Posted under mtv
Late Thursday night (March 11), Lady Gaga finally unveiled “Telephone,” one of the most hotly-anticipated music videos in recent memory. The epic clip runs nearly 10 minutes and features a super-colorful, quick-cutting narrative that follows Gaga as she goes to jail, extracts revenge on a diner full of patrons and goes on a general mayhem spree with the help of Beyoncé and the giant yellow truck from “Kill Bill.” There’s also lots of cursing, all types of wacky fashion, fistfights, a poison recipe, plenty of athletic dancing and a cliffhanger at the end. It’s unlike any other music video in recent memory, even surpassing past Gaga efforts like “Paparazzi” and “Bad Romance.”
At the same time, it does conjure up memories of Guns N’ Roses‘ “November Rain,” a similarly lengthy video that acted as the second entry in a trilogy of cinematic clips. (”Telephone” also acts as a sequel to “Paparazzi” and sets up a third clip at the end.)
When Guns N’ Roses released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II back in 1991, frontman Axl Rose wanted to create something truly unprecedented when it came to music videos. He collected three ballads from the two albums (“Don’t Cry,” “November Rain” and “Estranged”) and crafted something of a narrative. Though the story is told out of order, the trilogy casts Axl as a vaguely fictionalized version of himself and the struggles he has with the woman in his life (played by then-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour). Over the course of three videos, they have a fight, Axl takes a lot of pills, Seymour dies in the rain (somehow) and everybody ends up sort of sad and depressed at the end.
Unfortunately, while the narrative made a bit of sense through “Don’t Cry” and “November Rain,” it totally falls apart during “Estranged.” It’s possible that the sudden unavailability of Seymour (she left Axl before the third video could be filmed) threw monkey wrench in the scenario, though it’s also possible that Axl was facing the collapse of his band and simply forgot where the story was going. Or perhaps he never knew where it was going in the first place. Regardless, the video for “Estranged” does make reference to the other two clips but is mostly remembered as the video where Axl is (apparently) kidnapped by a dolphin.
So far, the story told during the series of Gaga videos is much more straightforward: Gaga gets involved with a man (”True Blood” star Alexander Skarsgard) and kills him in “Paparazzi,” then goes to jail for it and breaks out to extract some form of revenge in “Telephone.” There are plenty of other references to other Gaga videos in “Telephone” as well (like the cigarettes from “Bad Romance” and the dogs from “Poker Face”). It seems as though Gaga may have better luck in her trilogy than Axl did, but until we see the third one, Rose remains the video trilogy king.
What do you think of the “Telephone” video? What should be Gaga’s next video? What do you think of Guns N’ Roses attempted trilogy? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
