Lady Gaga mesmerizes the Lollapalooza crowd on Friday night at the Grand Park. Her gravity sucked most of the total crowd from Friday's other headliner, the Strokes.
That day the weather was perfect, around 70's with nice breeze.
I think Lady Gaga is an incredible talent who knows how to get attentions.
Our Lady first appeared in silhouette, singing "Dance in the Dark"...
...In the first of many outlandish costumes fresh off the semi, including enormous shoulder pads, a nun's habit with a see-through plastic suit, a huge fringed lampshade, even the same disco-ball bra she wore when she played a Lollapalooza side stage for a small crowd as an unknown in 2007.
She tackled all the hits -- "Just Dance," "Love Game," "Poker Face," an encore of "Bad Romance" -- from her two albums.
"My name is Lady Gaga. I thank you for coming to my show. I didn't used to be brave. In fact I wasn't very brave at all," she told her fans. "But you have made me brave, little monsters. So now I'm going to brave for you. Tonight, I want you to free yourself."
Her two-hour set played like a jukebox musical -- a bunch of Gaga hits strung together with a loose story line about kids in a broken-down car trying to get to the Monster Ball.
So rock is dead, and somehow Broadway won. Lady Gaga's performance was a highly scripted, bewildering, bedazzled psychological drama, with production values right off the Great White Way.
With tears in her eyes Lady Gaga said the day she came on this stage 3 years ago, she had no record deal and no one believed in her, but she did it with all the support and love of her fans.
She thanked everyone present at Lollapalooza 2010 music festival from the bottom of her heart for being supportive and believing in her music and for loving her.
When things quieted down and she sat at the piano, alone, she was stunning, holding the crowd in the palm of her hand with greater power than the dancing and the mugging and the light show. "Speechless" easily leaves a listener just that way, and a new song, "You and I," was a killer ballad with meat on its bones. She sounded like Bonnie Raitt when she sang it, and she certainly left us all something to talk about.
The attitude behind this is very aggressive, too, and you can see it in the choreography -- all punches and thrown elbows and monster claws.
Everyone on stage frowns and sneers. The band members flip each other off.
This before she tried to out-sacrilege Madonna (a profane prayer, a bleeding angel statue, comparing herself to Jesus) and added, in possibly her truest statement (despite also explaining that, next to money, she really "hates the truth"): "I don't care who you are or what you believe, all I care about is what you think of me."
"What I really hate," she added, "I hate money."
Then the ridiculous scream again: "I don't want your money, I WANT YOUR SOOOOOOUL!"
Gaga's expletive-laced homilies end with screams that say, in essence, "F--- you, world!" She rips her stockings, she smears herself with blood, she's seen in a video dressed in delicate chiffons -- and a gas mask.
She strives to obliterate every convention of beauty, and she says she's doing it so we can "be FREEEEEEEE!"
After the concert
Some other shots from during the day
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