the main thing that I think makes this Gaga's most successful video is its ability to combine all of the elements that made Lady Gaga so popular in the first place. Do we have ridiculous imagery? Yes - a lot of this video qualifies, but I'd say the birth images are probably number one. Do we have some sexiness? Yes - Gaga spends most of this video in her underwear. Do we have some dancing? Yes - Lady Gaga is still a pop star, after all. Do we have some weird artsy stuff but not too much? Hell yeah we do - 2:30 is the perfect length for her artsy intro.
Director Nick Knight also keeps the edit and the pacing extremely tight, keep anything too self-indulgent at bay. This is a tactic that I really wish was used on the later videos from Born This Way, where things go out of hand.
Finally, here is the Kidz Bop version.
