Lady Gaga released the music video for her new single “911” on Friday, September 18, and it's classic Gaga: bizarre, abstract, filled with head-turning fashion and makeup looks, and a surprise twist you won't see coming.
The clip starts with Gaga lying down in a desert, seemingly alone. Her face is covered with some type of red cloth, and a broken bicycle is next to her. She's then led by a man on a horse to a village, where she weaves around a group of elaborately dressed people. One man is repeatedly banging his head against a pillow. Not much of it makes sense.
But then we get to the twist. I don't want to give it away for you, so go ahead and watch, below:
At the climax of the video, we see that all of this was a dream of sorts. Gaga is resuscitated by a medic, and she finds herself back in the real world, bleeding on the ground. She was in a car accident outside an Armenian film festival, and all the characters in that "dream" played a part in said accident.
“I didn't have pain pills,” Gaga says to the medics, crying uncontrollably. “I don't want to die.”
Both of those quotes carry weight in the context of “911,” a track about Gaga's relationship with antipsychotic medication.
“[The song] is about an antipsychotic that I take,” she told Apple Music in a May interview. “And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs.”
As for Gaga's quote about not wanting to die, she opened up in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning about previously having suicidal thoughts.
“Did you think about suicide?” journalist Lee Cowan asks her in the interview, which airs in full this Sunday (September 20) at 9 a.m. E.T. on CBS. She responds, “Oh yeah, every day."
