Lady Gaga paid Jimmy Kimmel Live a visit Wednesday night to confirm that she and Bradley Cooper are not in love, despite the horny energy of their Oscars performance Sunday night. “First of all, quite frankly, social media is the toilet of the internet. What it has done to pop culture is abysmal. Yes, people saw love and and guess what? That’s what we wanted you to see,” she told Kimmel. “This is a love song, ‘Shallow.’ The movie, A Star Is Born, it’s a love story. We worked so hard. We worked all week on that performance.”
She explained that Cooper directed the romantic set:
“Bradley, who—you know, I, like, never relinquish control about a live stage performance, I’ve done about a million of them—but, you know, he directed this film and he directed, obviously, the musical moments in the film, and he directed, obviously, “Shallow,” the moment in the film, so I knew that he had the vision of how it should go. So I was like, ‘What do you think, Bradley?’ And he laid it all out and everything that you saw—the way that it was shot, the way that they pushed the piano out, you saw them put the piano together and us walk up on stage, no intro—all of that was all him. He was also the one who said, ‘I think the audience should be lit, so that we’re not just lit, the audience is lit…
And reiterated that love song performances are just supposed to look like that, okay?:
It was just great, and from a performance perspective, it was just so important to both of us that we were connected the entire time. Look, I’ve had my arms wrapped around Tony Bennett for three years touring the world. When you’re singing love songs, that’s what you want people to feel. I’m an artist and I guess I did a good job… fooled ya!”
I applaud their ability to get so much mileage out of a television performance that aired almost a week ago, but is it possible that this song with never die? Perhaps you’re never really out of the shallow?