(The following is a comment that I made on a recent post asking about the controversy surrounding Burqa.)

Time travel with me back to 2013 if you will..

All you really need to know is… DANCE… SEX… ART.. POP.

As someone pointed out, many of us were lucky enough to be old enough to experience these early Gaga eras as fans. Something that I am forever grateful for. During ARTPOP, I was a senior in high school.

ARTPOP is forever the love of my life. The album is stylistically so ahead of its time. But the song Aura was indeed titled Burqa and changed .. rightfully so. Because it was culturally appropriating a religious symbol.

Whether it was Burqa, Gaga’s performance of Swine at SXSW (trigger warning for people with bulimia nervosa), or Do What U Want feat. R. Kelly… the era was full of highly controversial performances and work. ARTPOP was easily Gaga’s most controversial era.

Do What U Want feat. R. Kelly had an entire music video that was filmed and edited. Upon clips of it Ieaking, it was scrapped entirely. It featured Gaga laying down on a medical examination table being administered anesthesia by R. Kelly, who was acting as a doctor, until she was unconscious — then dancers began to dance and grind on her while playing with her limbs as she lay unconscious on the table.

Yeah that one was pretty fucking bad.

The song however was about something quite profound. Something that we even see today happening to artists like Chappell Roan. The media and general public seem to think they can own an artist. Gaga was simply taking her power back by giving them a big ol FUCK YOU and saying they can do whatever the fuck they want with her body because they can’t have the her that is true and authentically her. They can only do what they want with her body, distinguishing her artistry and intellectual contribution to her field as separated entirely from her physicality that the media loved to criticize endlessly.

Wrong artist to feature? Umm yeah. Definitely. But you can blame Interscope for that. Much of what ARTPOP became was very different than what Gaga had initially wanted. The music video for Applause, if you can tell.. while it is awesome to me personally… it is very-much-so missing that “Gaga factor” that you will find in other videos like the one for G.U.Y. .. and this is because Gaga was rushed into the concept and forced to work under conditions she was unhappy with for the Applause video.

If you understood Gaga, you were a fan. If you didn’t, you hated her. This was all pre-Sound of Music Oscar performance, so she was still very-much-so regarded to as strictly a figure of the pop music world. Unlike today where she is widely known for many other things.

Although, during ARTPOP, Gaga was trying desperately, despite the roadblocks put in place by her label, to show the world that she is a “renaissance artist” or a multidisciplinary artist, rather than just one particular thing. A la Leonardo DaVinci, Gaga attempted to blend together art and science, creating a prototype for the world’s first “flying dress”, the TechHaus Volantis.

She was even set to be the first artist to perform in space.

And she did all of this.. at the age of 26. Pretty mind-blowing.

Gaga is a very authentic artist in terms of her art and storytelling. Even when she is forced into a box by her label, she still manages somehow to get the point across that she initially wanted to, albeit not in as impactful of a way as she would have liked to. That’s why so many were waiting for an ARTPOP Act ll. Because so much was left out of that album that was jaw-droppingly incredible.

It is, in fact, the complexity of Gaga as an artist that captivated many of us monsters. And it is the exact reason why most, if not all, of us are still around and still adore her so much.

Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk :)