Lady Gaga sung the real lyrics to her hit song ‘Poker Face’ during a performance at her recent Las Vegas residency and people are still stunned to hear how explicit the track actually is.
The year 2008 was a game changing year in the history of modern pop music, thanks to the release of Lady Gaga‘s debut album The Fame (later reissued the following year as The Fame Monster). Packed with hit singles such as ‘Just Dance’, ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Paparazzi’, the album would blast Gaga’s career into the stratosphere and see her earn multiple awards and a spot on Rolling Stone’s ‘100 Greatest Debut Albums of All-Time’.
But have you ever taken a moment to actually listen to some of the lyrics?
Advert
‘Can’t read my, can’t read my No, he can’t read my poker face’ (YouTube/Lady Gaga)
16-years-on from the release of ‘Poker Face’ and both hardcore fans and casual listeners alike are beginning to cotton on to the fact that the chorus of the track doesn’t go exactly as you think.
When belting the track out over the years, most of us have probably sang the chorus lines as follows: ‘Po-po-po-poker face, po-po-po-poker face (Mum-mum-mum-mah)’.
Well, it turns out we’ve all been singing it very wrong over the years.
Advert
The actual lyrics go: ‘Po-po-po-poker face, fu-fu-f*** her face (Mum-mum-mum-mah), Po-po-po-poker face, fu-fu-f*** her face (Mum-mum-mum-mah).’
Which certainly gives the song a whole new meaning.
Despite addressing the NSFW chorus all the way back in 2009 at iHeartRadio Wango Tango, where she revealed that US radio station KIIS FM were the only station to censor the track accurately, there has always been a certain ambiguity as it isn’t explicitly clear that she’s saying ‘fu-fu-f*** her face’ or ‘po-po-po-poker face’.
You know, plausible deniability and all.
Advert
Gaga explained the track’s bisexual lyrics during her Las Vegas residency (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Park MGM Las Vegas)
However, the uncertainty was well and truly cleared up for good during a performance at Gaga’s Las Vegas Jazz and Piano residency in 2023 where the singer very clearly sang ‘Po-po-po-poker face, fu-fu-f*** her face’, while performing a stripped back version on piano. Which, of course, received roaring applause from the crowd.
This wasn’t the only revelation Gaga made about the track either, with 38-year-old also explaining that ‘Poker Face’ is actually an ode to bisexuality and sleeping with men while secretly fantasising about women.
“Bet you didn’t know that this song was about sleeping with men and thinking about women the whole time,” she said.
Advert
Which certainly gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘Poker Face’.
This isn’t the first time Gaga has spoken about the song’s bisexual meaning either, as she previously told Jonathan Ross during a 2009 interview that she she wrote the song as she would often ‘think about women’ while ‘having sex with her boyfriend’.
