Lady Gaga Drops Epic ‘Artpop Film’ for ‘G.U.Y.’
Lady Gaga premiered her longest music video yet Saturday night, unleashing a wide-ranging lux epic for “G.U.Y.,” the third single off her album Artpop. Clocking in at 11 minutes and 46 seconds, the “Artpop film,” which was directed by Gaga herself and produced by Nicole Erlich and Andrew Listermann, incorporates four different songs and a kaleidoscope of landscapes and themes.
Lady Gaga’s Music Video Evolution
The video opens to the strains of “Artpop” with a scrum of men in suits fighting over money scattered on the ground. When the fray clears, Lady Gaga, dressed as a bird creature with tattered brown wings and a scarlet body, is left lying in their fight pit, where she’s been pierced through with an arrow.
She manages to makes her way to what at first appears to be a monastery, but the gates open onto a party mansion – Hearst Castle, actually. “Venus” begins to play as Gaga is revived on the scene, baptized in the swimming pool and serenaded by a court orchestra of lipsynching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The “film” switches gears again as the song shifts to “G.U.Y.” and an invigorated Gaga, no longer winged, leads various male dance troupes in synchronized routines. There’s also some kind of cloning going on (Gandhi and Michael Jackson, naturally) and suit made of lego.
Toward the end, Gaga and some female accomplices, dressed in confident black feathers, drive to an office building armed with crossbows, where they shoot money at the businessmen in the course of their hostile corporate takeover. The last four minutes of the film are taken up entirely by credits, to the tune of “Manicure.”
Lady Gaga premiered the clip Saturday night on NBC’s Dateline before making it available online.