Lady Gaga: David Bowie Tribute Causes Controversy After Bowie ‘Blackface’ Photos Reappear On Twitter

Lady Gaga is scheduled to pay tribute to David Bowie tonight at the Grammy Awards. It is going to be an eight-minute tribute covering eight songs. Pictures of Lady Gaga getting a David Bowie tattoo have appeared all over Twitter.

Lady Gaga pays homage to David Bowie by tattooing him onto her body https://t.co/cRRwnQ1g9w

— Mashable (@mashable) February 14, 2016

However, there is another picture of Lady Gaga with David Bowie makeup that will make some people cringe. It has appeared all over Twitter for the past week leading up to her performance.

In the picture, she is seen wearing David Bowie’s eye makeup while holding two men, with their faces painted Black, in chains. This picture has made its rounds over the Internet over the past couple of years, and The Inquisitr talked about it last fall. The photo is legit, though the context of the photo isn’t clear.

Seventy-three people have signed a petition on Change.org calling for a boycott for CBS and Intel. The mission statement of the petition is pretty harsh.

“In 2011, Lady Gaga held a completely tasteless gay slave auction in Berlin…She took pictures with the ‘slaves’ and talked in a Southern accent the whole night. She had the photographer of the event fired.”

The validity of that statement is certainly debatable and the petition could just be one made by a huge Gaga hater hoping to bring her down. Still, many people have a right to be offended by the content and although it wouldn’t be right to burn Lady Gaga at the stake yet, many just want her to make a statement to at least explain the photo. The people who signed the petition aren’t having it.

“This blatent display of ignorance disgusts me,” says Carol Greenberg of Skokie, IL.

“This woman is a sick human but she is brainwashing her fans to be racist,” claims Arial DeJesuz of Lansing, MI.

It’s important to note that the pictures were taken in 2010, not 2011 as the petition claims. This was before Lady Gaga started her Born This Way Foundation, which aims to make the world a kinder place. Fans say that Lady Gaga can’t be racist, especially since she sang such songs as “Born This Way,” and “Americano.”

Speaking of Lady Gaga’s Bowie Tribute, many fans say that she is absolutely the right one to do the tribute. However, there are some who also think Lady Gaga is exploiting David Bowie’s legacy for her own purposes. After an article about the topic from the Daily Mail, many comments weren’t very supportive.

“Are we supposed to applaud this? Any excuse to be more tacky!” claims commenter “alegria.”

“Wanderlust, Exactly, so why is she only now getting a tattoo of him? Bandwagon jumping etc….” says Eden-C of Dublin Ireland.

“Not a huge fan of Gaga, but she has always been a huge Bowie fan and has cited him as a huge influence on her music for years,” Wanderlust92 of London believes.

Lady Gaga certainly loves the attention and doesn’t care if it is good or bad — that’s what fuels her career. No matter how many people are insulting her, they are the same ones who will be watching Lady Gaga’s performance at the Grammys Monday evening.

[Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]