For someone who likes to stir the pot with Madonna, even going so far as to drum up viewings by including a cliffhanger snippet in the trailer for Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two explaining that “The only thing that really bothers me about [Madonna] is that…,” Lady Gaga sure does relish directly ripping her off. And while some may argue, “But how can you not rip Madonna off? She came first, she blazed the trail” blah blah blah, there are plenty of amalgam originals who have come in her wake (see: Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey). Lady G, on the other hand, seems to relish direct pluckings of Madonna’s oeuvre, which reached one of its zeniths with 2011’s “Born This Way.” Addressing its very overt musical similarities to “Express Yourself” in an interview with Cynthia McFadden in January of 2012, Madonna made the now illustrious dig that the song was “reductive,” followed by the equally snarky (and badass) suggestion, “Look it up.” So yes, even in her insulting of Gaga, Madonna was the innovator. In contrast to Gaga, Madonna’s genius in smearing Ms. Germanotta has always lain in its subtlety, the most over the top she went being the employment of a mashup of “Express Yourself” and “Born This Way” included as a segment in her MDNA Tour.
Since the incident, the feud has perhaps been overly blown out of proportion by the media, as it’s always in their best interest for sales purposes to create the illusion of tension and competitiveness among females. And yet, Gaga hasn’t exactly done anything to negate the perception of discord after an interview with People Greece (which seemed to be the only publication willing to give a shit about what she said at that low point after Artpop was released and she had to start doing duets with Tony Bennett). In it she shrugged in assent when the interviewer summed up her opinion of Madonna as: she “has no soul.”
Even so, Gaga has modeled her latest project after the soulless one herself. Except instead of the grandiosity of premiering it at Cannes and getting distribution from the Weinstein brothers, Gaga is simply putting it out on Netflix like the trashayshay she is. While Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two might not be filmed in black and white with interspersed color performances, it undeniably follows the formula that Truth or Dare perfected based on godfather rockumentaries like Don’t Look Back and Gimme Shelter. And yes, of course, it will address Gaga’s go-to topics of emotional pain (and apparently physical, too), ostracism and likely a smattering of gay men thrown in to prove she still cares about them. In short, it will have nothing of the bombast and audacity of the masterpiece that is Truth or Dare.
So the below will probably be Madonna’s reaction to the doc should she actually choose to sit through it:
