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Member Since: 11/24/2009
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THE GUARDIAN on yesterday's Monster Ball. 
Quote:
Tonight, her umpteenth show of the year at Britain's biggest venue is packed to the rafters: teenagers with slap on, dressed-up twentysomethings, middle-aged suburban couples, a vast contingent of homosexual men going berserk in the way only a vast contingent of homosexual men in the presence of a gay icon can. The uproar in the audience is relentless: it gets louder when she plays the big hits – Just Dance, Paparazzi, Bad Romance, even the dreary Allejandro – but it never really stops. The suggestion seems to be that the public might not want a Gaga clone because they think there's something unique about the real thing that's impossible to duplicate: it's not just a matter of playing a keyboard in a daft hat.
It's also difficult to think of any pop star of her stature who interacts with her fans in quite this way. She appears to know the front row by name. When someone throws a book onstage, she opens it, stops the show and begins reading out selected passages. When someone throws a home-made t-shirt, she puts it on. What looks like a bedsheet, crudely felt-tipped by a fan, ends up covering her as she lies prone onstage.
Gaga clearly understands that the one thing that pop is not is all about the music. What she's created isn't just a grand entertaining spectacle, it's a weirdly intense one, emotionally charged in a way that arena-sized pop shows never are. That, as much as the songs or the staging, seems to be what people are here for: clearly it's not for want of trying, but you'd be hard-pushed to argue there's anything else even remotely like it on offer elsewhere.
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her facial expression in the second pic