Lady Gaga’s Ice Bucket Challenge Is the Worst Ice Bucket Challenge

If you have any social media presence whatsoever, then you have come across the Ice Bucket Challenge in the past couple weeks. It's a campaign to raise awareness and money for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, a.k.a Lou Gehrig's Disease), and it involves getting doused with a bucket of ice water and donating to the ALS Assocation, then challenging your friends to do the same, all in a quick video posted on Facebook or Instagram.

The trend has gone viral, with celebrities like Justin Timberlake taking part, and it's been exciting to see how social media has been harnessed for such a great cause. So, golf claps all around for that. But the ice bucket craze is also super fucking irksome, because it's clogging your feeds not so much with the valiant acts of do-gooders, but with basics from your hometown putting on their most stylish side boob-exposing tank tops to get a bunch of likes and RTs under the guise of charity. Do all these people know what ALS is? Do they even know why they're fighting that disease as opposed to other worthy diseases? This whole thing is just SO focused on the givers (but thankfully, not The Giver), so it has the feeling of that South Park hybrid car episode.

It's the little people, who hunt for clicks and show off how many people they can @ in an Instagram post, that make this challenge so off-putting. WE GET IT. You hashtag care, and you have friends. Thus, I assumed it would be one of my lame forgotten friends from high school who put me over the edge on the ice bucket trend, but it wasn't. It was Lady Gaga. Her video for the Ice Bucket Challenge is just THE WORST. And I say this as a Lady Gaga fan (we still exist!). Just look at this thing.

The theater-kid, faux-graceful movements, the fact that the water barely hits her, the stench of performance art bringing this already smug trend to another stratosphere of ego masturbation. It's the worst, and I hate it, and it makes Drake's douchey shirt-removal ice bucket stunt seem charming.

But, ya know, props to Lady Gaga, Drake, Weird Al, and the rest for contributing to a good cause, and hopefully Adele will respond to Gaga's challenge with her own (obviously lovely) video.