Lady Gaga Plays SXSW: 'You Don't Need a F--king Record Label"

[rmd1064]

The humor of playing Austin’s most prominent barbeque joint was not lost on Lady Gaga. For her headlining performance at Doritos’ Bold Stage, temporarily held at Stubb’s before relocating to 5th St and Red River Friday and Saturday, Gaga entered the stage while simulating a pig roast on a life-size wooden spit.

...Though she only played two bonafide “hits” from her catalog, “Bad Romance” and “Applause,” she spent the rest of the 60 minutes doing, well, what she wanted. “You don't need a fucking record label, you don’t need a company you are the spirit of every artist!” she cried before introducing “Swine,” (with) the neon orange Doritos logo shining brightly behind her. “Let’s fucking celebrate! This is the moment now! I won't play by your fucking rules this our world!”

...Gaga’s set was heavy on “Artpop” material — even, begrudgingly, its best known single (“And now, because we were told we really have to, we’re gonna play a song called ‘Applause,’” she said shortly before the brief encore.) Doritos executives were audibly disappointed with her set choices. “I paid [her] $2.5 million, I better hear ‘Alejandro,’” said one executive involved with the production, whose request went unfulfilled.

Instead, Gaga spent much of her brief time onstage asking the crowd to live in the moment. “Do me a favor and don’t take my fucking picture, put your phone down,” she said after “Artpop”’s hip-hop highlight “Jewels N Drugs” (featuring an onstage cameo from Twista, no less.) “The best thing about South By is I see so many people just feeling music. Close your eyes, fuck your cell phone – fuck your friends instead!”

...Later, when introducing the for-the-fans ballad “Dope,” Gaga got even more candid. “Sometimes guys, when you're not yourself it's so much harder. It’s so much easier to be yourself than it is to be somebody else,” she said. “When you have to pretend to be somebody else you do things you don't wanna do. It eats your soul inside and makes you do stupid shit. I wrote this song for all the things I'm sorry for. I'm so sorry to myself, that I don't always be myself. But I'm gonna be myself today.”

Look for more similar self-empowerment messages at Gaga’s keynote speech at SXSW on Friday at noon (the first keynote from a woman in 15 years, as many have pointed out.) And, perhaps, another anti-technology-at-concerts screed such as this one: “I think we should just take this one moment and do that thing where you put your phones away and you just look at each other and just be right here. Because when you leave the world nobody's gonna give a fuck what you tweeted or what picture you posted or what you caught. They’re not gonna care how famous I was, they're gonna care about whose lives you saved, what people you touched. When you go home tonight, grab your guitar, grab your piano and don't give up. Don't let the machine and technology take you to a place you don't belong.”

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/ne...l-you-dont

Kick Ass, Big Pony.......