Teeth: Lady Gaga’s Bite, Rough Sex, and The Fame Monster

“Teeth” sits on The Fame Monster (2009), Lady Gaga’s second major commercial release and her third EP. Gaga and Teddy Riley produced it. For adult listeners who already live around BDSM and fetish, the track is the one people keep calling a perverse march: oral, gospel-tinged, and aimed at rough sex, biting, and a sadomasochistic charge. The chant “show me your teeth” works as a sexual demand and as an order to tell the truth.

The bite has two jobs. In an MTV interview Gaga split them herself. On the surface the song is juvenile and sexual, easy to read as oral sex. Under that, the monster is fear of the truth, and “show me your teeth” means “tell me the truth.” She said that for a long time she had replaced sex with the truth. That split is why the song keeps landing on kink-adjacent playlists: dominance, vulnerability, and the erotic charge of being made to open your mouth. Popjustice heard a wobbly, stompy, bouncy march that opens on “don’t want no money, just want your sex” and then hammers “show me your teeth!” Music Times pointed at the skanky horns as Teddy Riley’s audible fingerprint. MusicOMH noticed another voice in the background intoning strange lines that may or may not be about dentistry.

Critics split. Sal Cinquemani in Slant Magazine wrote that “Teeth” sounds like something from Michael Jackson’s last studio album sung by Christina Aguilera, and that the closest she gets to another person “involves being tied up and bitten.” That line still reads as kink-pop subtext. Nick Levine at Digital Spy called it the most sonically intriguing thing Gaga had put her name on: an ode to rough sex over an intense, tribal production that recalls Cher’s “Half Breed” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.” Nick Hyman at Under the Radar ranked it the worst track on the album. Tony Hardy at Consequence of Sound called it a repetitive chant that makes its point in the first verse and then keeps going. In 2017 Billboard placed “Teeth” at number six on its list of the 100 greatest deep cuts in twenty-first-century pop, and argued that what makes the song remarkable is not the implied carnality but the aggression seething under the surface.

Live, it was a set piece. Gaga sang it through The Monster Ball Tour (2009–2011). The Riverfront Times called the January 2010 St. Louis show fantastic: a fierce Broadway strut, vamps, vigor, choreography that recalled Chicago. Days later at Radio City Music Hall she did an angry version, hunched in an animal crouch, a predatory pack of dancers around her, wolf imagery behind, grabbing her crotch and snarling the words. Dan Aquilante in the New York Post said those gestures did not seem especially out of place. At Lollapalooza in August 2010 she sang a concert version with guitar solos between repetitions of “Show me your teeth!” Bradley Stern at MuuMuse described a stomping, hoot-and-holler chant that asks a crowd to sink their teeth into the music.

The single peaked at number 107 on the UK Singles Chart. In 2011 the Discovery Channel used “Teeth” to promote Shark Week, bite lined up with the brand almost too neatly. Target sold a “singing” toothbrush that played excerpts of “Born This Way” and “Teeth,” folding the oral-sex and dentistry double meaning into a retail object. In 2017 she brought the song back at Coachella.

In 2013 Teddy Riley sued Gaga for US$500,000 plus punitive damages over songwriting credit. He said he had not been given the 25 percent of royalties he had been promised. He also alleged that his daughter Taja had committed fraud and copyright abuse by landing an EMI deal off the song, tried to sue her as well, and called her claims of participation, authorship, and ownership on “Teeth” false. The Fame Monster liner notes credit Gaga with vocals, songwriting, production, and background vocals; Pete Wyoming Bender, Teddy Riley, and Taja Riley as songwriters; Dave Russell with recording at Record Plant in Los Angeles; and Mike Daley as recording assistant. Music Times noted that “Teeth” was Riley’s only contribution to the EP and called the track the smallest thing on it. None of that removes what listeners already hear in it: bite play, a rough-sex ode, and mental bondage built out of being told to tell the truth.