Lady Gaga - ARTPOP [2012]

Naw. I kind of hate her now.

did she even do anything in the past year to make you change your mind?

I think it's me that's changed more than her.

Suddenly, the Koons is you.

fame monster is front-to-back classic but everything since has been shit

dammit I don't wanna think about these lyrics but now there they are, printed upthread and I'm sitting here puzzling over Lady Gaga's use of prepositions, like does she even understand the relationships implied and not implied by a simple little word such as "in"? imagine a venn diagram of the scaffolding of inclusion and containment implied by this song, with "me" as the largest class/category, which then contains "art", and then that contains "pop culture"- it goes without saying, but the grotesque egotistical sublime of these lyrics couldn't be more blatant and obnoxious. Then we've got the equation/synonymy shenanigans, I = Koons; Koons = I, and if I = me then it would follow that Koons, too, contains "art" and, by extension, "popular culture". I bet she's not an idiot but she sure sounds like one on this tune.

fame monster is front-to-back classic but everything since has been shit

otm

i actually prefer this new thing to any BTW single tho

uh, it's kunst, no?

Lyric video says Koons.

haha yeah, I just watched it. so funny

So any predictions where this will end chart-wise? I think her lowest right now is marry the night at #29. She didn't stutter on that one did she? -oh no wait, I think she did... ma, ma, ma, marry... lol mammary.

Anyhoo I predict this will end up between 5 and 9 depending on what else gets released around this quarter.

I think it'll debut in the top 5 in most countries off digital sales alone. What it does from there, though, may not be pretty.

Jeff Koons that is

How are people shocked by her sub-quality lyrics on Applause when Poker face sounded like a Mad TV skit? And BTW is a cluttered mess, but it has some of her best songs on it. Terrible single choices and people being turned off by her in your face 'activism' with that record is why it left a bad taste in people's mouths. Out of the 76 tracks that were associated with that album, more than half were actually pretty good.

How are people shocked by her sub-quality lyrics on Applause when Poker face sounded like a Mad TV skit?

very important question

Excessive album is excessive.

it will probably scrape the top 10 on the billboard charts this week

"How are people shocked by her sub-quality lyrics on Applause when Poker face sounded like a Mad TV skit? And BTW is a cluttered mess, but it has some of her best songs on it. Terrible single choices and people being turned off by her in your face 'activism' with that record is why it left a bad taste in people's mouths. Out of the 76 tracks that were associated with that album, more than half were actually pretty good."

OTM

Follow up question: How many of the singles will feature Lady Gaga stuttering the song's title? Here are the previous stats:

The Fame: Just Dance, Pokerface, Love Game, Paparazzi (4/4 = 100%)
The Fame Monster: Bad Romance, Alejandro, Telephone (3/3 = 100%)
Born This Way: Born this way, Judas, You and I, Edge of Glory, Marry the Night (4/5 = 80%)
Artpop: Applause - (1/1 = 100%)

I'm counting the stammering on 'you and i', 'edge of glory' and 'love game' as stuttering even though she actually completes the phrase on these 3 but she keeps fixated on repeating the same words (e.g. "you, you and I", "the edge, the edge, the edge...(∞)" "a love game, love game"). If we remove those the numbers would be;

The Fame: Just Dance, Pokerface, Love Game, Paparazzi (3/4 = 75%)
The Fame Monster: Bad Romance, Alejandro, Telephone (3/3 = 100%)
Born This Way: Born this way, Judas, You and I, Edge of Glory, Marry the Night (2/5 = 40%)
Artpop: Applause - (1/1 = 100%)

Looks like Applause has debuted at #6.

that breakdown was amazing, Moka, you need to publish a longer version of that somewhere

hey, I'm not that bored.

I would be happy to put it up on Freaky Trigger, Moka, crediting and linking to you of course!

Born This Way is a perfectly fine album brought down by overexposure, hype and her obnoxious behavior during the promotion of it.

The messy nature of BTW is what made it so compelling, to me at least. I spent all year trying to figure it out, and when I looked back, I discovered I'd spent more time with it than anything else in 2011.

The stuttering thing would make a good thread. I'm curious about the history of that. So many pop songs do it now, but not in that My Generation sense of stuttering the first syllable. There are a couple of threads about that. The thing of repeating an ending syllable seems like something different and newer that's influenced by doing a stutter effect on sampled vocals or on a turntable. Some songs like Umbrella almost remind me of the subtractive/additive trick on Bat Macumba by Os Mutantes, but I'm sure there are other clearer precedents.

BTW was first brought down by "Judas" being the 2nd single. I'm sure if "Edge Of Glory" had been released instead it would have gone to #1 and kept the momentum for the album going. Then she decided to release a really disapointing video for EOG and that pretty much killed the interest and goodwill people had left towards the project. (x-post)

i love "Edge" and i think it was rendered more palatable by following "Judas" but i somehow doubt that releasing it on the heels on "Born" would've really had a substantially different result. i love to play fantasy A&R but i've never been able to think up an alternate Born This Way singles campaign that i can believe would've had a far bigger commercial performance.

I think "Marry The Night" could have been an awesome single. Or maybe "Hair," but "Hair" was probably too close to "Edge."

I still like most of "Born This Way." If anything hurt it it's maybe that it came out right when she came off touring the US behind the last one - "Born This Way" was the final song of the encore when I last saw her - so perhaps people just couldn't or didn't want to keep up with her crazy pace? That hip injury came at just the right time for her to pivot (so to speak).

well, "Marry The Night" WAS a single, just her lowest charting one to date. it was actually going to be the album's lead single before she wrote "Born This Way," and while I'm not crazy about "BTW" I am glad that didn't happen. "Marry" and "Edge" have very similar choruses but i think "Edge" is so much better that it almost renders the other one irrelevant.

Wow, was it? I've literally never heard "Marry the Night" on the radio, whereas I still hear all her initial singles and "Edge." Not "Judas" or "Born This Way," though, come to think of it. But "Edge," yeah, pretty frequently.

yeah "Marry" was the campaign-ending 5th single, complete with boring 13-minute video. i wish she would've used that spot for one of the album's more overtly weird songs, she could've left us with a reminder that she's sometimes interesting instead of a failed last stab at radio.

"Hair" trimmed down a bit (haha) would've made a great single after EOG.
Although I like it, "Judas" is just too similar to "Bad Romance" and a bit too weird it put a lot of people off. It seems like they tried to play it safe by giving people a RedOne production but it failed.

If anything hurt it it's maybe that it came out right when she came off touring the US behind the last one

Her last single before that, "Alejandro", had been out for a long time. Sure she was touring, but radio was really waiting for some new material. I don't think I remember a new single as highly anticipated as "Born This Way" was. Way more than "Applause" or "Roar" were.

In fact I think this time she's been off the radio for too long and it's diminished her "power". Her last single dates back to 2011. That's something she forgot to pick up from Madonna who would always stay in the public eye during a tour or inbetween albums by having a soundtrack or one-off single.

Sure, but there was never a day before the release of "Born This Way" when every single one of her previous singles was not still in heavy rotation.

Bearing in mind how times have changed and the speed of the hypercycle, Madonna took 1988 and the first few months of 1989 off.

Marry The Night is one of my favorite tracks on BTW. I would've been happy with it as the lead single, and the part of the video when she's crawling around on the car at night with fire behind her—or whatever the specific imagery was—was cool.

I learned to enjoy it after my three-year-old niece imitated the dancing and her ground roll.

And it seemed really strange at the time. (x-post)

Yeah the video for "Marry The Night" is cool. Especially when it looks like she's going to get in a car with a 6 ft wide hat. I wish the song sounded more like "Flashdance" though.

Re: BTW singles, I listen to or am just in places to hear a fair amt of pop radio and barely remember hearing BTW itself or Judas

"Judas" had negligible airplay, only got to #15 on the Pop Songs chart (and "Marry The Night" got to #14)

it's interesting that she's expended so much time and energy touring all over the world that it feels like the kind of things that really make someone like her seem like a star, a constant barrage of singles and videos and a general pop culture presence, have been neglected.

Well, you can't do everything at the same time. But I basically agree with all of the above - goes back to my comments way upthread or on BTW thread (leading to New Jersey mania) that BTW despite its vastness left her a smaller star at the end of everything. I think what she needs to do more than anything is just focus on having a really, really good album full of singles that people like, hum, and relate to. A little too much of her output has been premised on assuming that she's the biggest star in the world and that she can trade on that, but I think she's burned through that capital. The last song she put out that I think made her any actual new fans was "Telephone" and that's now a whiiiiiile ago.

I dunno, I didn't really have much time for her until BTW in all its sprawl.

(Yeah, OK, "Telephone" was pretty great.)

tell me about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vEStDd6HVY

Be still.

I think Born This Way the album was a great follow up to The Fame Monster and should have kept her way up there. But "Judas" was so badly received by radio they had to rush release "Edge Of Glory" like three weeks later and it kind of killed the pacing. The singles campain was over before the tour even started !
We'll see if ARTPOP can turn that around or if she'll become the Cyndi and Katy the Madonna (I hope not).

"marry the night" => => "edge of glory" => "government hooker" => "heavy metal lover" => "scheisse" => "you and I" => "electric chapel" if you need a #7

there is your revised singles cycle.

I still stand by Yoü and I as the monster sing that didn't quite have the support, though I'm sure I heard it more than Judas. The flipside should have been an even more countrified version, see if she could punch into that market (stranger things has happened altho one would have to avoid it being Lady Gaga As Stef Gaines) altho personally I love the weird hybrid that happens between her singing style and Mutt's pastiche of himself.