Forward Thinking: Truly offal fashion

We are - mostly - a nation of meat lovers. I love a good steak, especially with some chunky fries and a wholesome green salad on the side. So, all hail Lady Gaga. I'm gonna get me a meat suit too. Or maybe, just for comfort and longevity's sake, I might get Weta Workshops to whip me one up. Then again, what if I get hungry?

One thing's for sure, next time she's in New Zealand let's invite her over for a barbecue.

In fact, that's likely to be the motivation behind Lady Gaga's costume; her stylist told her to "Dress like a Barbie" after her Little Kiwi Monsters made such an impression on her following the shows here in March. That'll be it. So once again, give it up for Lady Gaga for dressing as something we would love to take a pair of tongs to.

From a distance, the meat dress she wore to the MTV Music Video Awards this week looked like her most tame outfit of the night - with her first frock a flamboyant Alexander McQueen get-up and the second so heavy she had to be hauled out of her seat by two burly blokes.

But if you looked a little closer at the meaty treat, then she clearly was a walking talking steak tartare, accessorised with meat boots (like the mangled limbs of an Orc), a meat hat (that looked like a flap of blade steak plonked on her head), and a meat purse (that Gaga kindly asked Cher, who presented her with the award for Video of the Year, to hold).

"I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," she said in that Nasally drone of hers.

While Gaga doesn't really have to defend her actions - since she's the reigning queen of pop - she justified her decision to wear the dress by declaring after, "Well, it is certainly no disrespect to anyone that is vegan or vegetarian, because as you know, I am the most judgment-free human being on the Earth."

Gaga is mad, bad, and prone to taking things to the extreme, be it bras or beef. Put it this way: she's not really the sort of girl I'd want my daughter hanging out with behind the bike sheds. And she out-frocked and shocked all comers at the awards.

But meat and controversy in music is nothing new. The Beatles donned white butchers's smocks and had bits of meat, decapitated dolls and their body parts draped all over them on the original cover of 1966 album Yesterday and Today. And what would Morrissey, who's never short of a tirade and called The Smiths' 1985 album Meat Is Murder, have made of Gaga's meaty expose?

Then there's the cover of Reek of Putrefaction, a heinous and gruesome bit of offal art by British death metal band Carcass, that makes Gaga's frock look like prime eye fillet.

With New Zealand's meat-loving pedigree, it's no surprise our local music is steeped in meaty goodness. Many Patea Maori Club members worked at the freezing works before they closed; the Skeptics revealed the brutal goings on in the freezing works with 1987 song Affco and its graphic video (banned for many years); and Chris Knox did a compilation album simply entitled Meat (with the excellent Face of Fashion on it).

So while she's here for that barbie, maybe Nick Roughan of the Skeptics could do a remix of Bad Romance for her.

Or maybe the Poi E remix would work better? And then we can put down a hangi for her.

- TimeOut