Let’s get something straight: Lady Gaga is our Lord and Savior, and I will not hear otherwise. She comes back, resurrected like the phoenix when we need a beacon of hope.
She gave us a taste of The Fame we dreamed of and got us The Fame Monster when we were edgy teenagers, Born this Way to discover who we are, and to bring us closer to art with ARTPOP. She reconnected us with our family while listening to Joanne, and cancelled the Earth so she could take us to Chromatica, until we discovered the Harlequin inside.
Now, she’s out for blood during this Mayhem of an era. After exploring our Disease, Gaga gives us back our magic in all of its latex glory with an ancient incantation: Abracadabra.
Lady Gaga performing in Dallas during her 2014 Born This Way Ball tour [Anonymous5454, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0
The song is about facing the challenge of life and the challenge of the night and finding the magic in it all. When you have to face the world, the people around you, your life, your unique circumstances, your unique fabric in the world. And when you feel challenged with really showing everybody who you are.
The lady in red is all of you that puts you to the test. Your internal monologue. ‘Can you do it? Can you do it? Will you do it? Are you good enough? Can you handle it?’ In a lot of ways, the song is about dealing with that challenge to yourself and very often the world around us can reflect it back to us as well. I wanted to explore the question, ‘What does it feel like to thrive and not just be surviving all the time?’
I highly recommend you read the whole thing. It’s fascinating. I mean, duh, it’s Gaga. And since we’re at it, you should also take a look at the meaning of the lyrics in the line-by-line analysis of Genius Lyrics and Mat Auryn’s analysis of the song. The internet is such a marvelous thing sometimes!
(But I do disagree with one thing on Genius: for me, “Feel the beat under your feet, the floor’s on firе” sounds more like a reference to the beating of the Earth, as if it had heartbeats. Synchronizing with the changing of the seasons, with the natural processes of the Earth, and so on.)
Lady Gaga performing “Replay” during The Chromatica Ball at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on July 29, 2022 [Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0, Raph_PH]
There is a lot of fear, sadness, trauma, and anger going around, but our words are one of our greatest weapons. Amy Lee from Evanescence already said it when the band released their single Use My Voice, which still sends shivers down my spine. Now it’s Gaga who reminds us that our words carry power. We know that already, it’s one of the first lessons we learn as witches, but a reminder always comes in handy, and much better if it comes with a dark pop music video that shows the inner battles we all face.
With a video that immediately reminded me of the Fameperfume commercial, I see this as a song about transformation, the endless process of entropy that we find in nature. We can either dance or die, love or die, smile or die. We either get drunk in joy, find every single ray of light we can, and multiply by sharing, by loving, or we die. Plain and simple.
So bring forth all the lovers, and get together to celebrate the inner Aphrodite and Venus as we paint it all red. When we least know it, we will be out of the woods, out of the underground, reformed into an army of love that will sing a single tune.
Did I just craft a “love unbound music ritual” for you to sing into reality with those songs if you listen to them in that order? I sure did. Enjoy the magic.
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