Bisexual Awareness Week might not begin until Saturday, but Lady Gaga rang it in early by reminding everyone that there’s a hidden meaning behind one of her breakout hits.
The singer is currently playing the Dolby Live theater at Park MGM in Las Vegas for her Jazz and Piano residency, performing jazz standards alongside acoustic versions of her own songs. Midway through “Poker Face” during a September 6 performance, the singer said, “Bet you didn’t know that this song was about sleeping with men and thinking about women the whole time,” much to the screaming delight of her audience.
“Now that’s a good poker face,” Gaga wryly added.
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She continued her vaudeville rendition of the 2008 hit, clad in a flapper-inspired dress and feather headpiece. Later in the performance, she punctuated the chorus with a mocking, “Oh yeah, baby, right there,” and “Mmhmm, yeah, it’s so good.” She also switched up the pronouns in the song, singing “He’s got me like nobody,” then “She’s got me like nobody.”
That wasn’t the only fun lyrical switch Gaga made, however. During the post-chorus hook, during which she usually sings “p-p-p-poker face,” she said “fuck her face” and “I’m fucking her face” instead.
“It’s not my fault if you brought your kids to my show,” she joked. “When you bought the tickets and you saw ‘Lady Gaga in Las Vegas’ and you thought, ‘I should bring my children,’ that’s not my fault.”
A few years ago, “Poker Face” experienced a resurgence when TikTokers realized that in the studio version of the song Gaga actually sounds like she’s singing “fuck her face” between chants of “poker face.” This interpretation of the chorus is, in fact, as old as the song itself. “I suppose it is whatever you hear that it is,” she said of the lyrics in a 2009 radio interview, adding that she was “quite pleased” that “none of the other stations anywhere else in the world ever edited the record.”
As for the meaning of the song overall, Gaga has been open about that since the beginning of her career. As early as a Palm Springs performance in 2009, she explained that it was an ode to fantasizing about women. Calling on all pop stars to sneak a low-key raunchy bisexual anthem to the top of the charts again, please!
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