Lady Gaga sees her album The Fame Monster as a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Gaga plays the role of Orpheus who was a gifted musician and songwriter who died because of his fear of death and obsession with the past. This myth drives every song on The Fame Monster, explaining the album’s religious elements and moral elements. Underneath all the stylish synthesizers and catchy pop songs lie sadness and uncertainty. The songs on Monster feel like a glimpse into the deeply disturbed, yet beautifully twisted place that is Lady Gaga’s mind.
In Ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus’ wife Eurydice died after snakes bit her and he begs the gods of the underworld to make his dead wife live again on earth. The gods agree to resurrect Eurydice, but only on the condition that on the way up from the underworld to the upper world (planet earth), Orpheus must not look back at Eurydice as she follows him. When Orpheus and Euryadice almost make it to the upper world together, and Orpheus reaches the upper world, he looks back at Euryadice and he realizes his mistake. Eurydice didn’t reach the upper world yet and then she died a second time, except this time forever. After Eurydice’s death, Orpheus refused to worship all the gods except the sun god whom Orpheus called Apollo. The wild Maenads were crazy, drunken harlots who killed people in insane rages. The Maenads killed Orpheus by tearing him to pieces, beheading him and cutting him into pieces as if he were Mr. Potato Head. The myth goes that Orpheus’ decapitated head and lyre (his instrument) floated down the river still singing sad songs. Women on the island of Lesbos took his head and buried it and built a shrine for him. His lyre floated up to heaven. He ended up reuniting with his wife Eurydice in the underworld.
Lady Gaga is a piano-playing singer-songwriter who sings beautiful songs, many ironic and many mournful. There are many things on The Fame Monster that represent Eurydice’s death. They include the death of good friends, the death of past lovers, the death of womanhood, the death of a father, the death of confidence, the death of labor, the death of obsession and the death of lies. The main lesson to take from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is to never “look back.” When Orpheus planned on returning to earth to recreate his life with Eurydice, he planned on living in the past. He wouldn’t be growing as a person, but only destined to make the same mistakes.
The 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo was driven by the main themes of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth of the perils of “looking back.” In the film, a man lost a woman that he obsessed over, and shortly after a woman who looks almost exactly like the dead woman comes into his life. He’s hell-bent on making the living doppelganger into the identical image of the dead woman, including changing her hair color and hairstyle and makeup and clothes. A life of repetition is not healthy. The Orpheus and Eurydice myth and Vertigo drive Gaga’s first single “Bad Romance.”
Set to a marching synth-fest of triumph (inspired by German techno music that Gaga discovered while touring Europe), “Bad Romance” is all about returning to life from the dead or getting a second chance, but swearing to never make the same mistakes. The object of Gaga’s affection on “Bad Romance” is someone from Gaga’s past who has been resurrected. For fear of losing her friend again, Gaga cannot make the same mistakes she made before. Gaga’s reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo makes the theme of “Bad Romance” crystal-clear. The lyric goes: I want your Psycho, your Vertigo shtick/want you in my Rear Window, baby you sick.” In other words, Gaga is saying she accepts her friend’s Freudian craziness (Norman Bates, the killer and victim of Psycho). She accepts her friend’s obsessive tendencies (John “Scottie” Ferguson, the detective whose obsession gets the better of him in Vertigo). She’s accepts her friend’s voyeuristic pleasures (L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a photographer who’s temporarily wheelchair-bound becomes a voyeur spying on his neighbors spending all his time in the confines of his bedroom in Rear Window). Rear Window is probably the most relevant to Lady Gaga’s essential message that defines her career: Hitchcock made Rear Window to show how Americans are all “a race of Peeping Toms.” It’s a reference to the power of the media and how the voyeuristic society that is America loves to watch other people live or exist. Their watching is made even easier by advanced technology like the Internet and cell-phones.
Gaga declares with immense urgency that “I want your loving, I want your revenge” to her friend. She wants to avenge his death by simply living a brand new life focused on building a better future, and not living in the past. Towards the middle, Gaga sings thunderously in all her throaty-voiced glory “I don’t wanna be friends!” It’s clear that she didn’t act on her romantic feelings for her friend in his previous life, and now that she has the chance to not make the same mistake, Gaga makes sweet, rapturous love to her friend. By the end of “Bad Romance” she’s celebrating in ecstasy because her grotesque friend is now her beautiful lover.
Now that Gaga found her beautiful lover, it’s unfortunate that she has to kill him. The Fame Monster is not necessarily told as a chronological story, but it could be. It could very well be separate experiences of Gaga’s. Still, all the strength and courage it took for Gaga to finally become intimate with her friend on “Bad Romance, “and it had to end. But all great things have to come to an end and on “Alejandro” it is no different. The genius of Gaga’s songwriting comes into play when concerning the Latin theme of the song. Gaga once said that she “writes music for the dress,” meaning she creates the visuals for her songs as she writes the lyrics. The visuals include the choreography, the music video, the performance, hair, makeup and clothes. The background music for “Alejandro” is ‘90s Euro-pop spritzed with Caribbean flavor. However, the violin strings are what give “Alejandro” its Latin flavor. There’s even the sound of the ocean getting swept by the wind. The song’s producer RedOne must have had a vacation on his mind.
Gaga is singing about past lovers who just won’t seem to die. Whether Gaga has trouble killing the memory of her past loves or finding it hard to resist their romantic charms, she can’t seem to get them out of her life. What type of men would be hard to resist with their golden-brown skin and sexy accents? Latin men, that’s who. In a recent performance of “Alejandro” in Osaka, Japan, each of Gaga’s male dancers performed a piece of choreography where the man holds his female dance partners down a bit so they dip in the air and pantomimes putting a stake through her heart just like one would kill a vampire. Now we’re getting into Gaga’s head, where she writes music for the dress. This is when Gaga combines ‘Alejandro’s two visual inspirations consisting of Latin men and death, and creates a Mexican vampire. I can already imagine the dancers wearing black beekeeper veils indicating the song’s sense of mourning. The opening violin strings also exude the song’s sense of mourning sounding as if they’re weeping. There’s also plenty of matador-influenced choreography that Gaga and her dancers displayed in Japan in April 2010, which again builds on the Latin theme of “Alejandro.” As the candles burn and the Latin undead become, well, dead, Gaga has to push ahead pondering her identity without a boyfriend.
It makes perfect sense that at the beginning of the ‘80s Italo-Disco-inspired “Monster” Gaga tells someone “Don’t call me Gaga” as if the person she’s addressing is supposed to address her by another name because she’s a different person. She’s been changed somehow. When she proceeds to sing she tells how she became changed in overly simple prose, as if she’s reciting a Grimm’s fairytale. Gaga tells the tale of a woman who goes out to the discotech and spots a guy who’s a bad boy. He’s probably the kind of guy with several tattoos on his body and a confident swagger. She sings the lyric “He’s a wolf in disguise/but I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes” in a slurred, mumbled manner, suggesting intoxication by alcohol, considering she’s in a night club. She’s supposed to be saying “evil eyes,” but it sounds very much like she’s saying “hero’s lies.” These two opposing statements, evil versus good, represent Gaga’s two states as two different people. Before the change, she thinks the guy’s eyes are evil, but after the change she thinks he’s a hero, but she doesn’t realize he’s telling her lies.
It’s as if her memory has been erased where the bad boy wolf disguises himself as a hunk each time Gaga goes out to the clubs to find a new love, when in reality he’s the same wolf in a human suit every time. The same thing happens every time Gaga goes to the club: she finds the guy, gets drunk and goes home with him. They have sex and he eats her heart and her brain, figuratively. Gaga compares his sexual hunger to the hunger of a cannibal or just some kind of beast who eats people.
“Monster” is an allegory for Gaga repeating the same old habits. She’s living in the past pursuing the same guys who will ultimately ruin her. Gaga said in an interview that “Monster” is about her fear of attachment and how she keeps falling in love with the monster, when what she really needs is responsibility of her womanhood and femininity. This sentiment explains her current state as a celibate woman who is now protective of her womanhood, physically and mentally, and exclusive to who has access to it. She figured that she has to figure out a way to live without men. She has to free herself from getting defined by the men she keeps and the sex she has with them. Before becoming celibate, Gaga’s past repeatedly killed her, deadening her spirit each time, but finally by taking ownership of her body, she killed the monster.
The depths of Gaga’s songwriting are most present on the song “Dance in the Dark.” Gaga’s songwriting is known to be three-dimensional in its scope, where different aspects of the song stack atop each other like a layered cake. It’s doubtful that someone would guess the true meaning of “Dance in the Dark” from simply listening to it because Gaga makes no mention of the actual subject at hand. There are three main layers of Gaga’s songs. The first is the surface layer, which appears to be quite simple and shallow. The second layer is the underlying meaning or story that’s represented by the metaphors of the first layer. The third layer is the way the background music relates to the lyrics. On the surface, “Dance in the Dark” is a song about a woman who’s afraid to dance at a night club because she fears her boyfriend is judging her with his eyes. The underlying meaning is a woman who prefers to have sex with the lights turned off, so her boyfriend can’t really see her naked body. An alternate meaning is the awkwardness that many people feel in their own skin, regardless of if they’re in public or not. The music is equal parts ‘80s New Wave, house music circa 1990 and techno. Both styles of music lend themselves to the cool, fashionable confidence that Gaga intends for the heroine of “Dance in the Dark” to attain.
Where does the existence of death, you may ask, and it involves the death of confidence, before the transformation. Like “Monster” Gaga (or some woman) transforms into something mysterious and not quite human. The transformation is her defense mechanism that kicks in to continue her existence. “Dance in the Dark” begins with a narrative, the first verse giving the story of a girl who now plays the role of Eurydice coming up from the underworld with hopes of entering the upper world, but is thrown back into the depths of death when her boyfriend looks at her. While the first verse is her first life, the second verse is her second life. She emerges as something beastly like a werewolf and something undead like a vampire, creatures of the night, of the dark. When Gaga narrates that the girl “still kills the dance,” she means she makes the sex deadly when she’s someone other than herself. The interlude at the center of “Dance in the Dark” is spoken. Here is where Gaga looks for strength in the gods and goddesses of fame who live in the underworld. Gaga calls on the blond bombshell actress Marilyn Monroe, the beautiful melancholy of actress-singer Judy Garland and troubled poet Sylvia Plath. She even calls on the spirit of child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey superimposing the words “Jon” and “blonde” (similar to the way Gaga played with the words “evil eyes” and “hero’s eyes” on “Monster”). Gaga says “work your blond/JonBenet Ramsey.” She even goes on to mention Liberace, Jesus, Stanley Kubrick and Princess Diana. What do all of these dead people have in common? They all died in the spotlight and remained in the spotlight even after their deaths. The dramatic natures of them live even longer in the public eye. One of the best lyrics on “Dance in the Dark” pulls the whole song together: “The moonlight’s her way, while she’s howlin’ at him.” The moonlight is the equivalent of a spotlight and having the moonlight her way is manipulating the spotlight, the cameras. It’s Lady Gaga’s modus of operandi.
The trusty songwriting of Gaga is the main reason the album’s second single “Telephone” is a richly textured piece of pop magic. Of course R&B/pop producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins’ beat is a sweaty mishmash of ringtones and dial tones mixed with some of the most rambunctious bass programming you’ll ever hear. There are two separate personalities at work on “Telephone.” The song begins calmly with a harp melody that sounds almost classical, and when the beat comes in to bury the harp melody, it becomes more of a bass line than a main melody.
Gaga uses a pedestrian concept of a woman trying to get rid of a guy (maybe a boyfriend) who keeps calling her when she’s trying to get her drink on at a night club and turns it into a metaphor for her struggle with balancing work and play. Gaga is a woman who some would call a workaholic and she doesn’t get much time to relax and party. She’s the hardest woman working in showbiz today. She treats her career or rather art as if it was her boyfriend that she needs a one-night break from.
As the song progresses, Gaga goes from mildly annoyed to full-on aggravated. The choreography Gaga and her dancers execute on stage when performing “Telephone” pantomimes eating, choking or shooting to kill when the word “call” or “calling” plays. Once again, Gaga wants to kill someone. She doesn’t want to kill herself, but she wants to kill the urge to work when she’s supposed to be playing and losing herself in the life of the night.
Whenever the chorus plays, it’s clearly the angry part of Gaga’s brain speaking. Guest star Beyonce plays much more of an aggressive role on “Telephone” than Gaga does. Beyonce rapid-fire sings her way through the second verse and the bridge. Gaga is the good cop, while Beyonce is the bad cop. Gaga sings things like “it’s not that I don’t like you, I’m just at a party,” but still the chorus makes it clear she’s irritated. It’s appropriate that “Telephone” ends the same way it began with the same ethereal harp melody. It’s indicative that Gaga has disconnected her phone. Her head and heart on are lying on the dance floor, as the chorus declares. Orpheus she really is.
The heavenly synths that flash like beautiful, yet unstable rays of hope make “So Happy I Could Die” into a dream world. Gaga wants to kill the illusions that addictive substances like alcohol create. She feels more free and frankly, happy when she’s drunk. The verses sound like Gaga in a sober state, while the b-section vocals signal that the alcohol is taking effect, it’s creeping into her brain. When the chorus hits, she’s high as the sky, sounding untouchable like she’s the Cheshire cat from The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland evaporating in thin air with her head spinning all the around. The best part of the song is when Gaga and her producer RedOne harmonize together at the 2:43 mark singing the word “ooh.” The short vocal part sounds like satisfaction. “So Happy I Could Die” may sound so euphoric that Gaga could mistake her surroundings for heaven resting on beds of clouds, but there’s a sense that something is missing. It’s artificial happiness. When she’s under the influence of alcohol, Gaga unifies with the hologram of herself as the ideal woman, but it’s an illusion, just like virtual reality.
Cannibalism is the metaphor of choice on “Teeth.” Gaga offers her body (her “bad girl meat”) as food to satisfy someone else’s divine hunger. Against music that sounds like voodoo would be close by, Gaga says she wants the truth, she wants to see “your fangs.” “Teeth” is a close counterpart to “Bad Romance” because both songs are about loving the ugly and dark parts of a person and turning those parts into something beautiful and luminous. Open your mouth, show those teeth, those blood-covered teeth. The truth is blood, it is religion.
Lady Gaga did a lot of slaying on The Fame Monster. She figuratively slashed herself and others to pieces and in the end became cleaner and more pure. She became more liberated. Let’s hope Gaga continues to never “look back” and continues to change the world “one sequin at a time.” Bless her sequined soul.
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