Few music videos drop with as much fanfare as Lady Gaga's, and her latest, "Alejandro," is no exception. The 9-minute spectacle crashed the pop star's website yesterday, and, some theorize, played a major part in the massive Twitter outage that left the blogosphere temporarily paralyzed earlier today. Critics have made zealous efforts to fathom the meaning behind "Alejandro" — a bizarre, S&M fueled mashup — without reaching much consensus: (Watch video below)
It's a gorgeous tribute to pre-Nazi Germany: "Alejandro" is "influenced by the smoky, darkly decadent art and fashion of 1920s Weimar Germany," says James Montgomery at MTV. The "carefully crafted close-ups, languorously smoked cigarettes and oppressively cut costumes" are all reminiscent of the "artistically fertile but politically and economically difficult era" preceding Hitler's rise to power. The "artful level of moroseness" creates "a world that, while oppressive, also looks great."
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