Gaga's "Born This Way" Video Where Sci-Fi Meets Dance

Gaga's Sci-Fi "Born This Way" Video

 

The following article is by William S. Goodman on February 28, 2011 for SPIN Magazine and is a decent description of Lady Gaga's newest video. A couple of notes/additions to the article, Goodman failed to mention Laurieann Gibson as the video's creative director and choreographer.

According to Gibson in an interview with MTV the video is very symbolic, it's really based in modern dance: She's doing [Martha] Graham. She's doing [Lester] Horton. These are legitimate dance techniques."

Nick Knight the director as noted is a well respected fashion photographer and is a long time collaborator with Nicola Formichetti, Gaga's stylist and Fashion Director for Mugler. They worked together of Gaga's Vanity Fair spread as well as other projects.

The male model that Goodman refers to as "the guy, whose face is tattooed like a skeleton" is Rick Genest AKA Zombie Boy, who Formichetti calls Rico in his blog. Formichetti featured Genest in his first runway show for Mugler at the Paris Mens Fashion Week.

Lady Gaga in "Born This Way

Turns out, Lady Gaga isn't just the queen of the pop music world. In the new video for "Born This Way," the empowering dance anthem and title track from her upcoming album, she's the mother a new alien race, deep in outer space. Maybe this explains why she arrived to the Grammys inside a translucent egg. Watch below! 

The seven-minute-plus clip, directed by fashion photographer Nick Knight, is a freaky sci-fi epic that borrows imagery from Superman, '80s cartoon series Jem, Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, and even neo-noir graphic film Sin City. 

Dressed like a futuristic princess in a feather headdress, Gaga spins deep into space and tells the tale of the birth of a new race. "It's a race within a race of humanity, which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom," she says. There's required reading, too, which Gaga calls "The Monster manifesto." 

There's also an evil force, led by a sinister-looking Gaga, who gives birth to a massive machine gun, which she violently pulls from between her legs, then rides, firing round after round. Then, like any good Gaga video, there's a dance routine with a bunch of mostly-naked dudes, including this guy, whose face is tattooed like a skeleton.