In 2017, Lady Gaga took on an unenviable task: filling in for Beyoncé, who dropped out of a Coachella headliner slot due to pregnancy. Gaga’s replacement performance, in her country-tinged Joanne era – as usual, she was years ahead of the pop curve – more than sufficed; perhaps only Beyoncé can hold a candle to her in terms of true-blue live performance ability, and she delivered the set of a consummate entertainer and generational talent. But Gaga felt that she had unfinished business. “I’ve had a vision I’ve never been able to fully realize at Coachella for reasons beyond our control,” she wrote in an Instagram post announcing her return to the desert for another headliner slot this spring. “I have been wanting to go back and do it right, and I am.”
Did she ever. Gaga, more than any other contemporary pop star, has approached pop as transmogrification, live performance like a hunter – the piercing gaze, transparent hunger and annihilating focus of an apex predator. And with Gagachella, as her fans have already termed a thesis statement of a set, she goes in for the kill. You knew from the minute she appeared in full deranged queen regalia, the head of a multi-story hoop skirt that opened to reveal a birdcage prison of backup dancers, that the vision was nigh. The nearly two-hour performance, covering 22 songs from her dance pop catalogue, joins Beyoncé’s postponed Homecoming in the pantheon of seminal Coachella headliner sets – a fully realized vision of a pop master, a testament to years of hard-earned experience at the highest level, and a banger dance party with production and delivery in a league above her peers.
At 38, Gaga reigns as a monarch in pop music, a fact she wielded to stupefying effect on Friday evening to a crowd that extended far beyond any eye could see. “Welcome to my house,” she intoned before opener Bloody Mary – understatement of the month, as her house was the sprawling skeleton of a neoclassical opera house, her domain an arresting realm of elaborate make-believe. For the purpose of Mayhem, the new album which returns to her original principles of pounding volume, dirty synths, high theatrics and irresistible hooks, Gaga conjures an entire fantasy of witches and queens, a typically twisted, self-referential fairytale of literal dark and light told in five acts.
Gagachella was notably not a full career retrospective – no tracks from Artpop, Joanne or Chromatica, with just A Star Is Born’s Shallow as the lone representative of Gaga’s decade-long pivot away from gritty, sticky music that makes you want to move. And yet it still felt comprehensive, all-encompassing, by seamlessly braiding her foundational texts – The Fame, Born This Way – with her latest one. Mayhem is easily Gaga’s best album since Artpop, both a return to form and a hard-won study of warring personas contained in one self, pop music with sharp teeth and beastly desire. Ever the visionary and literalist, she renders her internal strife as a court battle between a domineering queen in black and a innocent in white, with full wig changes from black bob to blond ringlets necessitating long, pulsating transitions that lavished attention on her army of backup dancers and, frankly, metal instrumentalists.
Gagachella, too, marks a return to form – from the outset of her career, Gaga has treated pop music as possession, her spasmodic dance style like an exorcism, more refreshingly loose and instinctual than her peers. The Mother Monster’s visions – a chess battle to the death (Poker Face), rage at fame sung to a skeleton (Perfect Celebrity), new Gaga strangled by 2009 VMAs Gaga in a zombie-filled grave (Disease, the concert high point that left me agape) – possessed Coachella with an unstoppable need to dance, primal screams of the gagged.
Gaga’s voice, honed with time, was more dextrous and luminous than ever, and though she didn’t miss a note, the performance was as much a feat of acting as singing – Gaga the possessed, the haughty, the hunted, the strangled, the Oscar nominee. Her performances often have the feeling of life-or-death stakes; even a track as sinuously groovy as Killah gets the embodiment of a demonic fever, accompanied by French producer Gesaffelstein entombed in black, the oil-slicked phantom of Gaga’s twisted opera.
But in the spirit of duality, she also broke character just enough – to salute her fans, her fiance, her spiritual belief of interconnectedness. “The truth is we’re all one. It’s all just one big fucking thing,” she said before the triumphant victory lap of Born This Way. “I love you so much.” The mayhem carried through a transcendent finale of Bad Romance staged, naturally, as a Frankenstein-esque revivification with plague masks, Gaga’s face at the conclusion shifting between performance snarl and personal joy. With both, she led not one but two extended curtain calls with the full cast and crew – unusual for a music festival, but fitting for an all-timer night of pop theater in the desert.
