Chicago crowd should go gaga over Gaga

Lady Gaga brings her “Monster Ball” tour to Chicago's sold-out United Center Monday night. Her appearance at Lollapalooza last summer in Grant Park might have been more festive, but there's no doubt this will be more the full Lady Gaga experience.

Lady Gaga has really taken on the mantle of Madonna in doing a big, oversized, theatrical show full of sets and costumes meant to fill up a cavernous space like the United Center. While her music might be tailored to dance clubs, Lady Gaga's persona seems suited to provide just that sort of oversized concert in performance.

From the audacious chorus of her early hit “Poker Face” on through the overt message of her new single, “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga has seemed determined to outdo Madonna in challenging and, sometimes, offending the audience. And if the Madonna blueprint sometimes shows through in songs like “Born This Way” and “Alejandro,” she nevertheless brings a dance groove all her own, full of a percussive array of chirps and beeps worthy of a Michael Jackson production, a devotion to the bass drum familiar to any house-music high-stepper and a “whomp” to rival the P-Funk All-Stars.

Most certainly, it's derivative, raising the issue of whether her fans consciously celebrate the phony in making her a star. Yet she also projects a love-hate relationship with love, fame and just above everything, for that matter, that seems entirely contemporary, at once cynical and vulnerable.

And with the song “Monster in My Bed” and the “Monster Ball” tour itself, she also displays a feel for the “Twilight” zeitgeist worthy of, yes, a Madonna. (See the similarities there with Kanye West's “Monster,” or better yet its YouTube fan tribute appropriating the Muppets.)

Will the texture of her music connect with her fans, or will she fall back on spectacle Monday to awe and amaze? It doesn't have to be one or the other.

Scissor Sisters open, with their dance hit “Running Out,” so the sold-out crowd should be grooving by the time the headliner hits the stage. We'll just have to see where she takes it from there.