Beyonce & Lady Gaga - Video Phone & Telephone
Though released at the end of 2009, I don’t think I can do a proper Gaga/Bee collaboration post without mentioning Video Phone. Both videos have inspired & delighted me all year.
I grew up during the golden days of MTV. The first video I remember seeing was Madonna’s Like a Virgin, I can still recall the original VJs & I enjoyed all the groundbreaking videos first-run - Land of Confusion, Thriller, Sledgehammer. Being raised by MTV in the 80s gives you a high standard for music videos, a standard that continued into the 90s with the risky raunchy videos released by artists like Prodigy & Marilyn Manson. Videos that came with a warning. Over the past few years, videos simply stopped being noteworthy, the majority had became more formulaic, less inspired, less an accompaniment to the song & more a silly little story that no one will recall years later, and even if a great video popped up, it received little to no airtime since all the music channels have devolved into reality networks.
Enter Beyonce & her tireless effort to dance & sing her way into our hearts. I celebrate that woman’s entire videography. Beyonce’s second album B’Day has a video for nearly every song, not every single - every song. Each video is sensational, eye-catching & for lack of a better word - fun. She’s so full of sexy contagious energy, she’s so damned talented. I can’t take my eyes off of her.
When Lady Gaga shimmied her tiny little body onto the scene, she brought with her that avant garde artfulness that the music world was missing. Like Beyonce, Gaga has a big voice, a fantastic body & an inexhaustible desire to make her music accessible & exciting. Gaga’s also unabashed. That girl is going to challenge us. Her videos are going to come with a warning.
Paparazzi was the first video that really overwhelmed me with a giddy excitement for Gaga’s vision. It may have been the first video to really stimulate me artistically in close to a decade. So fashionable! So inspirational! Such an homage to artists & designers without being a rip-off of their vision. Then that epic piece of art Bad Romance was released. Goosebumps, hitches in my chest, possibly even a tear or two shed over Gaga’s spooky fantasy combined with Alexander McQueen’s beautifully grotesque reptilian creations.
Already I’m devoted to Beyonce’s tightly choreographed masterpieces & Gaga’s fashion forward dreams. And then they collaborated.
Video Phone, directed by Hype Williams, is a remixed version of a song on Beyonce’s third album I Am… Sasha Fierce featuring an extra verse by Gaga. An uneven album with mostly great songs & kick ass videos, I was excited to see Gaga take on this naughty little song. Oh & the naughtiness abounded! Gaga fully committed to the whole hip pop vibe & watching these two talents together was fantastic! Gaga looked damn good in that little get-up, like a tiny little blonde haired Bee. I really enjoy watching tiny girls dance with more curvaceous girls, so seeing them together was aesthetically exciting. And the red shoe clad Beyonce next to Gaga in yellow heels? Red & yellow! You’ll be the death of me yet!
Telephone is quite simply a masterpiece of a music video. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, one of the truly great music video directors, it featured Bee & Gaga in a breathtaking nightmarish dusty criminal pop-art adventure, a sequel to Gaga’s Paparazzi where her Swedish man love meets an untimely demise. There’s a Pussy Wagon, there’s an androgynous lady prison, there are poisoned villains & victims. Gaga & Beyonce celebrating their crimes in Wonder Woman inspired costumes. Gaga & Beyonce celebrating as Merry Widows. Gaga & Beyonce plotting while costumed in Mugler femme fatale creations. Best of all? There is a bit of choreography that mimes eating a sandwich. It has everything! It’s such a delicious tale. It’s so smart, so ambitious. It gives me faith that music videos aren’t dying, they’re being reinvented, recreated & now featured on the internet instead of on television. And this music video revolution is being helmed by that very very bad bad girl, Gaga & her sweet partner in crime, Miss Honey Bee.
JOHNNY GAGA + HONEY BEE <3
