PEOPLE wanting to stop the
Lady Gaga concert in the Philippines are barking up the wrong tree, says Renen
de Guia, head of Ovation Productions, organizer of the two-night show.
"They are reacting to
Lady Gaga's music video of Judas (a track from her 2011 album Born This Way),
which has nothing to do with the concerts," De Guia told the Inquirer.
The music video, which
currently has more than 138 million views on YouTube, stars Lady Gaga as a
modern-day Mary Magdalene caught between her allegiance to Jesus and a
disturbing attraction to Judas.
It has more than 462,447
likes and 144,523 dislikes.
Even before the video's
release in April 2011, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights-an
American Catholic antidefamation and civil rights organization-had reportedly
condemned the 26-year-old singer-songwriter for the use of religious imagery
and her role in the video.
Explaining the song's
meaning, Lady Gaga was quoted on the Internet service provider MSN Canada:
"Judas is a metaphor and an analogy about forgiveness and betrayal and
things that haunt you in your life, and how I believe that it's the darkness in
your life that ultimately shines and illuminates the greater light that you
have upon you.
Someone once said to me, 'If
you have no shadows then you're not standing in the light.' So the song is
about washing the feet of both good and evil and understanding and forgiving
the demons from your past in order to move into the greatness of your future. I
just like really aggressive metaphors- harder, thicker, darker-and my fans do
as well. So it is a very challenging and aggressive metaphor, but it is a
metaphor."
De Guia pointed out that
Lady Gaga, just like other artists, likes to be controversial. He cited the
rumors surrounding the New York-born singer when he produced her first concert
in Manila two years ago: "The talk back then was that she's a
hermaphrodite. Did she deny it? No. She went along with the rumour. Now we all
know that it was just rumour.
Today she's thought of as
evil who belongs to a satanic cult. Again she's not denying. We should know
better. The controversy is working."
The promoter added that the
Judas music video "is very tame, compared to other videos by R&B and
hip-hop artists. "If you're paranoid, everything is evil to you. And why
is nobeody making a fuss over vampire movies. Why single out Lady Gaga?"
De Guia went further back to
the 1970s, recounting the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, whose lead singer,
Ozzy Osbourne, had cultivated an evil persona and once bit the head of a bat
while performing at a concert. "What did Ozzy do later? He starred in his
own reality TV series, doing comedy."
People should understand, De
Guia stressed, that "it's all about entertainment." (Philippine Daily
Inquirer)
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