Lady Gaga, 'Messianic' Revival Tent Preacher?

February 27th, 2011 7:15 AM

Absolutely nobody goes to a Lady Gaga concert looking for a sermon on Christianity. But in Saturday's Washington Post, reviewer Sarah Kaufman strangely compared the Madonna wannabe with the "pyrotechnic bikini" to a revival-tent preacher:

She knows we don't only go to a Gaga show for the music but also - maybe mostly - for the messianic, revival-tent message.

"We're gonna be super free, little monsters!" she shouts, in a throaty evangelistic roar. "This is a place where all the freaks are outside!"

With the arena thus sanctified, we embarked on a roller-coaster ride through a Gaga theme park [of her hits]...

Kaufman was clearly not just a reviewer, but described herself as one of Gaga's "worshipful little children" at review's end: 

She knows us too well, knows we love this fantasy of understanding. That's why she's up there in her vinyl bra, smeared in fake blood, bellowing over the cheers: "I hate the truth! I prefer a giant dose of [expletive] any day over the truth!" To go along with Gaga is to feel a surge of righteousness, however vague, undirected and ephemeral it may be.

In their worshipful stilettos and spandex, Gaga's little children trip precariously into the rain, singing that indelible, upbeat, sally-forth refrain from "Born This Way": "I'm on the right track, baby . . . " Gaga knew we'd do that, too.

It's a little odd to connect the concept of righteousness to a love for "a giant dose of [expletive]" over the truth. But then, it's a little odd to connect righteousness to the woman shouting expletives and wearing the pyrotechnic bikini:

Most of all, Lady Gaga knows we're all broken inside, and that we crave hearing how we're just as big a star as the divine hot dog onstage with the sparks shooting out of her bikini - the one bellowing into her headset that we must never give up on our dreams.

Her pyrotechnic two-piece - yes, fireworks detonated from her crotch, too - was one of the more spectacular of Gaga's dozen or so costume changes throughout her two-hour set. Others included a translucent rubber dress topped off with a nun's wimple (and tape over her breasts, an oddly Victorian touch for a woman who regularly shouted expletives and mimed the Kama Sutra with her dancers). But the one disguise the 24-year-old never shed was Mother.

Gaga is your hell-raiser-with-a-heart-of-gold mom. For you, she would stomp on bullies with her go-go boots (because, as she confides while stretched out onstage like a wet cat, she was once bullied, too). She's Oprah without pants, bucking up her fans - her "little monsters," as she calls us, affectionately - between every song.

The "messianic revival-tent message" sentence came right after all of that.