Lady Gaga likes to be controversial, says show promoter

“GODLESS,” as Christian groups here call Lady Gaga, arrives in Taipei on Wednesday for her “Born This Way Ball” tour. AP

MANILA, Philippines—People wanting to stop the Lady Gaga concert on May 21 and 22 at SM Mall of Asia Arena in Pasay City are barking up the wrong tree, says Renen de Guia, head of Ovation Productions, organizer of the two-night show.

“They are reacting to Lady Gaga’s music video of ‘Judas’ (a track from her 2011 album ‘Born This Way’), which has nothing to do with the concerts,” De Guia told the Inquirer on Friday.

The concert promoter revealed that he and a member of Lady Gaga’s team went to see Pasay City Mayor Antonio Calixto early Friday to explain that the show is part of “a brand-new tour which was conceptualized recently and may not necessarily include the visuals on the video [of ‘Judas’].”

The music video, which currently has more than 138 million views on YouTube, stars Lady Gaga as a modern-day Mary Magdalene caught between her allegiance to Jesus and a disturbing attraction to Judas.

It has more than 462,447 likes and 144,523 dislikes.

Even before the video’s release in April 2011, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights—an American Catholic antidefamation and civil rights organization—had reportedly condemned the 26-year-old singer-songwriter for the use of religious imagery and her role in the video.

Metaphor

Explaining the song’s meaning, Lady Gaga was quoted on the Internet service provider MSN Canada: “‘Judas’ is a metaphor and an analogy about forgiveness and betrayal and things that haunt you in your life, and how I believe that it’s the darkness in your life that ultimately shines and illuminates the greater light that you have upon you. Someone once said to me, ‘If you have no shadows then you’re not standing in the light.’ So the song is about washing the feet of both good and evil and understanding and forgiving the demons from your past in order to move into the greatness of your future. I just like really aggressive metaphors— harder, thicker, darker—and my fans do as well. So it is a very challenging and aggressive metaphor, but it is a metaphor.”

De Guia pointed out that Lady Gaga, just like other artists, likes to be controversial. He cited the rumors surrounding the New York-born singer when he produced her first concert in Manila two years ago: “The talk back then was that she’s a hermaphrodite. Did she deny it? No. She went along with the rumor. Now we all know that it was just rumor. Today she’s thought of as evil who belongs to a satanic cult. Again she’s not denying. We should know better. The controversy is working.”

Paranoid

The promoter added that the “Judas” music video “is very tame, compared to other videos by R&B and hip-hop artists. “If you’re paranoid, everything is evil to you. And why is nobody making a fuss over vampire movies. Why single out Lady Gaga?”

De Guia went further back to the 1970s, recounting the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, whose lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne, had cultivated an evil persona and once bit the head of a bat while performing at a concert. “What did Ozzy do later? He starred in his own reality TV series, doing comedy.”

Entertainment

People should understand, De Guia stressed, that “it’s all about entertainment.”

He noted that the artist’s show in Seoul—which opened the ongoing “Born This Way Ball” tour—was declared for-adults-only, but “Koreans realized that it was really wholesome.”

Tickets to the Lady Gaga concert at the 20,000-capacity Mall of Asia Arena are selling fast, according to De Guia. “The first night is as good as sold out. We didn’t want to decide too late, so we added another night.”