Gaga Drama with Bad Romance

  For this critique, I will be looking at a song that is well known and played at almost all parties around the States as well as Internationally. The song was sung and written by the prominent Lady Gaga. In particular, we will be reviewing the cover photo for the song, Bad Romance. As of February 2018, the song has managed to sell over 5.8 million digital copies nationally and over 12 million copies worldwide making it one of the best singles of all time.

  Because of how well known the song is, people not only listen to it but have even come to memorize every beat, lyric and even dance move. However, this is done out of pure ignorance of what the song is trying to portray. We will begin by assessing the image itself. In this photo, we see a portrait of Gaga with the title of the song and her name printed below. In addition to this, it is very hard to ignore how the first thing that the eye notices is how Red the image is. The colour in this image acts as a semiotic – something that represents anything else but itself (as stated by Danesi, M.) and was not something that the producer thought would go well with her skin tone; instead, it is already giving the audience an idea of the song without seeing the video.

  First off, as the title of the song suggests, the colour red is meant to represent this idea of romance and this is because it has become a world-wide fact that the colour red represents red hearts, red flowers and red clothing as a romantic (loving) gesture. To back this up, the red dress that she is wearing ruffles up towards the bottom making it look like a bunch of rose petals which also represent romance. Moreover, the dress shows us a scandalous side of the artist in the sense that the top part of the dress is mostly lace thus exposing her upper body but not exposing too much, again giving the audience a feeling of mystery and affair.

  In terms of the overall design of the cover photo, I think it does a good job of sending a message to its fellow viewers about what the song is about. However, I believe they could have done a much better job on the Title and Artist name. I say this mainly because almost 95% of the photo is red and so making the font colour red does more harm than good. Mainly because the colour of the text then blends in with the background making it hard to make out what it says at first. Furthermore, the ruffles of the dress play a major role in blending in with the letters making them nearly impossible to see. The text is also all centred but I think in this case it works because the head tilt to the far left and hand the right compensates for this giving the poster a good eye flow.

  In conclusion, the general design of this cover photo works well and represents the song very well. One thing that it is missing is a CTA (Call To Action) that would encourage people to look up the song and listen to it. However, for someone as well-known as Lady Gaga a CTA is the least of her concerns because either way people will still buy and download the song. Apart from that, I believe this cover photo paints a great image of the music video in correlation with the lyrics.