In the 1950s, great American folk songwriter Woody Guthrie set his sights on Fred Trump: at the time, he was the landlord of Guthrie's Brooklyn apartment building, a venue the musician found to be unwelcoming to potential tenants of color.

"Beach Haven looks like heaven/Where no black ones come to roam!," Guthrie wrote, among other barbed lines.

Mr. Trump's son Donald is now a new president, struggling to ban people from seven Muslim-majority nations out of the apartment complex we call the United States; on Sunday night, with some 100 million sets of eyes upon her, Lady Gaga turned toward another Woody Guthrie song to open a Super Bowl performance full of pride and solidarity in a moment heavy with protest and patriotic questioning.

Gaga, the pop star born Stefani Germanotta, has always married her music to a cause. She's been a staunch ally of the LGBT community and one of its musical favorites since "Just Dance" and its neon Eurodance beat blasted into pop culture in 2008. Her Born This Way Foundation has fought for tolerance and empowerment; she has spoken out for body positivity, against campus sexual assault, and was moved to tears last summer at a vigil for the 49 victims murdered in Orlando, Florida at the gay club Pulse.

"We represent the compassion and the loyalty of millions of people around the world that believe in you," she said then. "You are not alone, you are not alone."

[Watch Lady Gaga's Super Bowl performance on YouTube]

Her Super Bowl moment was awaited some degree of political anxiety: would she stand up, and make a statement about the state of national politics? Or turn to crowd-pleasing safeness for her career-peak moment?

She didn't have to choose. On Sunday, Gaga didn't have to pull a Meryl Streep and explain what it takes to make America great: she showed us.

Like Michael Jackson did in 1993, Gaga began her performance atop the arena, Houston's NRG Stadium: Jackson used a pair of doubles before emerging onto his stage, but Gaga dived down to the field on wires after singing "God Bless America" and Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," a socialist protest song with lost verses attacking private property and the plight of the poor.

Gaga skipped Guthrie's 1940 verse about the "big high wall": as an American flag formed in lights behind her, she shouted "Liberty and justice for all!" and zipped down to the stage, singing a line of her own "The Edge of Glory" and turning quickly to "Poker Face" and "Born This Way." Flanked by dancers in purple vests, her own sequins as bright as spotlights, Gaga delivered: choreography, spectacle, vocals, and a message against discrimination. "I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way."

As the writer Sam Lanky put it: "If nothing else it's hard not to be impressed with how unabashedly gay this whole performance is."

She followed with "Telephone," tossing a prop phone into the crowd as she picked up a star-topped staff that would've pleased Gandalf. Gaga played the whole show, by the way, in sparkling heels--continuing Prince's Super Bowl tradition of leaving flats to the amateurs. "Just Dance" brought a golden, spike-shouldered jacket and a keytar; recent single "Million Reasons" was another opportunity to highlight her vocal chops.

The set ended, in the best possible way, with "Bad Romance": pyro exploded behind her, dancers took on white football helmets, and Gaga jumped out of the camera frame while catching a football.

At a time when artists are often told to shut up and sing, Gaga did--and on one of the world's biggest stages, proved how inclusive and exuberant that can be.

Set list:

"God Bless America"
"This Land is Your Land"
"The Edge of Glory"
"Poker Face"
"Born This Way"
"Telephone"
"Just Dance"
"Million Reasons"
"Bad Romance"

-- David Greenwald
dgreenwald@oregonian.com
503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald
Instagram: Oregonianmusic

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