Lady Gaga’s “Fame” Attracts Kanye West, Perez Hilton to L.A. Show
Lady Gaga didn’t wait until she was famous before writing an album about the pleasures (and perils) of fame. But Friday night at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, on the second night of her first headlining tour, the dance-pop diva made it clear just how much she’s enjoying stardom now that her hit 2008 debut — it’s called The Fame — has bestowed her with the real thing. “I love you, and I will never, ever leave you,” Gaga told the capacity crowd (which included Kanye West), before Perez Hilton came onstage to anoint “the new princess of pop” and present her with a plaque commemorating 3 million sales of her single “Just Dance.” Lady Gaga has launched an assault on the charts the past few weeks, leaping from Number 10 to Seven to Four, where she sat last week, just below Taylor Swift.
Accompanied by DJ Space Cowboy, Gaga offered up plenty of pounding disco beats, but she also seemed intent on proving that she’s not just the latest in a long line of lip-sync Lolitas: Midway through the hourlong show she sat down behind a piano and belted out a surprisingly bluesy version of “Poker Face”; it wasn’t Amy Winehouse, but it was far closer than Gaga’s bubble-wrap mini-dress might’ve led you to expect.
The tongue-in-cheek tabloid-victim shtick that provides some laughs on The Fame grew somewhat tiresome at the Wiltern, especially when the singer started spewing half-baked media-studies nonsense like, “Some say Lady Gaga is a lie, and they’re right: I am a lie, and every day I kill to make it true.” Fortunately, this is a woman who knows how to lighten a mood: Within 10 minutes or so, she’d donned a flesh-colored leotard and a bedazzled admiral’s cap and was rhyming “boys in cars” with “buy us drinks in bars.”
Set list:
“Paparazzi”
“LoveGame”
“Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”
“The Fame”
“Money Honey” “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)”
“Poker Face”
“Future Love”
“Just Dance”
“Boys Boys Boys”
“Poker Face”