🌈 I'm Hooked on a Feeling; I'm High on Believing that You're in Love with Me 🌟

Walk, Walk — 

Lady Gaga and Doechii's Runway is the summer anthem you'll either love without question or spend the rest of the season interrogating. Possibly both.

There is a moment in the music video for Runway — the new Lady Gaga and Doechii collaboration from The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack — where the whole thing tips just slightly past spectacle and into something harder to name. The runway is impossibly long. The looks are architecturally absurd. The strut is impeccable. And you cannot quite tell whether these two women are celebrating fashion's theater or quietly eating it alive.

On pure sound, the song delivers everything you want from a summer Billboard entry. The track is booming with in-your-face bass and filled with the exact type of rizz anyone about to hit a runway would want to hear. It opens with the spoken command, "No matter what, you better strut," which is simultaneously an instruction, a dare, and a kind of absurdist pep talk. The house-pop groove underneath it is engineered for movement — the kind of song that rearranges the air in a room the moment it starts playing.

Then there's the video. Director Parris Goebel sends Gaga and Doechii through a parade of looks so daring they loop back around to surreal — Marie Antoinette-esque ball gowns, matching platinum wigs, and at one point, both artists sharing a single crimson jacket constructed for two people. If you squint at that last image long enough it starts to feel less like a fashion statement and more like commentary — two stars literally fused, performing a single role, split down the middle. Which raises the question your brain won't stop asking: Who exactly is being showcased?

There's a Tom Petty Don't Come Around Here No More quality to the visual world here — that same Wonderland-gone-wrong atmosphere where grandeur tips into mockery and the gorgeous and the grotesque hold hands. Are Gaga and Doechii the queens of this world, or its most glamorous prisoners? The song cheers you on. The video shows you how to try.

For long-time Gaga fans, there's a familiar and slightly thornier pleasure in all of this. She has always been an artist who builds elaborate mythologies around herself — sometimes at the expense of the audience, sometimes in service of it, and sometimes both in the same breath. The outro has Gaga singing, "You were born for the runway," which could be an anthem for every listener who has ever felt made for something larger than their circumstances. Or it could be a gentle joke at the expense of everyone who walks around believing that about themselves without much evidence. Both readings are available. Neither one cancels the other.

The collaboration itself is genuine. Doechii presented Gaga with the Innovator Award at the iHeartRadio Music Awards, calling Gaga a lifeline and reflecting on her impact on young queer fans. And Gaga returned the admiration, saying of Doechii: "You don't often see someone come out of the gate with a pen that feels immediately legendary." That mutual regard shows up in the song — neither artist is decorating the other's project. They're genuinely in it together, which makes the ambiguity of the video feel collaborative rather than accidental.

So is Runway a self-portrait or a roast? An invitation or a dare? Maybe the most honest answer is that it's built to be heard two hundred times before you decide, and the song is good enough that you won't mind the homework. That, too, is very Gaga. She has always been most herself when she's making you wonder.