The American pop export known as Lady Gaga keeps running into trouble as she tours Asia. First, she was pegged as a "devil" by Islamic hardliners in Indonesia, where protests and security concerns forced the cancellation of a June 3 concert. Now, the 26-year-old pop star is causing a ruckus for tweeting that she was going to use her time in Thailand to buy a "fake Rolex."
In the never-ending soap opera that is the life of an international superstar -- one of the globe's few -- Lady Gaga is suddenly pop-culture's safest target. Even Madonna, whose once contentious "Like A Prayer" is today family-friendly halftime show entertainment, is piling it on.
Rehearsal footage surfaced online from Madonna's "MDNA" tour, and it sees Madge mashing up her self-empowerment anthem "Express Yourself" with Lady Gaga's kindred "Born This Way." A sly wink to their thematic and tuneful similarities? Perhaps, yet Madonna and subtlety don't always go hand in hand, and Madonna ends the live rendition with "Hard Candy's" bitter "She's Not Me." Madonna's tour starts Thursday in Tel Aviv, so watch the rehearsal clip on YouTube before it's removed.
When "Born This Way" was released it was the subject of much back and forth between Team Madonna and Team Lady Gaga, a debate that was already tired last February when Lady Gaga was forced to address it on national television. Little on a tour the size of a Madonna or Lady Gaga is off the cuff, and Madonna has already slammed "Born This Way" as "reductive," so working it into "Express Yourself" seems rather petty, an admission that the song isn't harmless but rather an irritant.
The only winner in all this is Lady Gaga. It's Gaga's whose Twitter will be stalked in hopes of a response, and it's Gaga whose U.S. tour in 2013 will have blogs like this one wondering if she'll retaliate. For Lady Gaga is in that magical/infuriating moment where all she has to do is write a harmless Tweet and she's inspiring wire stories.
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