If she isn’t blowing people away with her charitable actions, she’s blowing them away with controversy. Lady Gaga is in hot water again, this time for wearing a bra featuring fake machine guns attached to it. The concert, in Vancouver, was her first since the December 21 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that saw 20 children and 6 staff members shot and killed by an armed gunman. Now anti-gun activists are up in arms, so to speak.
A spokesperson for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Ladd Everitt, told Britain’s The Sun: “You’d hope Lady Gaga would have better sense of judgement. We would ask her to consider the influence she wields over many people and to use that power responsibly.”
Gaga was in the public’s good graces only a few weeks after the Sandy Hook tragedy, when she announced that she would be bringing a bus on the road that would give kids access to information on how to deal with issues of bullying, abuse, and self-confidence. Plus, she reached out to a Baltimore boy who had been shot by a classmate at his high school. Now, by wearing a silly bra onstage she has perhaps undone some of that good.
I’m not sure where I stand on this whole thing. On the one hand, the concert was in Canada, and while we have our share of gun issues, although nothing like what we see on the news in the States, to link her performance to something that happened in the U.S. last month on the other side of the continent seems a bit much. On the other hand, it was literally only a month ago that the tragedy happened, and since she seems to be so socially concerned about children, maybe it wasn’t the best outfit to chose that night. On the third hand, there have been shootings since Sandy Hook, and while it was certainly a tragedy, life moves on. On the fourth hand, why involve guns in anything? The bra looks stupid, they aren’t cool in any way.
Fans of the singer have come to her defence, noting that she has worn the bra before, notably in the video for “Alejandro,” and during many of the shows on her Monster’s Ball tour. She also wore a similar outfit on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in June of 2010.
I certainly don’t think she was trying to make a big political statement about gun control in the wake of Sandy Hook with the outfit, but she has yet to make any statement about this current controversy. Maybe she’s just trying to drum up some press to promote the next leg of her tour. Maybe she’s not that smart. Maybe she thought no one in Canada would care. I’ll be interested to see if she keeps the bra in her show for the rest of the tour. She is in the U.S., where she played Tacoma last night, and is playing Portland tonight.
