Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball Was Missing a Lot of Little Monsters

At Madison Square Garden on Friday night, Lady Gaga herself was transcendental, but I couldn't help but notice the lack of diehard or longtime fans surrounding me.

By Alyssa Mercante | August 27, 2025 | 4:12pm

Photo: Getty Images

Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball Was Missing a Lot of Little Monsters

Three years ago, Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball arrived at MetLife in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Over 55,000 neon-pink-clad guys and queers in Gaga drag filled the stadium to see the show that had been delayed not once but twice due to covid. I spent $133 on my ticket, where I was far from the stage, but dead center.

This year, Lady Gaga took the Mayhem Ball, a much smaller tour (no stadiums), to Madison Square Garden. I spent $321 on my ticket for one of the worst seats I’ve ever had.

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And though the Mayhem Ball is more intimate than her previous world tour, and boasts a cohesiveness in theme and visuals that Chromatica Ball lacked, there was something off about the vibes in MSG on Friday, August 22.

It felt like it was severely lacking in Little Monsters.

Fourteen years ago, at the Monster Ball Tour at Nassau Coliseum, I wore Coke cans in my hair and caution tape wrapped around me, a nod to the “Telephone” music video. At Chromatica Ball, I click-clacked around in an outfit inspired by her “Rain on Me” performance at the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards. This year, I spent over 10 hours handmaking my Venus costume, a deep cut from her oft-maligned (wrongly) Artpop era, complete with a rhinestone seashell bra and a flower-covered thong.

In 2011, most Monster Ball Tour attendees wore jeans, jackets, and concert tees. But over the last few years, concert costumes have become more common and more intricate, so I expected Little Monsters to bring their absolute weirdest, wildest, darkest, and most neon-ed best to NYC.

And there were definitely some great looks: I’d say around 30-35% of the attendees were in proper get-ups that weren’t just Gaga tees—like lacy white dresses with milkmaid braids, or all-black ensembles resembling mourning widows. A few standouts were those who chose looks from before the Mayhem Era, like one young woman in her 2008 TRL look, or the squad of friends who donned different Gaga albums from Joanne to Joker 2.

But outside MSG’s main entrance on 7th Avenue, there was only a small crowd of concertgoers milling about in their fits, while a few photographers tried to sell them photos. “Where is everyone?” I asked someone dressed like Lady Mayhem. “I think they all went inside?” they said from under a massive veil. “I dunno, I expected more people here.” It was an hour before the show, and she had no opening act.

As I walked through security, I realized I stuck out like a sore thumb. People in the merch line stared at me, though a few kind folks mumbled pleasantries about my ass. As we found our section, it was the MSG employees who were the most excited about our looks (my sister wore an off-white cropped leather balero and a skeleton bodysuit). One employee gleefully showed me all of her Lady Gaga-inspired tattoos and Mayhem colorway nails. A few people screamed “Venus” at me while I waited for a $43 double gin and tonic, but it was the bartender—who had glitter in her voluminous black hair—who demanded I turn around when I told her I was “double cheeked up.”

In our section, my sister and I stuck out even more. A quiet mother and daughter sat down for most of the show. A gay couple behind us, who came from a flyover state, only knew the words to a few singles—“I know this one!” one of them screamed when she sang, “Die with a Smile.” There were also several heterosexual couples, canoodling while seated in what can only be described as a blatant act of homophobia. Our seats were arguably some of the worst in the entire arena—half the time we couldn’t even see Gaga performing—but still, I found myself shocked that we seemed to be the only longtime Little Monsters in the nosebleeds.

Of course, Gaga herself was transcendental. Her vocals were incredible, and her surprise song (a piano version of “Hair,” a deep cut from Born This Way) had me in tears. The sheer joy of hearing music I have listened to for nearly 20 years so loud and so close, the beat throbbing in my chest, made everything else melt away. We danced, screamed the lyrics in each other’s faces, cried during the piano ballads, and hobbled to the train, exhausted but ecstatic after the two-hour-long show.

But trudging out of MSG, I couldn’t help but side-eye some of the others. Why were they here? Was I being a hater?

Then, I saw a few social media posts, specifically this TikTok from NYC-based singer and producer SOLRWAVE, in which he complains that no one on the floor knew the lyrics. “I was in section 3 row 2, and most of my row seemed like casual listeners in their late-30s to mid-40s,” he told me over DM. “There was a family to the left of me, and they didn’t know any of the lyrics but were filming the majority of the time.”

He continued: “I thought back to all these videos and comments I had seen of truly deserving fans begging and fighting for floor tickets to see an artist they had supported for most of their lives. That’s when I made the video talking about how it was strange that most people on the floor in my section didn’t know the very music they had come to see live!”

Mayhem Ball sold out every show in general sale, with ticket resellers jacking up the prices. One Twitter post showed an alleged screenshot from a reseller for night one at MSG, where a single floor seat ticket was going for over $30,000. Meanwhile, my editor said she got a nosebleed seat to Gaga’s Chromatica Ball the day of for about $100.

I believe music, and especially Lady Gaga, is for everyone, but this continues to be a bizarre reality of our modern social media age: diehard fans with little disposable income are relegated to watching grainy livestreams or waiting months for the concert film to hopefully hit theaters, while well-off people, some with only a passing knowledge of an artist and the desire for social clout, sit in the stands, mouthing the wrong words to a multi-platinum record.

Swifties also famously struggled to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, where some cities’ ticket prices averaged in the thousands. Comedian Nikki Glaser has talked about Swifties getting angry with her for seeing the show 22 times. And the Beyhive weren’t buzzing over the hundreds of dollars a pop for the Cowboy Carter tour—especially when ticket prices finally slightly dropped closer to the start of the tour.

Is there a solution to this? Aside from asking people to take a discography quiz (which is a level of gatekeeping even I can’t stand for), the only answer I can think of is one greedy resellers would never go for: Release a large swath of highly sought-after tickets to marginalized communities first. POC folks, the gays, the theys, the lower-income baddies, the people who listen to these artists’ music to invigorate their lives, to enrich their souls—not the Top 40 fans looking to add another feather to the cap.

I’m not sure how that would work, logistics-wise, but I’m not a coder, I’m a Little Monster. And more of us should have been there Friday night. Mayhem Ball could be Gaga’s best tour of all time, and it’s a bummer that some of her biggest fans had to watch it from impossible-to-see angles, or not at all.

The Mayhem Ball is back at MSG tonight, then heads to Miami for August 31, September 1, and September 3, before returning to MSG for September 6 and 7. After that, there are a few more North American show nights before she jets overseas. I wish every attendee a good view of the screen and a section full of Little Monsters.

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