Heartwarming / Lady Gaga

• Dedicating a live reworked performance of "Telephone" to the late Alexander McQueen.
• "You're not at all what I expected. You're much more."
  • Watch nearly any of her conversations with fans. Oh, but this woman cares.
• This video was given to Lady Gaga as a gift from her fans for her birthday. She wrote on her Twitter: "I've never cried so hard in 24 years, from pure joy and unconditional love. Tears still streaming."
• "WE WERE BORN THIS WAY, BABY!"
  • At the very last Monster Ball before Lady Gaga went off to give her speech on DADT, she gave a particularly impassioned speech midway through the show about how important it was that LGBT people be respected and included, and ended with commanding the audience to "be proud of who you are, because you are beautiful, and you were BORN THIS WWWAYYY!!!" It was Narmtastic while also being really sweet.
  • Seeing hundreds of people beginning spontaneously singing it during Boston Pride 2011 was quite a moment of its own, and more than a few tears were shed.
• Maria Aragon's cover of "Born This Way". Lady Gaga then called her upon seeing it, and invited her to sing on stage.
  • Which she's since proven was not simply for show — during the Toronto leg of her tour, Lady Gaga and Maria Aragon performed a piano duet of "Born this Way".
• The country version of the song shows that Gaga got soul.
• This fan's story about meeting her. Holy crap.
  • Be it pausing a concert to break up a fight or signing a fan's painting mid-song, this woman is real. As someone said on YouTube, this is why she's Mother Monster. And when somebody throws something onstage she will acknowledge it, thank the person who gave it to her, and actually wear it. A whole costume change indeed.
• Appearing in one of Google's "The Web is What You Make It" commercials for Chrome. They filmed her using the web to reach out to her fans by blogging and tweeting while pulling covers of Edge of Glory off YouTube in real time when she had only released the song hours earlier. A CMOH for her that doubles as a CMOA for her fans.
• THE ENTIRE SONG "Bad Kids". Once you realize that it's basically a love letter to the kids whose parents kicked them out of the house for being gay it can't be anything else. Also triples as Awesome Music and a monumental Tear Jerker.
  You're still good to me if you're a bad kid, baby...
• Her tribute to Jamey Rodemeyer, who committed suicide after being bullied.
• This tweet: "I know I say this all the time, but I woke this morning so grateful for all of you. Little Monsters, your are the sunshine in my darkness"
• The "release" of "Stuck On Fuckin' You", a B-side from "Born This Way", as a Christmas present to her fans. To put into perspective: one of the most powerful and popular musicians of the moment with a huge fanbase who would do almost anything for anything Gaga-related put out an entire song, complete with cover artwork, for free. She really does love her fans.
• Her Facebook post about Britney. "Real fans will never turn their back on you #WillAlwaysLoveBritney Some stars really are as sweet as you thought they were".
• This line from "You and I": "Three men I've been sure of in my whole life/It's my Daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ." If you've ever dated a Catholic girl, you know being mentioned in the same breath as Jesus and her father is the highest praise you can ever receive as a man. Whoever "Nebraska" is, he's beloved.
• There was a lot of speculation on how "political" Lady Gaga would be with her Super Bowl Halftime Show, given how outspoken she is and that she personally protested Donald Trump on the night afther the election. How does she open one of the biggest shows of her career, during a time of deep political division in America? Not with a blatantly liberal message, but a beautiful medley of "God Bless America" & "This Land is Your Land" with the lights of Houston (and a bunch of drones) behind her.
  • Later in the Halftime Show during "Million Reasons" she makes a shout out to her parents, and then at the end of the song she hugs a fan.
• Despite its thumping music, "Bad Romance" is a surprisingly sincere love song. All that Purple Prose basically amounts to "I want you Warts and All."
• Pretty much all of The Cure. Yes. All of it.
• "Don't Mess with Italian Girls◊"^note The photo of Madonna embracing Gaga after her Oscar win in February 2019, ending years of speculation of a feud between the two singers.
• In a weird way, the fact that when rumors were circling around about her being a hermaphrodite or a trans woman, her response in interviews wasn't to deny it, but to counter by asking why it would have mattered if she was.
• Her performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Joe Biden's inauguration. Not only was it a moment of absolute triumph for her as a musician, with an absolutely flawless rendition of the song, but she was performing at the United States Capitol, which just weeks earlier had been damaged by the insurrection of January 6th. At the line "our flag was still there", she gestured to the flag flying over the ceremony as if to say, "We are still here, and our flag will always rise." It was an impossibly moving moment.

---