Lady Gaga, Pussycat Dolls and a Taxonomy of Vacuous Pop

The following is taken from a series of exchanges with some friends, but I thought it might have some purchase here as well:

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So does not surprise me that Australia is the first market to "embrace" GaGa. She is made for Melbourne radio in particular.

It occurs to me that she is the female Calvin Harris - basically the tipping point where I think, "you know, just because I usually like this style HEAPS doesn't mean I will like any old guff."

Still, she's so close to something I would really like. The fact that she is writing for Britney is telling: "Just Dance" reminds of "Piece of Me" but sounds so rote and bored-with-itself in comparison.

This is the danger with autotuning actually: if used insensitively that roboticisation of the vocal can really make it (surprise surprise) sound impersonal and lifeless. Especially in the current era of autotune glut (and nothing proves this more than Kanye trying belatedly to lend it some respectability with "Love Lockdown") it's important to use it in unexpected ways, if you're going to go there at all.

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(in response to a friend's suggestion that perhaps GaGa would work better if - a la contemporary Britney - she embraced vacuousness and didn't try to construct a persona)

True - although that mostly works for Britney because she's already famous. It's difficult to attract much attention to a blank canvas pop star created ex nihilo. It's hard to think of many pop stars who built their persona around a lack of a persona from the beginning. Although it would be fine if she was just a Melissa Thkautz type, content to do PAs in gay clubs and have a crossover dance-pop hit with a cover of big eighties soft-rock anthem.

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I think an interesting contrast is Nicole Scherzinger of Pussycat Dolls (for starters you could imagine GaGa attempting "When I Grow Up").

Ostensibly Nicole is absolutely in the mould of cookie-cutter robot (R&B) pop (mould/cookie-cutter perhaps tautological but you get my point). Certainly the rest of her group are. And she's not really made any attempt to disprove this (her failed solo career aside - which produced at least a few fabulous and underrated singles most people never heard - check "Superhero"), although she's perhaps contractually obliged not to run down her fellow Dolls in interviews in an effort to distinguish herself.

Nonetheless Nicole is just so ON as a singer and performer and persona, she more often than not can take what are fairly good cookie-cutter R&B tracks and push them over the line with the inventiveness, the precision and the sheer personality of her vocals. The verses of "Buttons" are an excellent example of this, but check out the new single as well (the Ne-Yo-esque club-ballad "I Hate This Part") - it's really quite amazing how Nicole is this Trojan Horse of a totally distinct persona within a generic package.

Conversely, Lady GaGa's "i'm interesting and arty" angle relies totally on her post-facto justification of it, there's nothing in her music or performances that would point to it. What's the opposite of the the Trojan Horse? The Emperor With No Clothes. I usually dislike the use of this metaphor in music crit (too often leveled by against an entire music crit discourse, when really "I'm not feelin' it, and here's why..." would be sufficient) but I'd make an exception in a case like this where the only such "discourse" is coming out of GaGa's own mouth.

Based on this and the above excellent points made by both of you, I'm tempted to propose a Taxonomy of Vacuous Pop:

I) If You're Vacuous And You Know It: Most clearly expressed in the joys of (in particular) "girly" dance-pop since like forever, perhaps hitting its heights with the golden age of Handbag House. You don't wonder what the singer of JX's "There's Nothing I Won't Do" thinks of postmodernity, you don't even know her name.

2) The Women of Troy: As per Nicole/Trojan Horse discussion above. This is stuff that, were it released under another name and with a different marketing strategy, probably wouldn't be considered "vacuous", or at least wouldn't be pigeonholed as such so readily. A lot of the time this Trojan Horse status works well for the music, allowing the artists to do interesting things while not having to conform to the expectations that attach to respectable music.

3) Vacuousness as Gender Tourism: Performers otherwise credited with having "real" or "meaningful" personas making otherwise vacuous pop, but relying on the implicit compact b/w them and the listener that they are not defined/confined by this. This category is very much not clear-cut actually (try parsing it for mainstream rap, for example).

4) A Black Hole is Really a Vacuum: AKA the Britney Model - as per my argument previously, what makes the vacuousness of Britney's current music/persona compelling is at least partly that arises from the collapse of such a massive star, whose persona already exhaustively had been over-analysed. What is fascinating about this perhaps is that we usually imagine starting with a vacuum and watching it become filled (the generic pop star who discovers meaningful lyrics and confessionalism and tastefulness, i.e. one heavily edited version of the Madonna story; another example would be Siobhan "graduating" from Bananarama to Shakespeare's Sister - I've left model out because by the time it emerges what interests precisely is NOT vacuousness but rather its having been filled; one caveat here might be the Failed Flight From Vacuum Mountain - where the performer tries to move past their prior vacuousness but in a cack-handed, overstated manner that dialectically collapses them further into the innermost reaches of vacuousness). Whereas with Britney what you're seeing is the emergence of a vacuum before your eyes, which makes us wonder "how can meaning be TAKEN AWAY from an artist's persona??"

5) Neither Rome Nor Dannii Were Built In A Day: Dannii's vacuousness progressively grows (marginally) more interesting over time because it is painstakingly built over the rubble of past "personas" that have emerged, briefly shone, deteriorated, and then been demolished to make way for a new version that isn't demonstrably different except in the sense of being a "relaunch". What gives Dannii's career its compelling "hook" is the sheer perversity of her persistence, that Terminator-like refusal to die. So she's like a cliff-face providing a cross-section of historically changing constellations of vacuousness. This make her "interesting" in a way that Lady GaGa cannot yet be, if only because it gives her a weird air of resilience that is particularly beloved of teh gays. Which leads us to:

6) Her Vacuousness Expresses Our Struggle: Yer well-recognized (but, I would argue, rarely well-understood) gay love of form/artifice/emptiness X pre-existing tendency to place women on a pedestal X penchant for absurd fashion X liking of a good song and a dance X capacity to identify with catchy ditties re sexy men whut done me wrong. This can be distinguished from category one on the grounds that a fully fledged icon of gay appreciation will have a meaningful, human persona (at the very least) projected upon them (jn a Lacanian manner if nothing else); it's distinguishable from category 2 in that (for the sake of the argument) no-one else would be able to appreciate said persona in the way or to the extent that teh gays do.

Obv. this is the Kylie model, even though Kylie (along with Madonna) to some extent appears to transcend this category and also fit into all of the above four at certain times or in certain capacities.

But in fact Kylie doesn't transcend this category, because this category itself is at once a species and a genus. On the one hand "the gay appreciation of vacuous pop" is only one instance of vacuous pop appreciation; on the other, to understand said gay appreciation is to understand how it seamlessly embraces and entwines ALL of the other four categories. The popular conflation of vacuous pop and teh gays is a partial (perhaps unwitting) recognition of this fact. This is why gays form the core of Kylie's fanbase even if/when little girls abandon her - because they have so many strategies for appreciation that can be applied to whatever specific form of vacuousness her music may take. This appears to be undiscriminating (and to some extent it is - no other excuse for the hosannas that greeted "Spinning Around" I'm afraid) but it's also because no-one has raised the appreciation of vacuousness to the level of an art as extensively or as successfully as has the gay community.

GaGa forms yet another category, although perhaps this entry is judgmental as much as it is descriptive, for which I make no apologies:

7) Self-Hating Vacuousness: i.e. vacuousness that from the get-go tries to win points by attaching itself to (variously or simultaneously) irony/art/transgression/"infiltration" (as in infiltration of mainstream consciousness). In retrospect perhaps what set me against "Just Dance" from the very beginning was that, having to review it for In Press, I had the benefit of perusing the press release, which was totally pimping the "I'm as smart as Roisin Murphy, honestly I am!" angle. Some overlap here with the "cack-handed non-vacuousness" sub-category, although to date there's no evidence that GaGa's music goes even that far.

Clearly this is too much REAL TALK for ILX.

it's saturday, my brain is too fuzzy to formulate thoughts on this! i think kylie's about as vacuous a presence as you get in pop music though and i'm endlessly baffled by the pedestal the gays place her on.

ts infuriating artist names of 08, lady gaga vs lykke li

I'm way too bleurrrgh to think about this stuff but briefly

a) i don't think i care at all about "personalities" in music, except separately from the music as lol fodder or gossip

b) you are not right about "Spinning Around"

Clearly this is too much REAL TALK for ILX.

― Tim F, Saturday, 4 October 2008 15:08 (34 minutes ago)

It's Saturday, Tim. The place is always very quiet on a Satruday. Bump it up on Monday.

"Clearly this is too much REAL TALK for ILX."

^^^real talk.

i cant read all that right now. but i agree with what you said about nicole PCD's voice.

she's hideous. and i like a lot of girly pop. this was sent to me in april:

<object width="400" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://media.imeem.com/v/ux8Xcy1kWv/aus=false/pv=2";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://media.imeem.com/v/ux8Xcy1kWv/aus=false/pv=2"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="345" allowFullScreen="true"></embed><a href="http://www.imeem.com/ladygaga/video/B4BerA0U/lady_gaga_making_the_fame_music_video/";>Making "The Fame" - Lady Gaga</a></object>

crap. will this work? http://www.imeem.com/ladygaga/video/B4BerA0U/lady_gaga_epk_music_video/

I should note that I have SO MUCH LOVE for the version of "Spinning Around" that Kylie performed live last year, which used the piano from CeCe Peniston's "Finally" to transform the song into an irrepressible barnstormer.

My history with Kylie is odd. I think the first of her tracks i actively engaged with was "Confide In Me", which I loved. Bought Impossible Princess and totally endorsed her bid for artistic credibility (which partly falls into the Failed Flight From Vacuum Mountain category above). Saw her perform live soon after this and liked the way her whole career seemed to hang together really effectively: she was still pushing the quasi-serious-artist persona but had realised that the only people who would come to see her live were gay people, so the show tried to balance these competing tensions.

Resented her collapse back into pandering with "Spinning Around" - partly because it seemed to shy away from what would have been a more challenging middle path, partly because it was just a bad song. And perhaps partly because, having just come out, I was appalled by what I saw as the compulsory observance of fandom on the gay scene.

Loved "Your Disco Needs You", but really got back on board with Fever, which I think is her best album and one of the best pop albums of the decade.

Having started as a fan of Impossible Princess (which I rarely if ever listen to now) it's hard for me to think of Kylie as vacuous (though some of her songs certainly are). But it helps to see her live, I think, Lex - I've seen her twice (once at a relatively small show during the lowest ebb of her popularity; once in the exact opposite circumstances) and she was terribly charismatic both times.

Interesting stuff, Tim -- I wish I could comment more but I don't know enough (about) pop to really say. Where would Sophie Ellis Bextor fit in? I'm generally as anti-pop as they come, not necessarily from an intellectual position but simply from the gut; it gives me hives. But I do love me some Sophie Ellis Bextor, for some strange reason.

I just discovered this thread, in fact, because I was searching for info on Lady GaGa, for a blurb I have to write. Anyway, your commentary on auto-tune seems spot on. (Speaking of auto-tune, have you heard of this LA kid Nickasaur!? 18 year old straightedge christian, makes electro-emo in the Postal Service vein. Anyway, his shit is positively SLATHERED in auto-tune. It's not a good look at all, but there's something kind of fascinating about it at the same time.)

ha i've been meaning to bump this thread for the past few days due to my inability to stop listening to the PCDs' 'i hate this part' but i still don't have anything else to say about tim's taxonomy yet

Sophie Ellis Bextor doesn't quite fit because when she emerged as a pop star she had too much baggage (ie she first appeared in a no-mark late 90s indie band and her mum was on UK children's broadcasting institution Blue Peter). If I was forced to put her in any category it would be in Vacuousness as Gender Tourism.

I've never heard of Lady GaGa so unfortunately I can't make a relevant comment but I'm suspicious about adjectives like "vacuous" being applied to women singers per se unless you're prepared to do a similar process for male singers on an Abs-Chris Brown scale.

Ha ha that category is supposed to be called "Vacuousness As Genre Tourism". Stuffed that pun up completely.

Matt is right but I think post "Groovejet" and esp. "Murder On The Dancefloor", Sophie was really playing it from both sides - much of her audience would have had no idea of (ahem) theaudience. This becomes murky though because she is still associated with class, but that's achieved through her accent, her precarious sexy-but-not-sexual visual image.

Lots of great stuff on the second SEB album, in a Daniel Bedingfield kind of way. Daniel's also hard to characterise.

Yes with Sophie the Blue Peter thing is vastly more important than theaudience, it's tied up with instant respectability more than class I think.

Doing this with male popstars hurts my head - I've been trying to work out where to put Craig David for about 5mins.

I like category #1 because issues of the vocalist's 'personality' wasn't/aren't particularly important - all that was required was their relative strength as singers. It really helped that this was backed up with robust and dynamic dance music - I mean the kind you don't tend to get now (with the empthasis having switched to minimalism and a subtlety of sorts) tho I suppose Booty Luv may qualify (e.g. you'll get instances were the singers are interviewed here and there, but yeah generally we don't care who they are?)

For category #3 I'd suggest (tho it's an old and maybe dated example) Jewel's 'Intuition' maybe. It works much better out of that context tho - presumably most examples would? Maybe Katy Perry overlaps here.

My setting out the above makes it seem like i'm singling out women as being vacuous in a way men are not. But the issue is more how everything is perceived "out there". This does work for male pop but in different ways. For one, men just do get away with a lot more - a male Avril Lavigne would never have been so vilified. But also men are less subject to the minute dissections of personality, physicality and fashion that seem to go with being a female pop star.

This is one reason why it's hard to place Craig David - as a persistent figure in UK pop he might become increasingly strained, but he's unlikely ever to fascinate or appall people.

Also the gay appreciation sub-category is obviously smaller and very different in its dynamic (ironically though male pop being "gay" is probably a good equivalent to female pop being "vacuous").

Ha Steve yes I thought of "Intuition" at the time!

Also - to some extent - Pink's "Stupid Girls", which is a more meta-example in that musically it's totally a reversion to pop while lyrically it rejects that option (albeit embracing it sarcastically in the chorus).

SEB is odd because you have all these associations of style and sophistication flung at you but the ceiling on this when framed against the music (usually pretty weak) is far too low. I think her enjoyment of disco-pop and being a pop star is genuine but it's not really enough. Annie has similar problems at times.

a male Avril Lavigne would never have been so vilified.

ha, but at the same time, not actally feasible at all? i mean Lil Chris is the closest i can think of...

Yes I think you're right. Actually "Murder On The Dancefloor" aside I'm not a massive fan of any of her discoid efforts. The album tracks I like are all the oddball moments e.g. "The Walls Keep Saying Your Name". Why this stuff reminds me of Bedingfield a bit (and Natasha Bedingfield also works as a reference point) is that it kind of fails (though interestingly and enjoyably at times) at being either categorisable production line pop or "art" in the generally accepted songwriterly sense.

"ha, but at the same time, not actally feasible at all?"

Yeah, that's the tension, I guess. In the same way that body image can work for and against female celebs more dramatically.

I was thinking more Good Charlotte actually. The same dynamic is there but it feels more muted, like people struggle to care so much that Good Charlotte make money off of popularizing modern rock moulds.

i think you explained Dannii's appeal, scant tho it is, well too. tracks produced to accommodate and play towards her limitations to the extent that maybe 'So Under Pressure' worked better with Dannii's voice than it would've with Kylie's. GA have this too but it's different when it's a group.

it took a long time for me to warm to Scherzinger personality-wise and it was all down to vocal stylings from 'Buttons' onwards ('Super Villain' still blatantly ace but don't think she made it her own if you know what I mean). will hear more new PCDs eventually.

It took "Buttons" for it to click with me too Steve. Perhaps because it's their most generic single and her most interesting performance, the gap between the two tendencies is unusually noticeable.

Great. Now how about you do something similar for male pop star/icon types, eh?

Or are men just not capable of being vacuous?

maybe we should talk more about how hot these women are like you do with male artists all the time

This is one reason why it's hard to place Craig David - as a persistent figure in UK pop he might become increasingly strained, but he's unlikely ever to fascinate or appall people.

― Tim F, Thursday, 23 October 2008 15:19 (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Really don't think this works, it's hard (impossible) to think of a single pop performer more villified/mocked in the UK over the past decade than Craig David (Victoria Beckham? James Blunt? Mick Hucknall?)

None of those three got a melody maker cover sitting on the bog

I dunno NRQ, that absolute hatred of David doesn't bleed over to Australian/international music press so it's difficult for me to comment accurately perhaps. My sense was that he was "a joke", but the big difference to me is that ultimately there's not the same narrative of media cycles focusing on successful/unsuccessful plastic surgeries, weight ballooning, new "looks", etc.

All of which is there for, say, a Victoria Beckham. So while Craig David might be disliked as much as Victoria, it's a different kind of dislike. I think with a certain brand of female pop there's an almost uneasy feeling that these stars are not really human beings anymore. I don't think people tend to feel the same way about male pop stars, who often disliked (see James Blunt) for being boring more than anything else.

"Or are men just not capable of being vacuous?"

This is an excessively literal reading of what is being discussed here. Of course men are capable of being vacuous. Of course male pop is capable of being vacuous. But it's the very fact that female pop is disproportionately criticized as vacuous that makes all of this stuff interesting to think about - would we ever have cared as much about Justin Timberlake saying "we should just support the POTUS in whatever he does?" No, because, there's less of a pre-existing urge to pillory male pop stars for being stupid (as I note above, we're much more likely to pillory male pop stars for being effete/feminine).

The other big motivation for me to write all of this was to talk about the dynamic of gay appreciation of "vacuous" (female) pop. Whereas gay men tend to like male pop (vacuous or otherwise) in much the same way as the rest of the population, give or take a desire to have sex with the performer, which anyway they share in common with straight women, pop's primary audience.

Above and beyond all of that, I think the big thrust of what I'm saying is that what is dismissed as "vacuous" often isn't, or rather that what is going on is far more complicated.

I never got the sense that Craig David is particularly hated in the UK - what am I missing?

(before I answer, I'm Dom. You can tell I'm not NRQ because I mentioned an act that wasn't from the 90s)

craig david's image these days is pretty respectable lemar territory, insofar as he's thought about at all. and anyway he was never mocked for (pcd-style) vacuity, he was mocked because he did things like say his name on record and play up the smoove loverman image (ie fairly standard and inoffensive signifiers in black music, which for SOME REASON many white british people get rather annoyed by).

boy bands are traditionally dismissed as vacuous in similar ways to the female pop acts mentioned here, but there aren't any boy bands any more (except mcfly! who are indeed mocked and rightly so) so this doesn't really lead us anywhere. it took justin ages to get rid of that stigma, though. a great deal of the vacuity criticism is related to the perception of who the act's target audience is (which is often only tangentially related to what they sound like) - if they're known for having a female teen/tween fanbase (or indeed teh gays, haha) that tends to be enough for them to be labelled vacuous.

PCDs are an increasingly interesting case cuz of how massively, reliably commercially successful they are, with absolutely zero critical respectability (EXCEPT US). look at their singles! this sequence is actually astonishingly good, in termsof singles they have not put a foot wrong yet:

don't cha
stickwitu
beep
buttonz
i don't need a man
wait a minute
when i grow up
i hate this part

pcd singles are wallpaper to me but i have a weird (for me) affinity for them because i think they might be the last mega-successful pop group completely engineered by a label with a massive promo budget and stuff

unless you count kings of leon

it's weird that pcd have never had a US #1 after all that though

it is actually interesting to see how the boyband concept has changed in 10 years - the types you had in '98 don't seem to exist at all now, apart from the SAME big 3 in the UK, 2 of which were always aimed more at older market anyway.

What goes around comes around.

Sorry dom, that was a weird mix-up.

why is there seemingly less interest in male 3s, 4s and 5s in the US market? esp. on the R&B side. ten years ago you still had Blackstreet plus Dru Hill, 112 and a few others. it seemed a reasonably constant model until recent years - what changed?

reality tv?

if you mean Making The Band, maybe O-Town killed it but it's weird to think that their failure on it's own would put a stop to what seems a long-running tradition in the US or all male R&B pop groups.

OF all male R&B groups, that should be

The male R&B group model was still quite prominent even about five or six years ago - Jagged Edge, B2K etc.

I think it's less common for female groups too, now, PCD notwithstanding. Which other new groups have crashed through?

Perhaps the myspace-isation of pop has meant listeners expect a more "personal" relationship with their pop icons, which R&B groups struggle to provide, esp. since male R&B groups never placed the same emphasis on individual personality that the female groups did. Don't know about the rest of you but I struggle to name any members of the male groups unless they went solo.

making the band male group day26 had a #1 album but they couldn't be more inconsequential in the grand scheme if they tried

pretty ricky had some singles a few years back but their new jack single didn't do anything this summer

the trend towards solo artists in "commercial" genres like r&b and pop is interesting - i can't really think of an adequate explanation at all. it's fairly definite, to the extent that i can't imagine that format providing a breakthrough act right now. poor danity kane :(

they tried a new black boyband here this time last year with Ghostt (X-Factor rejects) - actually really liked their debut single but it was hard to see how they could succeed (also hard to reason why not tho, given the precedents (Another Level!)

but maybe there are a few bands like them on Channel U you'd never know about unless you watched that

is the development of solo artists seen as more worthwhile from a record company perspective? the boyband/girlgroup format implies a limited shelflife, whereas investing money in a solo act like chris brown, who is effectively a one-man boy band, can potentially pay off in a longer career?

im not sure if this has any traction or not but maybe male r&b groups died here because it just became to inexpensive and not profitable enough to employ 3 or 4 guys who are singing songs written by people who have to be paid and dancing in choreography devised by someone who had to be paid etc

it seems like all success here in the US in terms of male r&b is coming from a few minds- ne-yo, the-dream, t-pain, akon even timbaland- who write songs for other people as well as themselves. i'm not sure what the business side of that is but r&b from a male perspective is so so concentrated now (even female r&b too since ne-yo, t-pain and dream all write tons of songs for women). otherwise the big stars are like, usher and justin who are holdovers from the era of earlier this decade. chris brown seems to be the only mega star i can think of who only sings songs written for him.

you can see that there are a LOT more solo women doing well now compared to 10 years ago (people used to joke about the Brit Award for Best Female because of the lack of candidates but now, irrespective of how you feel about their music, there's so much more choice).

Sounds about right. Used to be a boyband was launched, main dude went solo (possibly as bands were in and solo acts weren't at the time? and maybe things have changed around). Now labels don't expect bands to last long enough so they just have a conveyor belt of solo acts from the likes of X-Factor and the like?
x-post

Certainly the times suit solo voices: it would be difficult to do an autotune track with a whole group (though in theory the result could be awesome), and solo singers can more easily make space for guest rappers in their songs.

Now I can't remember if Danity Kane use autotune at all. But the fact that they come across as so robotic (which would be a plus only for some listeners) is a good demonstration of the "dangers" of group format right now.

Interestingly, PCD songs are to all intents and purposes solo tracks with back-up singers. This may not simply be because most of the Dolls can't sing; perhaps it was just felt that this structure was easier to fit to chart-ready pop songs circa 2006-2008.

the boyband/girlgroup format implies a limited shelflife, whereas investing money in a solo act like chris brown, who is effectively a one-man boy band, can potentially pay off in a longer career?

also much easier (and cheaper) to manage only 1 person rather than 4

not that we should give much, if any, credit to the labels imo. t-pain and ne-yo have been two of the most bankable r&b minds of the past two or three years and t-pain was signed by akon after t-pain parodied "locked up" and i'm willing to bet ne-yo got a deal out of courtesy for writing hits but the label mad minimal expectations for his solo career

because it just became to inexpensive and not profitable enough to employ 3 or 4 guys who are singing songs written by people who have to be paid and dancing in choreography devised by someone who had to be paid etc

good point when taking into account the market decline (piracy + saturation)...altho the number of guitar-based quartets seems the same if not greater

um that should say too expensive btw

I don't want this to get into a pop vs rock rockist bands should write their own songs "debate". But when did pop groups stop writing their own songs? Cathy Dennis writes loads of songs as does betty boo, but their chart careers didn't last long really. Are labels too scared about their investments to allow pop stars to write like say Madonna did? Gary Barlow is the last one I can think of. (Does Ronan Keating write his songs?) I can't believe there aren't some talented people out there in the pop world that could write or produce their own stuff. (if any do exist please point them out as it's not a genre I'm an expert in obviously)

I can't believe there aren't some talented people out there in the pop world that could write or produce their own stuff. (if any do exist please point them out as it's not a genre I'm an expert in obviously)

― Pfunkboy Formerly Known As... (Herman G. Neuname), Thursday, October 23, 2008 6:00 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark

i mentioned these a few posts ago, but t-pain has basically written and produced every song that he's sung for himself or been featured on in the past 3 years. ne-yo and the-dream write a ton of songs for themselves and others, and though they don't produce most of them they have each have a reliable team to do the production. akon is the same as t-pain but he doesn't work at the same clip.

yeah i think the trend is actually towards pop stars writing more of their own material! and to let a lot of the songwriters out from behind the curtain as viable pop stars in their own right, like ne-yo.

Any British equivalents?

basshunter

Sugababes write many of their own iirc. All Saints did too.

All Saints is going back a bit!

from a rock perspective, there are no boyish guitar bands that are successful anymore on a massive scale like blink-182 was. panic at the disco fell the fuck off and fall out boy are in the process of doing the same on a huger stage, so right now majors have nickelback and american idol rockers or one offs like hinder and finger eleven. i'd say, contrary to what herman has proposed, pop/r&b are far far outpacing popular rock in terms of "writing their own hits"

only 2 years! xp

there aren't that many british commercial pop acts left any more. girls aloud don't write their material, generally, but they're a holdover from a different time. the saturdays are the only other act in this vein having any sort of success, i have no idea whether they write their songs but given how pointless they are it prob doesn't matter.

jonas brothers, jordan

i wonder how the game will change as and when all these insanely popular disney stars grow up and forge their own artistic paths outside the disney umbrella

oh true i forgot about them

but that's still not the same as a perspective a rockist would take cuz jonas bros and the disney-arm are like a parallel universe version of the music business. traditional majors are still flailing

Are many of the fall out boy type bands having hits written for them? I know that Bon Jovi (in the mid 80s when they got mega) used to have Desmond Child write songs for them until Jon Bon Jovi wrote a no1 single for them and took over. (i wouldn't be surprised if they get someone in to write for their hits now though) Kiss had others write for them too, didn't they?

i think when it comes to the success of pop we're really going to start seeing two distinct strains:

-megastars who are promoted traditionally, like britney who had no promo budget because she was always in the tabloids, or chris brown scoring a huge hit out of a commercial jingle. i guess rihanna is the outlier here, but usher and pcd were both promoted really traditionally here and didn't live up to sales expectations. i'm not sure how many huge vacouous pop stars are going to appear in the ways we are used to.

-more artists in the t-pain/akon/ne-yo/dream writer/singer etc. mode, though even this may be dying out as neither t-pain or akon are really taking over this year and someone like sean garret flopped earlier last year

or i guess we have seen these strains i suspect that they will continue

megastars who are promoed untraditionally, jeez

Jim Steinman is probably looking for a younger band to take on the Bat Out Of Hell franchise haha

jazmine sullivan wrote her own huge r&b hit this year, whereas ciara, keri hilson and cassie have all had huge megawriters behind their singles which have all been relative flops

dunno if this means anything though

xp to myself

hang on keri hilson had a megawriter behind her single? b-b-but she IS a megawriter! she's part of the clutch, the only reason she has a career is because she's doing a ne-yo-style move out from behind the curtain. wtf is the point if you're just going to hire someone else?

maybe she's trying to groom a new her

wtf yeah i totally blanked about hilson breaking in as a writer

she didn't write energy though

but she did hire the producers of "no air"

i think energy is great though so :/

kind of back to the original topic of the thread...listening to a few of the scherzinger's finest moments over the years, i'm struck by how incredibly versatile she is, and this is because she commits so fully herself to whatever style she's working in at whatever moment. she's so subservient to aesthetic - particularly formalist within an ultra-formalist genre - everything's in the correct place and done in the correct way. 'i hate this part' is their epic groove/ballad, so we got those opulent extended syllables and flowing half-rhymes culminating in heartbroken semi-whispers. 'bottle pop' is their blackout-style banger so all vocal pyrotechnics are abandoned in favour of robotic intonation. 'stickwitu' is all tender candyfloss, the breathlessness of 'whatever you like' makes it overwhelmingly visceral, &c &c.

'whatever you like' is such a great lost banger, the video was amazing too and t.i.'s verse is so raw and sexy. "somethin' 'bout that cock, you think you got me wanna see what's goin' on"

T.I. said that?!

Always the romantic.

I would imagine breaking a manufactured pop band in this day and age is a very expensive and highly risky activity unless you have a ready-made marketing tool like a popular TV show there in advance. In today's market, its not really surprising that British record companies don't really bother.

no it's nicole singing about t.i.'s cock obv

i'm also v fond of this lost scherzinger track, a duet with rihanna called 'winning women' which exhorts women to represent their culture, keep their last names and buy homes in geneva

"where the word DIVA DIVA means VIVA VIVA, we run las vegas"

great thread.

I think as far as the US and where-did-all-the-boy-bands go, the rise of the Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus/High School Musical Disney seems to me to have created a cut-off point as far as market demographics. Whereas in '98, the Backstreet Boys and *Nsync would appeal to the tweeners, it still had appeal for high schoolers and even college girls. The Disney thing seems to have a cut-off at around 13 or 14 (pulling ages out of a hat, here, admittedly), and they've got the young'ens sewn up. Past that, you're going to get slightly "edgier" Katy Perry stuff, so the market doesn't exist for that kind of across-the-board boy band. Plus American Idol neatly manufactures groups for the other demographics already, without having to spend the money (Daughtry, etc...). A fascinating look at how the US sees (or the industry tries to sell) "pop" these days is MTV's Friday night show (can't recall the name), where they have a few live performances and premiere videos (IN THEIR ENTIRETY is the hook they give) and interviews, and the way that Rihanna, the Jonas Brothers, PCD, Ting Tings, Maroon Five, Slipknot, and No Age all (uncomfortably) occupy the same space. Not to mention it's hosted by Pete from Fall Out Boy.

The gay aspect of the taxonomy leaves the US a bit wanting for pop stars that can fit into the molds described. Britney holdover, PCD seems more of an abberation, and...anyone else? Not wanting to go back to the old argument of "America doesn't understand camp", but...

wow lady gaga really is the absolute pits isn't she?

this whole thread: tl;dr

i hear this stuff all day at work. lady gaga is 10000x better than 'i hate this part', which makes me want to kill everyone

http://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/no_wai.jpg

lady gaga is 10000x better than 'i hate this part', which makes me want to kill everyone

there is no statement more wrong than this!

Conversely, Lady GaGa's "i'm interesting and arty" angle relies totally on her post-facto justification of it, there's nothing in her music or performances that would point to it. What's the opposite of the the Trojan Horse? The Emperor With No Clothes.

^^this was a very prescient criticism (though as the UK's been spared gaga until now, i've only had to start thinking about her in the past couple of weeks) - people like fergie and the scherzinger are really instructive points of comparison. fergie is the genuinely unpredictable, zany, out-there artist than gaga says she is (how much more inventive and ridiculous is the dutchess than the fame?), and as tim says scherzinger is so permanently ON as a vocalist that gaga just pales in comparison. but fergie and nicole have these extremely vacuous public images, and afaik have never said anything interesting about their artistry in interviews, or gone on about warhol as if by invoking his name they can grasp something of his essence.

apart from the performative/sonic side of it all the other unpackable aspect of gaga is the way she harps on about money fame boys shallow shallow money fame boys in her songs, which i should love, but really the way she acts as though it's some giant art project is so extremely tiresome. you can just hear her trying to layer on the irony ("do i mean it? yes! no!" I DON'T CARE) with heavy hands and fists of ham, much like calvin harris. and then think about genuinely great paeans to shallowness like lil' kim's 'the jump off' and again gaga just doesn't match up.

I think 'Just Dance' is a very good record and its success doesn't surprise me. I like the way it has both an r&b and rock element to it (eg the neanderthal, cymbal-laden beat on the chorus). The fusion works very well on that particular song (and the chorus is massive). I listened to a couple of her other songs ('Beautiful Dirty Rich' and 'Poker Face') but found them to be feeble by comparison.

I think she is trying to be the new Madonna. That's the closest comparison I can see. When Madonna first appeared on the scene there was a similar sense of her early songs being very closely related to the funk/club music of the day, but also that she was trying (too) hard to be 'more' than just that. I've never been a big Madonna fan and that 'trying too hard' thing is one of the things that's always annoyed me about her (along with a lot of her songs being just short of very good - as actual songs).

Unlike Madonna, Lady GaGa seems to be quite a good singer technically, but, when you listen closely, rather too conventional for my taste.

--

I missed the earlier discussion about changing artist formats (groups vs solo artists) and I think there is a big, and very obvious, point being missed. Things change primarily because they have to change, to stop being boring. The boyband format, and also the three or four man (or woman) r&b group, died out (or receded) because it became boring, through overkill.

Every format runs its course, be it musical style, or the format of line-ups. When something begins to lose popularity, the labels notice that sales are down. The aspiring artists find they are not getting signed doing whatever it is so they have to shift to something else, or not get signed. Obviously it's more complicated than that (influences bouncing around), but the audience's liking for, or boredom with, whatever it is is what, to a large degree, drives change (in the form of rising or falling sales).

i think "just dance" is an all time banger but i dont know if i care much about gaga herself. i think the song is extremely well-written in terms of getting across the feeling of being really fucked up and not caring about anything but dancing. you don't really hear lyrics as straightforward as "I love this record baby but I can't see straight anymore/ Keep it cool, what's the name of this club?/ I can't remember but it's alright, a-alright" on pop radio and i think that's the song's biggest strength, esp. compared to awfully generic shit like "hot n cold" and "womanizer"

it's the same reason why that veronicas song sticks out to me besides being sonically bonkers. "i feel so untouched right now" is arresting in the same manner to me as "i love this record baby but i can't see straight anymore"

this is an interesting point from tim's OP

"Just Dance" reminds of "Piece of Me" but sounds so rote and bored-with-itself in comparison.

i think this is otm but (not to jump through too many backwards logic hoops here) it's kind of what makes the song attractive to me (lyrically at least). gaga seems bored with everything BUT dancing i.e. "what's the name of this club?/i can't remember but it's alright" - which i read as "this club kinda sucks but let's dance" which i like along with "i lost my phone but let's dance" and "what's the name of this record idk let's dance" etc etc

as it being sonically boring - yeah idk i could feel that. the keyboard bit at the beginning sounds exactly like lollipop/low

also the radio down here has been playing the remix with kardinal offishal subs out the o donnis verse and the bridge iirc and is way better imo

I really like the theme of "Just Dance" and (unusually for a pop song) I think the lyrics look a lot better written down than when they're sung.

At work, I have started a very successful rumour about Lady Gaga having a penis.

http://www.newnownext.com/images/2008/08/12/ladygagatrl_1.jpg

"I don't know what you're talking about"

think some of the paint is coming off that action figure's legs

hey Tim I don't know if you've spoken about it elsewhere but what do you think of natalie basingthwaite's "alive"? it's probably my favourite non-indie thing of '08 next to the presets..

I quite like "Alive" - of all the schaffel-pop efforts of 2008 it's the one that most openly and slavishly copies the blueprint put down by Rachel Stevens in 2004 (ironically, people used to claim Rachel of just copying Goldfrapp), but it's probably the best of the bunch too.

http://idolator.com/5151472/congrats-lady-gaga-youre-more-annoying-than-katy-perry-now

on the one hand it;s nice to be proved right.

on the other, GNNNNNGGGHHHHH when will she just fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off.

it's weird because she is gross. who would want to have sex with her

She has ALWAYS been more annoying than Katy Perry!

"I dig way down into my soul and I find that place where I was born to be an artist, and it carries me through. I am everything about what I do. Every marrow in my bones and blood is for this work. GaGa is the greatest creative journey of my life."

...

She is pretty gross.

"I dig way down into my soul and I find that place where I was born to be an artist, and it carries me through. I am everything about what I do. Every marrow in my bones and blood is for this work. GaGa is the greatest creative journey of my life."

― lex pretend, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:03 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

lemme point out that she went to NYU

Just like Dalton from Road House.

i am not sure why i dislike lady gaga as much as i do. as tim said, she has all the elements necessary for an infatuation for me but somehow she just pushes it all too far. as with the popstars i do like, which include britney, there still some human element i can cling to. britney became more interesting as soon as she became more human. with lady gaga it all seems a bumbling art project gone wrong. i like robotic voices but only if they are presented by something which seems human. also the name. urgh, so so so wrong.

ugh hipsters?

that quote could've come from any solo girl out there. big deal.

i like the mask she wears in the new vid (esp. as it hides her annoying hair).

I am still somewhat convinced she is a tranny.

I don't think so. She styles herself like one.

Oh it's very clear that she isn't, or that she's had surgery if she has, but almost everything about her screams TRANNY!

http://open.salon.com/files/victor_victoria%5B1%5D1229458627.jpg

I might like her more of if she was a tranny. Except then I think: the drag queens who are like Lady Gaga I'm not so much into. I prefer my drag queens more... blowsy? Mrs Havisham-esque?

Which is why that chick from Scissor Sisters going solo probably would have been a better version of Lady Gaga than Lady Gaga is, esp. if she'd gone hyper-commercial too.

She'd be like the tranny version of Fergie, rather than the tranny version of Christina Aguilera's new look.

I am trying to imagine the tranny version of Fergie and all that comes to mind is:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Entertainment/abc_alley_061212_ssh.jpg

fergie is already her own tranny version, surely

Well the same applies to Christina Aguilera surely?

Maybe this points to the super-double-pointlessness of the entire Lady Gaga Project.

also:

standard lily allen interview with jonathan ross, but wait for the gaga mention at 3mins in. it's worth it.

Maybe this points to the super-double-pointlessness of the entire Lady Gaga Project.

^^^ pretty much OTM

since there's not teenpop thread i'm just gonna post the video for this dope demi lovato song in here

who needs avril right??

sounds like if paramore were writing songs when they were 15

Woah, I really like that. The way she sings "some may say I need to be afraid of losing everything..." makes it sound deep. Deeper than the song actually is admittedly. Is the guy interviewing her supposed to be a send-up of Perez Hilton?

http://s.buzzfeed.com/static/imagebuzz/terminal01/2009/1/18/23/what-lady-gaga-really-looks-like-20206-1232337767-4.jpg

lol

omg that's not her right?

oh its her

oooo
mmm
gggg

http://ultimate-ladygaga.org/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=25

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

O_O

^just as a prophylactic against any "everybody has a bad shot sometimes" comments, she looks like arthur kane in every single one of those

also she seems to be looking like that deliberately

still!

she's having a gigantic nose deliberately

that wig

ugh son

would not poke 'er face

speechless

Looks almost like Amy Winehouse there. :)

Lady Ga Ga is one of many examples that extremely mainstream manufactured chart pop sounds better now than it has done for 25 years btw. Roughly because it sounds more or less exactly like it did 25 years ago. Only with more advanced drum programming and a lot more dynamic range compression. :)

^the don weighs in

i just can't get past her name

and apparently her face

see the difference here is that amy winehouse looks bad when she is cracked out and wearing no makeup and hungover or whatever. that's lady gaga....at a photoshoot.

that's lady gaga....at a photoshoot.

― and why (roxymuzak), Friday, March 6, 2009 5:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol

sounds like if paramore were writing songs when they were 15

― rev. al shipley (J0rdan S.), Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:20 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

do u realize u were describing paramore's actual first album here

tbh i have no recollection of paramore existing prior to "misery business"

yeah but i'm just saying they were writing songs at 15 that sounded just like their recent stuff they wrote at 17/18, so it struck me as a strange qualifier

essentially i think i was using paramore as a stand in for "this sounds like a song written by/for teens and fronted by a girl"

yeah...i mean it actually does sound like Paramore (one album track in particular it reminds me of more than the singles) so if you'd just said "sounds like Paramore" i'd have no quibbles. sorry silly number of posts to spend discussing this.

Councils get banned jargon list

Winston Churchill is an example to council workers, campaigners say
Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, with "predictors of beaconicity" and "taxonomy" among the worst horrors.

Just so's you know.

I've already had several angry letters.

My wife has been singing "Dan can't stand/Dan can't stand/Lady Gaga's butterface.../She so ugly/Oh so ugly" for weeks now; she will get much enjoyment from that link, roxy!

Brad M
Is lady gaga a man? My sister thinks so. I dont.?
Now i think she is very pretty. Why do people say she is a tranny? It dosent make much sense... She just wears alot of makeup. I love her voice. I am almost sure she is a female. No rude answers plz. if u dont know the queston then DONT ANSWER. Ok? ^^

Mariah S
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
no shes a LADY and gAgA there are A's if she was a mand her name would be.... Man GoGo

proved by LOGIC

Do not Googlimg Man GoGo

completely bizarre

Lady Gaga Stirs Things Up By Going Pantsless'It's fashion! I'm an artist!' singer tells Chicago police after being stopped on the street.
By Jocelyn Vena

By now, Lady Gaga is known as the singer who has an affinity for not wearing pants. But apparently there are some law officials out there who may not have gotten the memo about Gaga's fashion choices. The singer was recently stopped by police in Chicago who had some objections to her hot pants.

"I guess they weren't really pants at all, but it was really funny because all you saw was this half-naked girl on the street yelling at some cop," she told the Daily Star, adding that she tried to reason with the officer." 'It's fashion! I'm an artist!' It was fun."

Lady Gaga doesn't seem to mind the attention, telling the U.K. newspaper that while she doesn't hate pants, she doesn't find them necessary either. "It's not that I don't like pants," she said, "I just choose not to wear them some days."

The singer, who is currently on her Fame Ball Tour, added that for her, going pantsless is no big deal thanks to her more salacious past. "I think no pants is sexy. I love the naked human body," she said. "I was working in strip clubs when I was 18."

These days, Lady Gaga is making headlines by wearing out-there outfits that probably cost some dough, but she told MTV News that it wasn't too long ago that she was getting people talking on a much smaller budget. "A year ago at this time, I was gluing sequins on $4 bras," she laughed. "So that should tell you how far I've come."

So sick of this chick. I like Poker Face, but Lady Gaga is a bad thing for music.

when will she discover the daring, transgressive nature of wearing paper bags over your head

'It's fashion! I'm an artist!'

Thing is, this is probably almost exactly what she said.

Metal Mike Sauders is slowly starting to convince me that Lady Gaga might not be as horrible as I thought.

Email # 1:

Lady Gaga in video/TV interviews has namechecked "i love Swedish pop" (her having been a screaming sidewalk NYC TRL-wannabe down on the street with her middle school classmates, 1999-2000) so a collaboration between her and Max is inevitable i would think.
two weeks ago the Poker Face single breaking Top 10 (no. 6) took the album up to no. 10 (american) (from no.28 the preceding week), so it is very possible that a couple weeks from now -- in a "slow release" week (like the way britney's first album was carefully targeted to be released -- after the single had hit no.1 -- on the SLOWEST week of the year, jan or feb, so that it would squeak into no. 1 with barely 125k? i recall) --

that gaga will score a no. 1 album. american's way the fuck behind the curve on her (no hit single until dec/jan, now it's a roadkill pileup with a third single hitting Top 10 just 6 weeks later, ha).

Email #2:

here's my Gaga wordpad collection of the most interesting Youtube interviews (and a couple ditto TV or club performance clips)

PAPARAZZI Album Chart Show / UK***

Billboard interview "i would die"

at 4:35 "i love swedish pop music" (german TV interview)

Jingle Ball backstage w David Archuleta

Dear Mr President

group letter Dear Mr President

paris hilton interviews GaGa

interview for Album Chart Show

GaGa loves the beatles

interview w/left cheek boltz at 1:31

australian interview / 5 min

Email #3

Jimmy Draper:

i interviewed gaga a few weeks before her cd came out, back when "just dance" was just a dance hit..she was super personable and pretty funny but i honestly don't "get" what she thinks is so Innovative about her work (she used the word literally at least 8x in our interview). then again, i dont really care either cuz the cd is amazing. she really is a trip tho--like when we talked she was comparing herself to madonna (but saying she one-ups madonna in self-reinvention = RIDIC) and bowie and art people...i left out the relaly, really obnoxious stuff from the article cuz i thought it'd make her sound super deluded and bonkers--in a bad way, and didn't want to go there. looking fwd to seeing her in detroit next week.

her xmas tree song is one of the only xmas songs i've ever liked

More Metal Mike:

yeah if you collected all the people who were bonkers/half-nuts back in 50's rock, well, a greyhound bus wouldn't half hold them all...

half again trumped by john lennon in his ThUg early phrase, or Brian Wilson on any given day in the 60's.

maybe what she's tripping on is that bowie or maddy never put on a blonde wig...

ohhhh and MAJOR drug use/abuse in her teen years (or beyond) according to bios/background info. never underestimate the modesty level of someone who's coked up!
combined with an upper-class academic-type (NYU) background

somewhere on google i ran across an audience member's short review of a small-ish gaga club NYC gig last fall... according to the poster, she passed out onstage, her dancers attempted to get her back up and moving, whereupon she stagedived into the crowd, passed out again, and her retinue gave up, gig over after 3 songs.

the rock/pop world needs more lunatics, i always say. (her natal chart w/o rising sign has major NO IMPULSE CONTROL, a mars/uranus conj. in fire. and other things of that
nature).

the most impressive thing about the best tracks on the album (half of more of it in toto i'd say, and i haven't close to digesting the lesser half yet) is the VARIETY of great vocal sounds. starting with the sound/tone of the vocals in the first place. it's got her handprints all over it, that and the synth/keyboard sounds (which are nearly endless in their variety of tones). ohhhh and whoever is reponsible, some GREAT drum/rhythm sounds.

one cool thing about her songwriting is how well she uses words as SOUNDS, lyrically.
maybe an entire 1/2 of Poker Face is (vocally) just sounds, right.

everything i've read indicates that gaga is completely over the moon/obsessive about songwriting.

the last two britney albums are pretty neat production jobs (from the two or three main producers) but gaga's shit is just two steps beyond, sonically.

which reminds me that someone should take max martin/luke's fucking drum machine away. the current Kelly (Clarkson) hit (which is treadbare enough to begin with, as a song) HAS to have a live non-clicktrack drummer or it's just, c'mon, jeez, it's fucking annoying is what it is.

Email #4, more Jimmy Draper:

there's a LOTTA non-album stuff floating out there by her, btw--a bunch of it weirdly subpar for her, but i'd recommend :

Big Girl Now with New Kids on the block
Fashion on 'Confessions of Shopaholic' soundtrack (orig. she gave it to heidi montag and while heidi has a brilliant "heidi!" thrown in at the intro, gaga;s is better and doesn't sound like she's speaking in tongues like heidi does-- it's basically a novelty tho)
Disco Heaven itunes bonus track
Eh Eh (Pet Shop Boys remix)
Xmas Tree mp3

plus of course she co-wrote Britney's amazing Circus bonus track QUICKSAND with Intersciope producer Fernando Garibay., apparently her other track for brit didnt make it on.(She said she gave a bunch of songs to Britney's team and they claimed 2 of em for her)

and totally yes re: her use of sounds. The "Mah mah mah mah" sound that opens Poker Face is brilliant/makes every gay club ive been in lately pretty much explode

this IS convincing

chuck are you seriously

copying emails to us

This is essentially convincing me that Gaga is a horrible person and I should do everything in my power to ensure I never accidentally give her money.

hold your judgment until you've watched all ten videos, you two

i lol'd @ "makes every gay club i've been in lately pretty much explode."

oops, left out email 1 1/2, fuckfaces:

lady gaga quoting / citing her love of "Swedish Pop" (in at least two audio/TV interviews that are on Youtube) is the chickens coming to roost. her and Max Martin would probably be about 3 too many control freaks in the same mixing room, but it looks inevitable i would say. since she co-writes with everyone/anyone who's producing, Max ditto as a writer, that is probably a far less volatile combination.

the best song (and her favorite, and all my friends' favorite or 2nd favorite) on the gaga album, Papparazzi, is the pop-culture song Redd Kross were trying/hoping to write for (a) decade(s) and never got it done. and it works (lyrically) on about 3 levels (of interpretation) where the McDonald brothers had trouble just getting Level 1 to the finish line. not that Bubblegum Factory isn't a classic, tho out of place out of time for the late 80's hair-metal era.

without orig drummer Ron Reyes/Chavo though, they could never rock the early songs for shit (after the fact) (last year's gigs all over youtube, ditto) after summer 1980. (the little 12 year old drummer they had with the brief 5-piece of DEZ/gr CHET LEHRER (future wasted youth leader/lp, and Lucky circle jerks' brother)/2nd gtr, was just fine though. best fucking 12 song - 14 minute set i ever saw by a "name band" (at the Fleetwood, right after we played our 4th bill slot on the 5 band bill) (jack TSOL's first band Vicious Circle was the 5th band).

oh thanks, now im convinced

We are the crowd,
We're c-coming out
Got my flash on it's true
Need that picture of you
It's so magical
We'd be so fantastical

Leather and jeans a watch on my wrist,
Not sure what it means,
But this photo of us
It don't have a price
Ready for those flashing lights,
Cause you know that baby i

Im your biggest fan
I'll follow you until you love me
Papa-paparazzi,
Baby there's no other superstar
You know that i'll be your
Papa-paparazzi

Promise i'll be kind,
But i won't stop until that boy is mine
Baby you'll be famous
Chase you down until you love me
Papa-paparazzi

I'll be your girl
Backstage at your show,
Velvet ropes and guitars,
Yeah cause you'll know
I'm staring between the sets
Eyeliner and cigarettes

Shadow is burnt
Yellow dance and return
My lashes are dry
But with teardrops I cry
It don't have a price
Loving you is cherry pie
'Cause you know that baby I

Im your biggest fan
I'll follow you until you love me
Papa-paparazzi,
Baby there's no other superstar
You know that i'll be your
Papa-paparazzi

Promise i'll be kind,
But i won't stop until that boy is mine
Baby you'll be famous
Chase you down until you love me
Papa-paparazzi

Real good
(We dance in the studio)
Snap, snapped
(That xxxx on the radio)

Don't stop boy, rewind
We'll blast it but we'll still have fun!

Im your biggest fan
I'll follow you until you love me
Papa-paparazzi,
Baby there's no other superstar
You know that i'll be your
Papa-paparazzi

Promise i'll be kind,
But i won't stop until that boy is mine
Baby you'll be famous
Chase you down until you love me
Papa-paparazzi

lol

Had she been taking Kanye-pills when this was written?

i believe that is the song redd kross were writing for 1. years and 2. never got it 3. done

fuckfaces

(that said, I never liked Redd Kross so yeah, maybe this is 3 times as deep as anything they came up with, I wouldn't know)

This is essentially convincing me that Gaga is a horrible person and I should do everything in my power to ensure I never accidentally give her money.

― Wes HI DEREson (HI DERE), Wednesday, March 18, 2009 3:52 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

completely otm

re-edited 'just dance' vid based on sequence from my 08 mix - 2nd half with the Moby/Kris Menace is best (and made me like her/this track's vocals much more)

i was just reading an old metal mike saunders review of demons and wizards by uriah heep and he called them PUNK rock

i dont get it — we're supposed to celebrate her for being an ex cokehead who can't get thru a show? she's just as subversive as 'this one time i kissed a girl' katy perry, which is to say, not subversive at all. and the fact, like perry, that she plays up her DARING image makes it even worse

also all her songs sound exactly the same. idk why anyone would need anything from her beyond "just dance"

yes, but at 4:35 "i love swedish pop music" (german TV interview)

this does have the ring of truth tho:
the most impressive thing about the best tracks on the album (half of more of it in toto i'd say, and i haven't close to digesting the lesser half yet) is the VARIETY of great vocal sounds. starting with the sound/tone of the vocals in the first place. it's got her handprints all over it, that and the synth/keyboard sounds (which are nearly endless in their variety of tones). ohhhh and whoever is reponsible, some GREAT drum/rhythm sounds.

one cool thing about her songwriting is how well she uses words as SOUNDS, lyrically.
maybe an entire 1/2 of Poker Face is (vocally) just sounds, right.

maybe an entire 1/2 of Poker Face is (vocally) just sounds, right.

the thing is, this is exactly what I hate about "Poker Face"

oh that's actually what i love about it.

and i think if she kept her trap shut, people wouldn't find her so obnoxious. just some basement production dance trax, is all i hear.

i've still never heard her speak. maybe i should keep it that way?

the uriah heep review was from like 72! or maybe even 71 but yeah i didn't know ppl used that term that early on.

i am talking about uriah heep in a lady gaga thread, what happened to me?

xp -- yeah. seems like her whole "i'm an artist" routine is excrutiating and embarrassing

i am talking about uriah heep in a lady gaga thread, what happened to me?

It means you're on ILM, what else did you expect?

Yeah my big mistake re Lady Gaga was to read her press release before I listened to "Just Dance" - it put me of her from the very start.

Same mistake I made with Vivian Girls. I saw that awful, awful bathtub interview and immediately wrote them off. Heard the album at a friend's over the weekend and actually liked it!

i am talking about uriah heep in a lady gaga thread, what happened to me?

It means you're on ILM, what else did you expect?

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, March 18, 2009 9:25 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave etc etc

First time I saw Lady Gaga I thought she was some Russian Eurovision type and was thinking "well, good for you".
When I realised she was yer bog standard American popstar with shitloads of cash behind her I lost interest. I really try not to let marketing etc of an act affect how I hear it, but this is SO MUCH marketing it dictates the style of the music, the bored singing style, everything.

and i think if she kept her trap shut, people wouldn't find her so obnoxious. just some basement production dance trax, is all i hear.

Basically this otm.

Gaga's schtick basically seems to be that she is smarter than the eurodisco she's peddling which makes it ironic which makes it popart and not pop. What do I mean when I say she is smarter? I mean she keeps fucking telling us that she is smarter. This is the only distinction between Lady Gaga and Basshunter.

xp -- yeah. seems like her whole "i'm an artist" routine is excrutiating and embarrassing

and so unsubtle - like, she doesn't even pretend to say "arty" things, she just comes out and literally says things like "THIS IS ART I'M AN ARTIST".

also her music sux too - not plumbing any particular depths or anything, but just blah reheated electro of no consequence whatsoever

"metal" mike

fuck music imo

shit is a lost cause, evacuate

tru dat

Basshunter plays DoTA though. More geek cred than Gaga.

chuck are you seriously

.......

copying emails to us

― roxymuzak

haha

no one will be shocked that i find her music dreadful, personally, although even i can't deny the fundamental catchiness of "just dance." but i do find her a fascinating figure for a number of reasons:
* her upper-class NYC background, not typically a spawning ground for female pop stars, at least not recently
* her imaging a la terry richardson/american apparel -- surely the last step in the full-blown mainstreaming of the last night's party aesthetic?
* her chart successes-- call me cynical but i can only imagine that the record company threw a ton of money at this project, and for whatever it's worth (quite a lot to them), it worked wonders

and finally i'm intrigued by this fetishization of the "club," something that's been going on since fiddy's "in da club" and right through any number of recent top 40 songs i can't recall now whose principal theme is getting down and dirty in the dance club. why the club? why is gaga so intent upon casting herself as a "dance" artist? it all seems to go hand in hand with the TMZ-style obsession with celebs' drunken shenanigans (which seems to have hit peaked w/ the antics of paris and her coterie, as far as i can tell); there's this fantasy of the club as a zone of total promiscuity and permissiveness (cf, again, last night's party). in many ways it's not that different from the fetishization of the club/party in house and techno, of course (berghain's rep for licentiousness, etc.), and yet in its pop incarnation it strikes me as... just this free-floating signifier, a purely speculative expression....

tim, i'm sure you have something to say on this subject, and better phrased than my half-awake mumbling.

actually think 'Poker Face' sounds quite weird for a big pop song - feels like a plus

weird only if you hasn't heard 'don't stop the music' or 'disturbia' or [insert any dancepop hit from past 2 years here]

*hadn't

maybe if novelty has a very fast metabolic breakdown in your system.

weird only if you hasn't heard 'don't stop the music' or 'disturbia' or [insert any dancepop hit from past 2 years here]

no i've heard those and i think there is a difference - a couple of elements on the LG track seem odder than any Rihanna thing. a better comparison would be with Danja's Britney stuff but particularly the stuff they probably thought would be 'too weird' to release as a single. 'Poker Face' chorus is totally ordinary tho, it's just other things going on around it.

uhh what elements? seriously, the britney album? i think gaga has managed to fool you :(

More Metal Mike, buried in another email (which yeah, I'm copying. Thanks for noticing):

so far, 1 ex GF, and two merch-help people, ages 20 through 38 who all are big on 4/4 4-to-the-floor 80's dance music, LOVE the album beyond description. on any kind of decent loud stereo (or in a car) it is a pounder.

my favorite part of its sound/production is that it has my favorite "cool synth noises" by about ten miles. if there's ever been anything else like them, ever, i'd sure like to know what they are. she's doing them with a sort of "excitement level" (for want of a better phrase) that's akin to how guys used to crank it up playing rock-guitar.

i also dig that the album/gaga is bringing out the "pop music haters" and making them crazy. hahaha sorry all you music-hippies, her lyrics (the best ones) are awesome.

But anyway, I never said I agree with him. (Just said he's "slowly starting to convince me that Lady Gaga might not be as horrible as I thought", hardly a ringing endorsement.) My reaction to her has so far been mostly negative (wrote a short screed to that effect on Idolator last year), but I have a feeling what's bugged me has been a lot more her clearly annoying schtick and marketing than her music. (The quasi-decadent cleverer-than-Eurodisco pop-art routine actually reminds me a lot of electroclash from a few years ago, as does the blankness of her voice sometimes -- amazed nobody's made that comparison here. She's just gotten bigger than electroclash ever was.)

But it's possible the schtick is making everybody (including me) underrate the music. I think part of Mike's point is that high-energy Eurodisco-like dance music never really hits in the States anymore. She sure doesn't sound much like Rihanna to me. As for the precedents for her particular synths sounds (or "basement production dance trax," whatever), now I'm curious, too. (I'm no expert on current dance music, so I don't doubt that they're out there.)

I have never listened to Lady Gaga and thought she was doing anything remotely new or exciting.

no i've heard those and i think there is a difference - a couple of elements on the LG track seem odder than any Rihanna thing. a better comparison would be with Danja's Britney stuff but particularly the stuff they probably thought would be 'too weird' to release as a single. 'Poker Face' chorus is totally ordinary tho, it's just other things going on around it.

― Hard House SugBanton (blueski), Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:18 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i feel this. it sounds very ordinary and very odd at the same time. like i hear the drum machine and the basic production but i also hear weird nuances that sound like someone was having some stoned fun with effects. and it kind of sends chills down my spine, which i know is a gag-worthy comment.

i also really like how the chorus vox are so much more expansive and heavy than the verses'.

But anyway, I never said I agree with him. (Just said he's "slowly starting to convince me that Lady Gaga might not be as horrible as I thought", hardly a ringing endorsement.)

All I said is that all of this is having the exact opposite effect on me; it's making me like her less and I didn't like her that much to begin with.

Also, having not heard her album, I'm hesitant to call her "high-energy" since her two radio hits are 119 bpm.

fwiw the elements that struck me as relatively "weird" sounding were the murky-sounding looped one-note synth detail that comes in after 8 seconds (a lower version of what you're already hearing- it makes me think the video should involve submarines), some of the backing vocals (taking their cue from 'Gimme More') and Gaga's affected low notes (not really camp but aiming for the same kind of warped mania as say Roisin's 'Ramalama (Bang Bang) - nowhere near as good as that but it works well enough). i guess my point is it reminds me of these much better tracks but i'm not seeing this as a bad thing.

i feel this. it sounds very ordinary and very odd at the same time. like i hear the drum machine and the basic production but i also hear weird nuances that sound like someone was having some stoned fun with effects.

^^ yeah this is one of the things that producers seem to be struggling with these days, doing this sort of thing right. I'm all about the cool synths and fucked-up druggy effects, but it seems like everyone currently producing music who likes these things makes a) dreadful spastic amelodic hook-free indie-electro or b) dreadful cluttered amelodic hook-free top 40 a la Lady Gaga. ("JUST. DANCE." is not a hook in 2009 ok? It just sounds like you were too lazy to think up good lyrics).

right now mainstream rap is the only genre I've found that utilizes the elements I like properly, but I'm worried that its top 40 side is going down the same unfortunate path as Lady Gaga et al (see: Flo Rida "Right Round")

"JUST. DANCE." is not a hook in 2009 ok? It just sounds like you were too lazy to think up good lyrics

no worse than Britney's "Gimme gimme more gimme more gimme gimme more" really (better tho that track is)

agree that 'Right Round' is awful tho

definitely worse than gimme more imo

TS: "JUST. DANCE." vs "PUH-PUH-PUH-POKER FACE PUH-PUH-POKER FACE"

vs "UMBERELLA-ELLA-ELLA AY AY AY"

I'm hesitant to call her "high-energy" since her two radio hits are 119 bpm.

Yeah, that's why I didn't spell it "Hi NRG." I mean, she clearly has energy (and her beats do too), even if they might not get played on anybody's 12 Noon Aerobics Show like Evelyn Thomas or Miquel Brown or Pamala Stanley used to. She's hardly mellow.

i just find the latter quite amusing ("Pukka face? wtf?") and not particularly annoying (the "MOMOMOMO" after it helps) xposts

Just Dance just doesn't strike me as exceptional in any way. it's not bad, but it doesn't get me excited.

dan plz transcribe the lyrics to "caterpillar girl"

vs "KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-KUHTA-CATERPILLER GIRL"

I think that's the thing about "Poker Face" that irritates me so much; the chorus is decent but most of the song reeks of budget "Umbrella", and I don't actually like "Umbrella".

xhuxk, i'm still not convinced either, but i'm on the fence. can metal mike work in a comparison to the new york dolls? i think that would make me like her.

i don't hear Umbrella in Poker Face at all, and the rihanna references in general are lost on me ::shrugs::

i can see the comparison with 'Disturbia' because they're songs with same aims and palette (but 'Poker Face' is the more twisted variation - maybe even a better song overall? didn't really like 'Disturbia')

true i didn't think of Disturbia

i also dig that the album/gaga is bringing out the "pop music haters" and making them crazy. hahaha sorry all you music-hippies, her lyrics (the best ones) are awesome.

Heavy HEAVY lols if Metal Mike thinks the Lex is a pop music hater. Will he seize up if he learns the truth?

or any of us, I feel like Lady Gaga is more offensive to people who really LOVE pop music.

so if i'm not offended, i don't really LOVE pop music?

proved by LOGIC

oh come on now, if I though anybody actually listened to anything I said on this board I just wouldn't post. But her "this is fashion this is art" bs just seems really condescending to pop music, like she's being ultra clever and intertextual and using pop music as this culture she can act out her Downtown '82 fantasies with. This bs rarely flies with me because it just seems so condescending, like it wants to have its cake and eat it, the giddy thrills of pop music but the respectability of being OMG TOTALLY AVANT or whatevs. Like Surmounter I think pointed out, Blackout was way more twisted and arty than this but we didn't have Britney mouthing off about deconstructivist pop music. Like, bonkers pop music has always existed and her acting like she's some post-ironic take on it while really sounding fairly conventional is both 0_o and annoying at the same time and my face isn't able to contort into an expression that communicates my reaction to this silliness.

How dare you hate pop, you hippie.

¯\(°_o)/¯

the moral is 'show don't tell'

well, yeah

I mean srsly, if your idea of being a serious artist is running around without wearing pants, you might need to get a couple of new ideas.

^^^

the moral is also 'lady gaga has done too many drugs'

altho i love some of her hot "pants" outfits

I think the overcoked ego thing is pretty much to blame.

Still waitng for somebody to pinpoint what the precedents for her synth sounds are, btw. (There must be lots, seeing how she's doing nothing new and all.)

NOW IT'S ON

SNL's Deep House Dish

Her synth sounds are all warmed over Belgian nu-beat circa 1992 (specifically thinking the Praga Khan axis, but also stuff like A Split Second); these same sounds have been all over major pop records for several years (the most ILMesque predecessor probably being Nelly Furtado's "Maneater").

(see also stuff like Underworld's "Two Months Off" or "David" by Gus Gus)

But her "this is fashion this is art" bs just seems really condescending to pop music, like she's being ultra clever and intertextual and using pop music as this culture she can act out her Downtown '82 fantasies with. This bs rarely flies with me because it just seems so condescending, like it wants to have its cake and eat it, the giddy thrills of pop music but the respectability of being OMG TOTALLY AVANT or whatevs.

yes. this sort of posturing lost its meaning a long time ago, and I'm surprised how much the pop music machine thinks it can get away with saying "lol aren't the icons we're pushing upon you such hedonistic, out-of-touch bastards, doesn't it just make you sick." I mean, I know the public has basically said it loves this kind of shit, but how much more can it take before it gets bored and maybe a bit ticked off?

although I do kind of have to say kudos to them for finding an iteration of Paris Hilton who can carry a tune

xhuxk do you believe Lady Gaga has yet reached the same brilliant artistic caliber of Brooks & Dunn?

curt1s he's established that he's not a big gaga fan he's just sharing metal mike's filibuster

yeah sorry

hasty zingz

I like brooks & dunn btw

and xhuxk of course

not sure why people bother to try and zing his championing of non-canonical acts when his unwillingness to prune c+ps and defensive oversharing of how little he's willing to look up about an act he's dismissing seems a lot more annoying.

yes one thing this board needs more of is detailed arguing on how we can make fun of each other more effectively

if someone was writing "lol u like the cure" on this thread I'd do the same for you

Not all music listening is a research project, for crissakes, Miccio. And I would have editing Metal Mike's rambling down more if the Voice was still paying me to do so. But who cares -- I just put on A Split Second's 1993 Vengeance C.O.D. CD for the first time in years, and it's great. I like Belgian nu-beat circa 1982; have no real problem with somebody warming it over now, though I wish Gaga (and Furtado) sounded more Belgian. Have to thank Hi Dere for making the comparison though.

no one's saying you have to research to listen, chuck.

No, just to talk.

surprised such an easy target has such a huge thread... i mean no one really takes her seriously except for the teenage girls and homos she's targetting anyway.

i don't get how she can be praised for using 'cool synth sounds' when her two big singles utilize literally the exact same synth sound. also, and i know this is stupid seeing as we're all arguing with disembodied emails, i'd like to know why "poker face" is necessary after "just dance".

i think there are way more homos against her and straights for her than vice versa on this thread (and in xhuxk's inbox)

xpost

surprised such an easy target has such a huge thread... i mean no one really takes her seriously except for the teenage girls and homos she's targetting anyway.

― fauxmarc, Thursday, March 19, 2009 11:10 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this is true for like kimya dawson post-juno, gaga's one of the two or three biggest pop stars atm right now

though I wish Gaga (and Furtado) sounded more Belgian

did you ever hear Girls Aloud's 'The Show'?

they ARE different, jordan. and i don't think just dance is as solid as you think it is.

i mean no one really takes her seriously except for the teenage girls and homos she's targetting anyway.

― fauxmarc, Thursday, March 19, 2009 12:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this statement makes me feel weird

Basically, all of that stuff was all over rave/dance music in the early 90s, started leaking into pop via crossovers like Snap! and Bizarre Inc, then detoured into hip-hop via Eminem/D-12 in the early 00s. I feel like it's been inescapable in pop music since 2004/2005, so I really don't get how or why people are saying they've never heard anything quite like it before. (ESPECIALLY when Rihanna AKA the singer who does "Umbrella"/"Don't Stop The Music"/"Disturbia" is so omnipresent)

And yeah, "Poker Face" is different from "Just Dance" in that "JD" is a decent enough song and "PF" is fucking horrible.

rong

i don't really hear Don't Stop the Music in these 2 songs at all either

another thing w/ her is that her annoyingness is manifested at least once in both singles, each time ruining or almost ruining a pretty good song. the puh-puh-poker face part in "poker face" is so horrifying and as much as i love "just dance" the bridge is unlistenable

it's far more stripped down xp

the puh-puh-poker face part in "poker face" is so horrifying

nope

I don't mind songs that are barely songs if there's something else about them I find engaging, whether it be the foundational beat, the arrangement, some weird sound effect, or, you know, ANYTHING. "Poker Face" is a warmed over retread of "Just Dance" with most of the singing (aka the best part of "Just Dance") taken out and replaced with some of the most irritating bullshit on the airwaves since whatever Chris Brown's last single was.

"just dance" is great, as i said on this thread earlier, to me because it breaks free of the trappings youd imagine youd find in a synth-pop song in 2008. its synth is huge and identifiable and lyrically it's as graphic and vivid as anything on the radio. "poker face" on the other hand uses nearly the same synth sound as "just dance" and is also pretty lame lyrically, esp. in the chorus

it sounds pretty ordinary to me

JD

the one good thing about it is the "i love this record baby" line

Poker Face is a pretty decent single. Its just Lady Gaga that I think is a BAD THING FOR MUSIC. Also Xenomania.

Chris Brown's last single was Superhuman fyi

agree totally w/ Surm's last few posts abt that song

I'm usually not a huge lyrics guy but the whole "I'm fucking blasted; maybe if I keep dancing everything will be okay" narrative trumps "uh, I wanna hump this guy... POKER FACE!"

the 1st line in poker face is so good it hurts

Yeah, I actually kinda like this stuff when I hear it on the radio but I don't really listen to the radio all that much so I don't really get hung up on overplay fatigue with this stuff. Its the way its being framed that pisses me off and I suppose its a bit like guys on Vampire Weekend thread frothing about Pitch4k reviews.

And yeah, "Poker Face" is different from "Just Dance" in that "JD" is a decent enough song and "PF" is fucking horrible.

^^ I kind of think the opposite

I don't mind songs that are barely songs if there's something else about them I find engaging, whether it be the foundational beat, the arrangement, some weird sound effect, or, you know, ANYTHING

exactly, except i think Poker Face actually does have this, in the 'barely qualifying' sense - more so than 'Just Dance' altho that's better in every other department and is carried mainly by vocal qualities and better song structure

I blame Gwen Stefani for all this BTW

I like the CANTREADMY, CANTREADMY bit

gwen stefani can be blamed for most things

I would buy GS way more as a pop-provocateur than LG

It's not Gwen's fault that she can do vacuous self-regard well and others can't!

once i bought one of her CD's, i thought it would be a fun thing to do. turned out i was wrong

hollaback girl sounds like it was written by Uncle Kracker

yeah well you NEVER buy CDs by any of these people, they are rather blatantly singles artists

i do love hollaback tho, kind of a lot

good

lol curtis

i would pay $40 to see uncle kracker cover "hollaback girl" while dressed as stefani and dancing w/ the harujuku girls

I... would not

I'd pay $40 not

I apologize for my attitude on this thread. I've been listening to top 40 radio regularly again for the first time since like 2003 and it's making me cynical

so that hardbody brooks & dunn zing was like top 40 roid rage then?

Chuck is OTM regarding her quasi-electroclash schtick (which is kind of what I was getting at re: the overall American Apparel aesthetic here), especially considering her vague aspirations to some kind of performance art (which she talks up incessantly, but which I have yet to see manifest itself in the recorded output).

As for the synths, they sound to me like the pretty standard sounds used throughout trance music for years. Her main trick seems to be to layer a bunch of "supersaw" type chords, big buzzy monsters, and offset them with a slightly different lead -- not sure how to describe it, but kind of hollow, tubular and striated. It's not a bad trick. But I don't think there's anything crazy inventive about her synth work that you couldn't find done with more nuance in Depeche Mode or The Knife. (But I'm not gonna tell Mike what kind of synths he should like; that's just my read on their precedents.)

especially considering her vague aspirations to some kind of performance art (which she talks up incessantly, but which I have yet to see manifest itself in the recorded output)

reminds me of someone else...FISCHERSPOONER. Empire Of The Sun making similar worrying noises recently too.

ah yes, but fischerspooner have the deitch imprimatur, therefor they are FOR RILLZ!

I thought it was kinda funny when Fischerspooner did it, and I'm sure someone's gonna google a quote that proves me wrong in five seconds, but they always came across in interviews as thinking the whole thing was pretty ridiculous and funny too.

yeah well you NEVER buy CDs by any of these people, they are rather blatantly singles artists

Suggest Ban Permalink
― Wes HI DEREson (HI DERE), Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:33 AM Bookmark

Love Angel Music Baby is a dope album tho

This is true.

the way she enunciates the d in "he can't read my poker face" is nice

also i'm unsure why the "puh-puh-puh poker" bit confuses ppl so much, i thought there was plenty stuttering happening in music these days

this song is like taking over my life right now

"confuses" isn't really the right word for the reaction that part gets from people.

what is it?

"revulsion"

:(

it revulsions people

lazy sry

funny kinda

i gotta say, her performance on idol tonight was kinda awesome

http://t.love.com/200255707

dunno why "poker face" has to have that awful "puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh poker face" part in it but oh well

btw i never thought i would like someone if they became MORE like nellie mckay but whaddya know

dunno why "poker face" has to have that awful "puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh poker face" part in it but oh well

lol that is the best part

judging various parts of "Poker Face" seems like a fools game to me considering they all suck

"Poker Face" has pretty much the same problem as the Veronicas' "Untouched" -- big awkward gulf between the melodic chorus and the inane talky verses with cheesy vocal filters. "Untouched" kind of survives that problem because the hook is great, "Poker Face" not so much.

"Untouched" also survives because of the frantic energy in the inane talky verses.

She's got the #1 single again.

well what can you en expect in a world that embraces Flo Rida

I'll take no-personality-ass Flo Rida over smug, hatable Lady Gaga any day of the week, thank you.

Reverend hitting it hard time and time again on this thread. Good sir you are a service to us all.

He is, and these other remarks -

especially considering her vague aspirations to some kind of performance art (which she talks up incessantly, but which I have yet to see manifest itself in the recorded output)

reminds me of someone else...FISCHERSPOONER

- really, really OTM. It made my eyeballs bleed a bit.

ooh Poker face is no.1?!! see, i'm not THAT late on this one

judging various parts of "Poker Face" seems like a fools game to me considering they all suck

― prins tuomas (The Reverend), Thursday, April 2, 2009 3:07 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

LOL

waht

http://i44.tinypic.com/2z4fx9s.jpg

(after you get over the pantyhose shock: I hope those guys are dancing)

jesus christ

no words

her existence is a joke, right?

then the joke is on me

we're all soaking in the joke

ewww

There's some flesh-colored panties on under there right?

But re: Poker face, the melodic chorus really is so much better than the rap-lite verses and especially the pu-pu-pokerface breakdown which is just awful. Same deal, to a lesser extent with Just Dance, the verses are actually cool but her "hip hypnotic gin-n-tonic chronic" bridge thing kinda derails the song, and the version with Kardinal Offishull or whatever retarded way he spells his name is even worse. How did this schmuck become the go-to Canadian dancehall guest MC for pop songs? That Dangerous song was banging but would have been so much better with a better rapper on it.

"i'm bluffin' with my muffin" ?!?!?!?

Fuck you, Kardinal Offishal is great. He's just a bit past his prime.

Actually, the problem with him currently is more that he's stuck making all these bad pop moves than that he's lost anything, but seriously, he's behind a lot of banging shit.

his verse on the "just dance" remix is pretty cool imo

the single he had w/ clipse was great also, "dangerous" is bullshit tho

I knew someone would come back at me with a well-thought out defense of Offishal. Mind you that I know nothing of his illustrious past in the Canadian dancehall scene and am basing my dislike of him purely on the recent radio songs he has pissed all over.

And you gotta admit that spelling is pretty stupid.

his verse on the reggae remix of "grindin" is also a classic

Verse 3: Kardinal Offishall
Kardi, yo, yo, they just keep holdin me, won't let go, provokin me
Niggas tryin to stop my doe
Well if it isn't, Mr. Canadian (BO!!!!) Mr. Canuck
T Dot niggas (Pharrell: Grindin!) we don't give a (BO!!!!)
Mr. Kardinal steal dem fronts out of your mouth
Flip it for a pound of herb and sell it in front of your house
Badbwoy big talk put this somethin pon cock
Whine out yuh dutty claat down south to up north
Weh di man dem a seh? Five plus two yo we flip that a (Ten)
Mek di english pound di paste up plus di (Yen)
Still fire pon a fassy and grind di gal dem (How yuh mean?)
Seen, come again, we mek di green yuh know,
Swell it to di seem yuh know
Chronic supersonic tonic juggle it to a fiend yuh know
Mr. Kardinal deal with the mic rockin V.A. to the dot
Stop whinin when we (Pharell: Grinding!)

He's more of a rap artist w/ strong dancehall influences than a dancehall artist.

These are both circa-01/02

and "rappers be spellin shit wrong" is one the most zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........zzz....

I don't know how anyone gets off on criticizing Kardinal when Lady Gaga exists.

i dont know that i would pass off "the spelling 'offishall' is dumb" as "rappers be spelling shit wrong"

Word roxy. I like plenty of misspelled rap names. It's just this particular one that strikes me as really dumb. I like how I turned this into a Kardinal Offishall thread though.

"Bakardi" is ridiculous too.

The spelling I mean.

I'm listening to "Poker Face" for the first time and it's kind of insulting how many elements they recycle from "Just Dance"; the whole thing strikes me as completely unremarkable. Can someone please point out specifics of why this song is special or enjoyable? On a side note, the "pop music will never be low brow" thing was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, right?

i find Poker Face far more enjoyable than Just Dance because the melody pulls me in much more. I also love all the loopy editing on the vocals and the crunchy synths.

i hear how it's very similar to Just Dance but this isn't something i hear initially, only when it has been pointed out.

Really?? It was the very first thing I heard, especially in the intros. It's like they were locked in a room and had to create every song with exactly the same instruments/effects/etc.

yeah their first few seconds are almost indistinguishable

i guess it just didn't seem that odd to me for 2 songs off the same album to use the same synth sounds

these 2 songs relate to one another in a way that reminds me of how the songs on Confessions on a Dance Floor do.

Also, I know it's extremely silly to attempt to critique lyrical content of modern pop music, but does anyone else find "Just Dance" particularly distasteful? "Go out and get grossly drunk and it's OK if you get raped or something because you can JUST DANCE YOUR CARES AWAY"

not really, that's a pretty common theme

Someone needs to photoshop Andrei Arshavin into that show photo that was linked above.

i just had to google the lyrics to make sure there wasn't actually a line in the song that goes "it's OK if you get raped"

http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/?em3106=227515_-1__0_~0_-1_5_2008_0_0&em3161=&em3281=

^^^^important video

Actually this makes me really love the song while it's playing.

youtube

what a world

muh muh muh maah

can't believe i'm posting this, but a series of really good interviews w/lady gaga on youtube:

part 1
part 2
part 3

That Nosferatu YouTube is tremendous.

What in the fuck

http://12.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kq4it9PWag1qz6dydo1_500.png

http://blip.tv/file/2599151?utm_source=featured_ep&utm_medium=featured_ep

Oompa Loompa, do-be-de do
I've got another
crap outfit for you

Oompa Loompa, do-be-de de
If you want to look like a tool
then dress just like me

Why not wear a bin liner to work?
Look like an attention seeking jerk

Top it off with fake tan and a hat
Then you'll look like a prat

I don't like the look of it.

Oompa Loompa do-be-de da
If you wear odd clothes
you can be a pop star

You will get a number one or two
Like the Oompa Loompas do-be-de do

Do-be-de do

she ugly

christina aguilera has made uneven fake tan her trademark, its prolly an ironic reference

sorry bro but christina's tan never looked that bad! also she's actually hot

http://www.realself.com/files/imagecache/blog/christina%20aguilera%20bad%20fake%20tan.jpg

I used to really hate xtina for a lot of the reasons that ppl hate on gaga now, but to her credit her pretension rocket never got off the ground while gaga's went into orbit.

Also, would Leona Lewis qualify as vacuous pop?

ok that tan isn't so hot but she does NOT always look like that

what are these "same reasons"? they seem SOOOOOO different to me

fucking leona lewis' tan is like, vomit inducing

ew like i saw her on tv with that tan, and i really could NOT believe no one said anything to her. she likes like burnt sienna

*looks

yeah for one, xtina had great songs.. xxxp

I dunno, I remember about the time of Stripped when she was, you know, expressing herself and stuff and I hated the production on almost everything she did and the way she sang, with I dunno what you call it, kinda like what country singers and alanis morisette do, where a syllable gets broken in two and the notes comes from a different part of the head, the way she did it made it sound like what a load of girls I knew who were into singing did when they wanted to sound like Mariah Carey. Also I was a huge Britney fan and I was true to the cause lol! Admittedly there is no comparison with Lady Gaga that is unfair, sorry x.

ok. i know her singing style was weird. but like i said on a thread a while ago, she is working with Ladytron to "soften her style" or whatever. also, dirrty will always be fucking amazing, so will fighter and pretty much the entirity of stripped, trumpet singing or not.

leona lewis has a fake tan? wtf?

yeah they are sooo different, but Candyman is a weirdly pretentious singe, much more wtf than any Gaga single IMO, and its kinda since then that I like her a lot more, that last single was fun and she seems like she would be kinda cool now, also amazing that she isn't a weirdo yet.

I think her next album will be good to fwiw

well, the last xtina was a mixed bag, but on the whole it's really fuckin good (Back to basics). yes candyman was very pretentious and kind of annoying.

blueski i hope you're kidding. do i have to post pix

i never want to hear candyman again, but i liked that she put it out and it made me root for her more than anything on stripped which is not my bag

some of the other songs on Back to basics, u would really like.

blueski i hope you're kidding. do i have to post pix

pls

http://www.leona-lewis.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/leona-lewis-sydney.jpg

:(

this is a much better look on leona
http://cm1.theinsider.com/media/0/69/53/leona-lewis.0.0.0x0.428x419.jpeg

I think a lot of what is so infuriating about Gaga is that no matter how otherwise pretentious she is, that her music itself is far in the other direction of being totally workaday. If she could at least stick to one extreme, she would be more ignorable.

looks more like makeup than fake tan to me but i'm not an expert

stripped is a pretty amazing album imo. needs a poll at some point.

i can't decide whether i'd rather gaga's music lived up to the image or whether her rhetoric lived down to the music.

My dislike of Gaga has lessened somewhat since I realised the following:

a) I really like Cascada's very gagaist "Evacuate the Dancefloor"; and

b) Few if any people actually appear to swallow her schtick wholeheartedly;

c) Only the disco stick song actively annoys me when it comes on the radio now.

If I ignore her copy she's basically just Dannii with a better hit rate?

She seems less of a "problem" in this regard than most other leading lights of nu pop. I'm much more likely to read something disagreeable in a Daniel Merriweather review than I am in a Gaga review.

The other issue - and why Dannii is a relevant point of comparison here - is rule 5 of my taxonomy, namely that persistence is its own reward in the realm of camp pop. Each time Gaga pulls off some truly horrifying photoshoot, sh's actually wearing down your (or at least my) resistance so that next time you're (i'm) more likely to laugh with her rather than sneer at her.

I disliked Gaga from the moment I read the press-release accompanying my for-review copy of "Just Dance". But it's a truism to note that simply by hanging around and getting noticed and talked about, artists tend to seem less and less defined by their stage-managed debutante presentation over time, regardless of how much they try to shore it up.; One doesn't need to backlash against gaga so strongly now that the idea of gaga-backlash is engrained into her public image so unmistakeably.

as i've said elsewhere, my resistance to gaga is on the verge of crumbling. it hasn't yet - thx for reminding me about "disco stick"! - but apparently i danced to "poker face" at a wedding last wkend :(

i mean, partially or even largely this can be put down to the regrettable rise of much worse people, la cunting roux. after dealing with elly jackson i find i have very little hatred left over for anyone else. except dan black, who thankfully hasn't become successful enough to annoy on a daily basis.

i don't get cascada at all tho. i don't hate it but i can't imagine having strong feelings, or ANY feelings, about it.

it's easy to dance to music you don't like if it has a strong beat. I have danced to flo rida's "right round" on more than one occasion and I think that song is stupid as balls

I like her a lot on the Wale song

'evacuate the dancefloor' is so great

Cascada's very gagaist "Evacuate the Dancefloor"

awesome.

I look forward to the Bonzo Dog Gaga band.

fucking leona lewis' tan is like, vomit inducing

― surm, Sunday, 20 September 2009 18:51 (Yesterday) Bookmark

Ummm... doesn't she have naturally tanned skin, also known as being a black woman?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne2kRxUwndo

If you ignore the fucking ridiculous thing on her head, this performance is fantastic. I'm still not entirely convinced by the song but I am more convinced than ever that she's got some serious talent, which kind of makes how annoying she is even worse (ha, it's the "Kanye Effect").

omg cannot believe i watched almost 1.5 parts of 3 part lady gaga interview where she says fame is a thing u can get and i got it like paris hilton did - its a pretty tedious pov

she seems to think shes pimped some deep understanding of the mechanisms of fame - but its more like wow look how crazy that girl is dressed o hey this song is stuck in my head isnt it

Ummm... doesn't she have naturally tanned skin, also known as being a black woman?

― Samuel (a hoy hoy), Monday, 21 September 2009 12:53 (1 hour ago) Permalink

ummm, i know the difference between being black and having gross chemicals on your skin. thanks.

also lex, i think there was a poll on stripped! didn't dan start it?

anyway i think everyone gives gaga too much credit with all the buzz. it's like, that's what she wants...

she's just a talented, annoying pop star.

agreed completely, minus the talented part

idk she is definitely "talented" on a basic "can hit notes, write hooks" level, esp compared with the fucking amateurs we endure in the UK who can do none of those things, LA ROUX.

i think she's talented but is not translating that talent into songs i can stand

^^^^^ this

I heard a disco remix of "Paparazzi" on Saturday that was really, really great and just made me even more annoyed and irritated with the original.

cad otm

I just saw that MTV awards performance she did. It was really affecting because of all the costumes and because it's basically melodrama. Her voice wasn't very controlled, but she's moving around a lot. You don't really notice because of all the stagework, though. The shakiness almost made the whole thing seem more dramatic.

That's the only thing I've ever heard her do, though, except the disco stick song. This one, this paparazzi song, was okay. If I had a recording of that performance I would not listen to it.

Wait wait. I just remembered that I wasn't really posting to share my opinion, but that I wrote to ask what people thought of that performance.

Paparazzi is such a beautiful song. video's pretty good too, it turns out.

the VMAs were for me at least the first time she's edged into more entertaining than merely annoying territory

http://www.bollywood91.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/lady-gaga-vma-pictures.jpg

bottom right pic is Goldfrapp meets KISS

I love that term "Gagaist."

i'm pretty much obsessed with these gaga mind control articles

http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=2614

good lookin from this guy

http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/30761512.jpg

i think i kinda like "poker face" now. stuck in my head so much :/

it's never quite satisfactory when i listen though, her voice is so flat and that bluffing with my muffin rap needs to die forever

"bad romance" is MASSIVE

A Taxonomy of Vorpal Jabberwock

xpost

"Bad Romance" is great, and as I care about her less for no particular reason I become more comfortable with "Paparazzi" being just-plain-awesome.

Here Lex, I'm sure you'll just love Chris Daughtry's rendition, which gets rid of the "bluffin/muffin" bit, thus making it perfect and very enjoyable to listen to. Really. Go ahead. Click it and see for yourself.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/t90dFkM9acg&hl=en&fs=1&";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/t90dFkM9acg&hl=en&fs=1&"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Show formatting help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t90dFkM9acg

those articles are blowing my miiiind.

what are they about? i don't have the patience to read them.

paparazzi is still giving me chills.

i basically refuse to listen to any of her newer singles out of fear that i might like them

lol

that stuffed animal dress on her is fucking gorgeous

reminds me of an awesome outfit i saw in vogue last month, with a top made out of beautiful little stuffed leopards.

She's more competent as a songwriter than most people would like to admit, right? I kinda like that song she wrote for Michael Bolton.

i love those articles

References to mind control, to secret societies, to Baphomet and to Metropolis are too widespread to be coincidences or results of artistic expression. There is an obvious media campaign pushing these elements into pop culture. What should we do about it? MTV says: Just dance.

was it someone here who showed me this comparison between roisin and gaga? http://idolator.com/5263432/roisin-murphy-knows-that-lady-gagas-imitation-is-in-fact-flattery kinda funny

The truth is somehow both weirder and more mind-boggling mundane than I ever thought.

I'm gonna bump this thread and leave it for my SisX0r to read and be amused be.

Yesterday the news went around that Irish dance innovator Roisin Murphy had called out the steamroller that is Lady GaGa for ripping off her style

lol

I didn't know Roisin was into Riverdance.

you know if lady gaga hadn't become really famous straight off, then most of her songs and stuff would be lyrically really mad

lookin kinda annie lennox to me here

http://www.popjustice.com/images/stories/g/gagabadromvid10.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4KQksDXhjQ

awesome

yeah i have to say that now i'm over her going on abt being a pop-construct r whatever, I'm totally in love with her a little, just watching her do live performances on youtube and she really is one of those next level popstars, nothing amateurish but pure charisma and great vocals always. She is a fucking awesome piano player too.

still hate the fame but she has a great album in her at least

Way way cuter with that hair.

my sister claims that clip is "pre nosejob"

don't know if she still has it now, but she had quite a schnoz on her when she was first blowing up

i think she's kept it.

i would prolly like to hang out with your sister xp

yeah she's just talented and cool

kinda wish she'd go more jazzy on some songs these days, instead of all electro all the time

the impression these clips give me is that she's giving over to all the wrong impulses, she's totally over the top on all her conceptual bs while i wish she would be a bit more self indulgent with the crazy piano playing and actually awesome pipes. Really i just get the impression that she's sacrificing making the awesome music she wants to make at least a little bit in favour of maintaining some trashpop aesthetic that works with the r'n'ziggy thing she's tryna pull.

haha ramzi i think u would, she's a pretty scary girl, says them how she sees them

i think she just kinda likes it. and the fact that it still sounds interesting given all the crap she puts on top of it says at least something. you're right tho, her pipes need a little more room in her mixes. good voice.

ha i've been meaning to bump this thread for the past few days due to my inability to stop listening to the PCDs' 'i hate this part' but i still don't have anything else to say about tim's taxonomy yet

― lex pretend, Thursday, October 23, 2008 1:51 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"I Hate This Part" holds up really well, though I associate it specifically with fall 2008 and the falling-off-the-cliff start of the recession.

This thread is strongly carbon dated by the subsequent twists and turns in Lady Gaga's career.

ugh wow at all the "tranny" language and "ew she's ugly" type stuff in this thread's early days. not ILM's finest hour.