Lady Gaga needs her own thread

It's a question of - what is she: musicians or performance artist? And she scans initially and presents herself as a pop star (i.e. musician first and foremost). So while the image and so forth might be interesting, the central part of the package (the music) is sometimes good but never great.

Re the quality of her songs overall:

One of the problems with having written one incredible, indelible, perfect pop hit along with all your other perfectly decent journeyman work is that it tends to make the rest look like, well ... like perfectly decent journeyman work. You know?

poker face is 'incredible' 'indelible' 'perfect'??

what is this indelible perfect pop hit you speak of

yeah she could really be more show-not-tell instead of just going "this is post-modern! it's pop art! it's very gay and transgressive, can you handle it america!?"

If she were just an entertaining persona - a self-aware Paris Hilton writ large, lampooning our fucked up and strange relationship with the concept of celebrity fame and money I would be totally down with her. But her shtick includes videos, albums, and songs. So the middling quality of those necessarily have a bearing.

its super great but i prefer the song when presented by the avant-pop artist nosferatu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNOkGsI47E

now thats subversive

@Alex in Montreal: you phrase that as if performance art/musicianship are mutually exclusive?

i kinda feel like if you look back at some of the more high concept or kind of subversive stars in pop history, probably most of them made a big impact well before they really got credit for exactly what they were doing or started to really spell it out for people

lol criss angel poster

Pop star fails to sufficiently satirize pop music for non pop music fans shocker

It's like, I don't want NO gaga, I just want the Socratic Ideal of GaGa and not this bullshit real world version we are stuck with.

xp Not mutually exclusive! More that, if music is being included as part of your performance art, it had DAMN better be as good as a) your ideas, b) the rest of your performance and c) the music of the genre/scene/etc. that you are participating in/commenting on

If you try to satirize something you're not better or smarter than in any way then you're just..I dunno, Meet The Spartans?

NV i think the point here is that ppl who LIKE pop music find her stuff middling at best

Pop star fails to sufficiently satirize pop music for non pop music fans shocker

Yeah, whatever.

a) most of us ARE pop music fans.
b) she's made it perfectly clear that this is what she intends to do.

shes poorly satirizing all the way to the bank tbf

if you're going to claim the title of satirist/cultural commentator/provocateur and declare this fact in every interview you have in your first four months or so of exposure, you should not be surprised when people judge you on the basis of those claims.

xp so?

she's kind of like Marilyn Manson in how she just hammers home her agenda constantly and is like, looking around the room to see if she's getting the reaction she's looking for

so kudos for a successful business plan in this economy xp

marilyn manson could be a worse comparison

i don't really understand what that sentence means

sure, i mean she has achieved her goal of being famous

thats all im saying

I like the pretension, the transparent phoniness of the art posturing, the whole "my art is my celebrity" shtick. I don't like it cuz it's clever or deep; I like it cuz it's dumb, fun and funny. And cuz it somehow throws into harsh relief the fact that she's not a product, that she's a real person doing this very strange (and rare and probably terrifying, exhilarating) thing for a living. Kinda like Marilyn Manson in that regard. The goofball pretension adds a quality of humanity, of awkwardness to a genre that can sometimes seem rather impersonal. Or so it seems to me. I liked Peaches for similar reasons, though more (much more). I guess other people relate to other pop stars for other reasons...

honestly i wouldn't really give a fuck how she acts if i had just a single goddamn one of her songs in the non-album tracks section of my ipod

i am listening to bad romance now. i mean, really?

gaga ooh la la

lol it sounds like 6 people wrote parts of songs and then a 7th guy had to put them all together

man were there ever a bunch of lady gagas around here on halloween

she's a bad artist, but that's her best song imo xp

i could list off reasons why i don't like it but that would bore everyone. suffice it to say imo it is a horrible song.

i mean it makes her other songs sound like songs i would actually enjoy.

Re some earlier discussion, Pokerface really IS a perfect indelible incredible pop tune. To me, anyway, and I don't think I'm alone in that. It's least good enough to justify the sub-par follow-ups and cheezeball image-mongering (for an album or two). I suspect it'll become one of those songs that represents & summarizes its era in the American pop memory banks.

Agree with those who are disappointed & underwhelmed by most of her other would-be hits. I have friends who get all excited about them and make me watch youtube videos, but so far I agree that she's usually more interesting & entertaining than musically successful. And I guess I'm okay with that.

y'all suck. gaga ruelz, she writes great songs.

xp one thing you might be able to help me with is what makes poker face so above and beyond her other tunes iyo

It's kind of a cop out answer, but catchiness. I think it's an incredibly appealing song, just based on sound and feel. I went around singing it for WEEKS after hearing it only once. I don't know any music theory, so I can't really articulate this in a comprehensible fashion, but it hits me in a way that very few pop songs do. First time I heard it, it struck me in the same way that Hey Ya and Crazy did a few years back. It struck me as the sort of thing that would instantly and effortlessly appeal to almost everybody -- not just the typical audience for "that kind of thing", but everybody. Kids, moms & dads, indies, rockers: anyone with any taste for pop tunes. And it seems to me that I was right. Everybody I know likes it.

I don't think anything else she's written even comes close to Pokerface, but that's okay, because tons of people have adequate careers without ever writing anything that universally appealing. And she's just getting started.

I don't understand the "biggest melting pot" thing...sure there are a couple different things going on in her music at once, but that can be said of virtually everything else on the pop charts.

It seems she does this with more intensity than most, not only in her music, but especially in her image. In the video for "Bad Romance" I can see influences from Goldfrapp, Annie Lennox, Bjork, Britney Spears, Cher, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stephani, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Roisin Murphy, Rihanna, Soundgarden...

She's definitely pushing the "weird" enveloppe for a pop star and I think it might even alienate a bit of her younger female audience, but as said above will attract the gay crowd like flies.

The melodies and choruses just aren't strong enough.

I don't know how the choruses to "Paparazzi" and "Bad Romance" can be considered weak. And I'm pretty sure if Britney had done "Poker Face" most people here would have wet their pants. If we're honest, I think the general problem has to do with Lady Gaga herself rather than her music, which ranges from decent to great pop music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACm9yECwSso

if britney had done poker face it would have been fun but nothing will stop that chorus from sounding awkward to me

probably because it follows verses that seem out of place in comparison and are pretty bad

yeah that and she also kind of swallows the part immediately before "poker face" because there's room in there for a couple more syllables and (shocka) she doesn't have anything to say.

Oh come on with the shockas. You don't have to have anything to say to stick a couple xtra syllables in yr pop song, if you think they're necessary.

I am pleased she has stopped with the visors and the lightning slash and all those other "signature" signifiers - the record company trademark-iness of which rubbed the wrong way against her claims of being a brave iconoclast. It's not the lack of authenticity that grated, but the sense that she was trying to pass off the same image as being two separate things depending on who she was marketing to (i.e. both Spice Girl Readymade-Doll "brand" and David Bowie art-pop experiment) - rather like politicians trying to "position" themselves with regard to illegal immigrants so as to come off like they're on everybody's side, I felt Gaga's strategy came across as never-quite-true to any sincerely-held position.

Now that her costumes have just juped off the deep end into "i had an acid flashback this afternoon and described it to my stylist" territory her schtick seems more of-the-moment and therefore easier to get with. Like she hasn't really thought about how it will be received. To extend the politician analogy, it's like she talked to talked to get into government and now she's just doing what she wants to do.

juped = jumped.

I like juped better.

The chorus to Pokerface is really neat. Almost everything else I've heard has ranged from "eh? to "meh."

x-post

To extend the politician analogy, it's like she talked to talked to get into government and now she's just doing what she wants to do.

OTM, and it will be interesting, to say the least, to see how long a modern career can last when it's built on shocking pop fans and winking at the aforementioned niche groups. How long can she maintain both of them?

jesus

And btw does anyone know who is existentialism girl because I have some existentialism ideas that I would v much like to discuss w someone.