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Artist News
Gaga’s Do What You Want video canned over R Kelly/Terry Richardson sex controversy
By Aly Barchi | Published on Monday 23 June 2014
Lady Gaga was advised (probably read: ordered) to bin a video made to accompany her 2013 ‘ARTPOP’ single ‘Do What U Want’, it emerged last week. The fact that the pop promo contained lines implying sexual abuse, and featured R&B star R Kelly with direction from Terry Richardson, who have both been accused of (denied) illegal and inappropriate sexual acts, was deemed distinctly ‘not okay’ by Gaga’s reps. I can’t imagine why.
The promo’s narrative, if it can be called that, casts Gaga as a hospital patient and R Kelly as a doctor, but wait, that’s only the half of it. TMZ has obtained a bit of the clip if you want to look. In the first scene, Gaga is heard to ask Kelly: “Will I ever be able to walk again?”, to which he replies: “Yes, if you let me do whatever I want with your body”, informatively adding: “I’m putting you under, and when you wake up, you’re going to be pregnant”. All of which practically makes Robin Thicke’s “I know you want it” look like a picnic in the park by comparison. A nice consensual sex picnic in the park of fundamental human rights.
The ‘Do What You Want’ clip was originally shot last year but its release was “delayed”, claimed Gaga at the time, for creative reasons, namely that her management hadn’t given her time to refine it as befits an artist of her standing. The New York Post now reports that the video has been shelved for good in light of ongoing accusations of sexual misconduct against R Kelly and Richardson, which they both deny.
As previously reported, the controversies surrounding Kelly were reignited last year when a US journalist who has long documented claims against the singer, Jim DeRogatis, wrote a new article and published a ‘timeline’ linking the star to numerous alleged incidences of sexual abuse of underage girls. Giving an in-depth interview to Village Voice writer Jessica Hooper, DeRogatis cited conversations he’d had with “dozens” of girls and women, dating back to the 1990s, and “hundreds of pages of lawsuits”, none of which had ever reached the courts (of course when similar allegations against Kelly did reach court, he was found not-guilty).
Photographer Richardson, too, has faced multiple sexual misconduct accusations from models, all of which he denies in this recent piece in the NY Post’s Page Six section.
The Post quotes a source as saying: “Gaga had a video directed by an alleged sexual predator, starring another. With the theme, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want with your body’, it was literally an ad for rape”.
