14 DAY TRIAL // Fans will remember that what is now the Monster Ball Tour, headlined by Lady Gaga alone, was initially called the Fame Kills Tour, which was also supposed to have Kanye West on board. Following the 2009 VMA incident with Taylor Swift, Kanye decided to take a break from music, which eventually turned out for the best, Gaga says in a new interview with MTV News.
The recently appointed Woman of the Year for 2009, also by MTV, says that it wouldn’t have been possible for her and her team to come up with such a novel idea as the one on which the Monster Ball Tour is based had they been given more time. As such, the concert is both original and, at the same time, intimate, while also managing to stay true to what Gaga sees as her mission in music: bring showbiz back.
With all this, fans should expect some changes next year, when Gaga takes her tour to the “monsters,” as she calls her fans, abroad. “For the next version of the Monster Ball, which is going to be in February when I begin in the UK with my arena tour, I’m throwing out the stage. My team thinks I’m completely psychotic. But I don’t [expletive]ing care what they think. Well, just to give you an idea, the stage is about four times the size of the one we’re on now and conceptually, it’s completely different. One thing that has been lost over the past 10-15 years, in pop music, is the idea of showbiz. And this is definitely going to bring that back,” the singer says for MTV.
As it is now, the concept behind the tour is as simple as it’s visually stunning. “I put together a show that is so perfectly an avant-garde-performance-art-fashion installation, put in a blender and vomited on as a pop show. It’s kind of this amazing theme of evolution, but it’s in a garage, and me and all my friends are kind of exploring the music. But it’s a very vacuous space. It’s a box, it’s a runway, and we have to transform that space to feel like eight different acts throughout the entire show,” Gaga explains for the same publication.
So far, the Monster Ball Tour has garnered nothing but positive reviews, despite some minor mishaps, like Gaga’s occasional inability to stand upright on the stage. Still, many industry insiders saying that, if bringing the wow factor back in pop music is what Gaga is after, then she clearly is triumphant on this account.