Original Coverage & Source Attribution: neonmusic.co.uk
“Paparazzi” is Lady Gaga’s song about wanting fame and love at the same time, written partly to court photographers’ attention and partly to mock it.
She put it plainly to The Korea Times in 2009: “Part of me wrote the song thirsting for paparazzi’s attention while a part of me is satirizing them.”
The question at the centre, she said, was whether love and popularity can live together. “Can a person have both at the same time, or can he only have one?”
A few months earlier, as The Fame was coming out, she gave SongwriterUniverse a more personal version: “This song is about narcissism, and about finally meeting that person in your life you feel so strongly about.” When you do, she added, “you just want to take their picture.”
That double meaning runs through the words. Neon doesn’t reproduce lyrics, but the singer plays a devoted follower who promises to keep chasing until she is loved back, and it is never quite clear whether she is a fan, a lover or a photographer.
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Gaga wrote it with Rob Fusari, who also produced it, for her debut album The Fame. It was released as a single in the UK in July 2009.
It was a slow burner in the UK. It peaked at No. 4 on the Official Singles Chart and spent 49 weeks in the Top 100, having first entered the chart in January 2009, months before its official single release that summer.
The video turned the song into a thriller. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, it stars Alexander Skarsgård as a boyfriend who sets Gaga up for the photographers on a balcony, where she is pushed over the edge, as SPIN described on its release.
She comes back in a neck brace and a wheelchair, poisons him with powder hidden in a ring, and ends the video posing for the cameras. Stylist B. Åkerlund later told Nylon that the costumes came from the Thierry Mugler archive.
Åkerlund later admitted the job revived him. “I was getting bored, and didn’t understand the purpose of music videos anymore,” he said, as quoted by Rolling Stone Australia. “Then she showed up in my life.”
At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards on 14 September, the video won Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects, according to the winners list from MTV’s parent company.
She performed it at the same ceremony in a staging that played the song’s ideas to the end. Fake blood spread across her body after she left the piano, and she was hoisted into the air as if dead, as PinkNews recalled years later.
Read beside the video, the performance made the same point twice: the fame the song chases ends with a body on display.
Fame and its costs became a running theme for her. You can hear different sides of it in Bloody Mary, from Born This Way, in Shallow, her duet with Bradley Cooper and, years later, in the lady in red of Abracadabra.
The darker side of that story fed into Chromatica, the album that topped our ranking of albums about mental health. For more pop songs explained, see our A to Z of song meanings.
Gaga asked whether a person can have love and fame at once. The video’s answer is a woman smiling for the photographers over the body of the man who set her up.
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