Guests We'd Like To See At Lady Gaga's Superbowl Halftime Show

Truth be told, we don't envy Lady Gaga right now.

Sure, she's been newly confirmed as the halftime entertainment for the 2017 Super Bowl in February, making the announcement in a tweet this morning (AEST) by dropping the same pun she's probably pulled out literally every time she's been named for a big event: "This year the SUPER BOWL goes GAGA!", and that's a very enviable thing to have happen to oneself.

But it's not like the Super Bowl hasn't sort of gone Gaga before, honestly — the singer performed at this year's Super Bowl 50 event, when the halftime performance came from the human vanilla factories in Coldplay along with guest musicians Bruno Mars and Beyonce.

And that last name is why we don't envy Lady Gaga in this specific instance (it is hard not to envy her in a much broader sense; she is a talented performer and even won a Golden Globe for her work on American Horror Story: Hotel, so, like, we don't mean this in a petty way). It's pretty uniformly accepted that Queen Bey pretty clearly walked away from that event the winner of the day, so ol' Boss Monster (is that… is that a thing that she is called?) will need to jazz things up a bit to follow in those footsteps, you know? Bring an extra notch of pizzazz. The ol' razzle-dazzle. Give 'em that, eh? The razzle...pizzazle.

Anyway, these people might help.

kevin parker

To be fair, we didn't say these choices wouldn't be obvious.

A very recent collaborator of Gaga's by way of co-producing her new single Perfect Illusion, he'd be a natural selection to provide a bit of casual-cool charisma, decked out as he so frequently is in one of his many scarves and looking just a bit sad about this whole "being a rock star" thing while Gaga, I don't know, torches an effigy of Andy Warhol. The press will call it "riveting but a bit wanky". It will be streamed a billion times on YouTube.

tony bennett

Bennett's voice just works beautifully with Gaga's. They bring out the best in each other, as was first demonstrated during their joint performance on Bennett's 2011 album Duets II: The Great Performances, and solidified on 2014's full-length collab LP Cheek To Cheek. Although the legendary vocalist turned 90 this year, he's still regularly performing, so presuming 2016 keeps its hands off him, there's no reason he wouldn't be a sprightly, and unusual, addition to the Super Bowl mix. (And not unprecedented — he performed at Super Bowl XXIX in 1995.)

florence welch

The celebrated frontwoman of Florence + The Machine recorded a duet with Gaga for the latter's eagerly awaited fifth album titled Hey Girl, probably something of a bit of a coup for the British musician, who gushed about Gaga to the New York Post in a video interview back in 2010.

Though the collab between the two performers has not yet been released it's safe to say — as you'll know if you've witnessed Florence's powerful live shows at any of the several festivals and shows she's played around the country — that they'll prove nothing short of a dream team, and that would only be magnified further in the live arena.

jessica lange

Poise. Elegance. Power. Like some sort of all-powerful proto-Gaga, Jessica Lange crushed a bunch of musical performances on American Horror Story during its Freak Show season, proving all kinds of magnetic in videos for covers of songs including Lana Del Rey's Gods & Monsters and David Bowie's Life On Mars?. So hell yeah, get her in here. Make it an American Horror Story party. Shit, you could bring in everyone that took part in the bizarre musical number from American Horror Story: Asylum (of which, yes, Lange was one) if you really wanted to, but surely nobody really wants to relive that. 

beyonce

Well… yeah. Don't fix what isn't broken.