The Cut’s recap of the video marveled that Bey “actually shows the angry, crazy side that we knew lurked beneath her too-perfect facade”; while Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield noted, “Beyoncé, the most egregiously non-crazy pop star of our time, gets to pretend she’s as nuts as Gaga for a few minutes.” Somewhere in the future, “Lemonade” beckoned.

“Telephone” is not Lady Gaga’s most iconic music video — that would be “Bad Romance” — but in retrospect it may be the one that best represented a turning point in the form. In a recent interview with Variety, the video’s director Jonas Akerlund recalled Gaga telling him she had become, “right on the edge of getting bored with making music videos.” MTV “didn’t like her,” she claimed, and was always censoring or editing her most ambitious ideas.

“Telephone” would not be for them, by design. “Gaga was, like, the first artist that came to me and said, ‘[Expletive] MTV, we can do this, we don’t need them,’” Akerlund said. “We can do this all online, on YouTube.’”

Released seven months before Kanye West’s similarly epic, MTV-agnostic short film for “Runaway,” “Telephone” was somewhere between an old-fashioned pop event and a digital-era phenomenon. It premiered, of all places, on a Friday night broadcast of “E! News” on March 12. But the internet was where most people saw it — a then-record-setting 15 million views in the first five days — and, just as importantly, where they dissected it.

In 2010, mainstream media was still attempting to make sense of and monetize the insurgent energy of the blogosphere and its voicy, offhandedly erudite pop cultural analysis. With its feminist-minded film references (“Kill Bill,” “Thelma & Louise”), queer imagery and seemingly Warholian-ironic product placement, “Telephone” proudly announced itself as a Rich Text.