Not so GaGa
Filed Under Dale Cooper, Music
Hiya. I’m Special Agent Dale Cooper, intrepid FBI agent and pop culture commentator. I’m new to Porch Dog – hope to be popping up here regularly going forward. Now let’s get down to business.
Every so often we get a Lady GaGa. That is to say, we get a self-aggrandizing little pop twerp with a giant head and pretensions toward being an artiste. Lady GaGa types aren’t content with riding high on the Billboard charts and annoying the shit out of me while I’m enjoying my weekly lunch in the Mexican district around 79th and Michigan (explanation: “Poker Face” is currently enjoying great popularity on Mexican pop radio, and there’s a lot of that playing in certain of Indianapolis’s many taquerias.) No, they also have to claim to be contributing something of large and lasting value to the world, in the form of capital-A Art.
Pardon me while I cough up some stomach lining. …There, that’s better.
Lady GaGa makes dance music. It’s reasonably OK pop fluff, but it doesn’t really aspire to be anything more, not even SUPERIOR fluff. Her sound is equal parts Britney factory hits like “Toxic,” and Cher revival tunes such as the vocoder-reviving, briefly ubiquitous “Believe.” There’s a throbbing disco beat, some buzzingly overdriven synth lines playing snaky minor key melodies, and of course the Lady herself singing nonsense about bluffin’ with her muffin… whatever that means. This song and dance isn’t new, and the craft behind it isn’t anything astonishing. I cop to the fact that I am a more-than-ordinarily cynical musician and a jaded consumer of prodigious amounts of music; so I suppose that I am admitting to being exactly the kind of person that Lady GaGa isn’t making music for. But I like my funk. I like a little bit of disco. I think “Toxic” is a very well-written song (naturally Britney had nothing to do with it; she barely sung the damn thing) and “Believe” isn’t ear-gougingly bad. I believe I’m qualified to call GaGa out on her subterfuge.
So that I am not accused of setting up a pantsless strawman, let me supply a few relevant GaGaisms:
“Right now the only thing that I am concerned with in my life is being an artist.”
“You can say the philosophy of GaGa is fashion-music-technology-performance art. It’s an interactive experience for the audience, I design everything together and New York is the nexus of my inspiration. I was born and raised in New York City. I am inspired by street fashion and the attitude. Andy Warhol is a huge inspiration of mine and I have a lot of Pop Art elements in the show. I am so passionate about my music.”
“If somebody said to me, ‘What you do isn’t art,’ I would say, They’re right. Yes it is, no it isn’t, absolutely, perhaps, it’s irrelevant, it’s important…that’s what this is all about, really. For me, more than anything, I want to do something important. It’s gotta be important.
If it’s coming out of my mouth, if it’s going on my body, if it’s going on TV, it better be important.” (Wha..?)
“GaGa is the greatest creative journey of my life.” (Gag.)
What is GaGa, in reality? Musically, GaGa is catchy trash. This version of “Poker Face” was making the rounds on the internet, impressing people left and right with its “musicality.” What this actually is: 1. barely a version of “Poker Face,” since the chord progressions and melodies through the majority of this performance bear no resemblance to the hit song of the same name; 2. incoherent, overcooked lounge hoo-ha; and distant number 3. reasonably but not amazingly well-played and well-sung. The main thing this performance does is preserve the icy, sexless legal separation between verse and chorus in the original dance version of the song. GaGa isn’t a good songwriter, at least not based on this example. She’s a good PERFORMER. Not the same thing.
Visually, GaGa is David Bowie (the face painting) mixed with Madonna (the pantlessness and much of the other accoutrements) mixed with various other pop art icons, finished off with a splash of good old-fashioned burlesque show. As a visual artist, she crushes the musical version of herself. I give her that. But none of it is strikingly original. It brands her as a quintessential post-modern fashion artist, making something “new” from recombinant DNA. In our post-hip hop, post-Danger Mouse world we are perhaps as well-primed to accept this form of creativity as we will ever be. I am no exception to that – my CD racks are filled with sampling-based albums, and my iTunes library has at least a few mash-ups in it. Hell, I was responsible for one. So even though I see a dearth of truly new ideas in the clothes and stage show wrapped around the GaGa burrito, I can appreciate what she’s up to.
But ultimately it amounts to smoke and mirrors. Our Lady isn’t selling clothes (at least not as her principal gig) or putting on blazing stage spectacles in Vegas unto eternity. Her primary product is music. The thing she talks the most about in interviews is music. And while she has produced a few nagging earworms, thus far she hasn’t produced any art that demands more than a passing glance. Nor do I expect her to, on the evidence of everything I’ve heard so far.
It failed to surprise me when in a recent Rolling Stone piece it was revealed that she has somehow aligned herself with Marilyn Manson. Manson is a perfect GaGa predecessor. His music was shoplifted and threadbare Trent Reznor with little to recommend it, but he got over with imagery and “attitude” and a generally well-designed package. He, like GaGa, knew how to sell the sizzle and not the gristle-choked, over-aged steak. And where is Manson today? Slobbering after Lady GaGa (seriously – at least if Rolling Stone is to be believed) and being forgotten by the rest of the world. On a good day, I can remember one Marilyn Manson song – his shitty, thuddingly obvious, embarrassingly “evil” rendition of the Eurythmics hit “Sweet Dreams.” His most memorable song is a bad cover. He is further fading into the twilight of irrelevance even as I type this sentence.
And there, God willing, will go GaGa.
Comments
2 Responses to “Not so GaGa”
I believe “bluffin’ with my muffin” is the point of the whole song; it’s a song describing thinking about person A while you’re having sex with person B. It really all goes together if you think about it–an overbearingly disrespectful thing to do in the sack as sung by an “artiste” who has no respect for art and little, if any, for fans of good music around the world.
I too like music and boy to the study of musicality SADC throws down. I am not a musician and don’t always get the finer nuances. I’m more of a lyrics girl. While I find Gaga’s music to be repetative and a bit grating in places, it is her lyrics I truly hate. Her first hit “Just Dance” gives us amazing gems such as “control your poison babe, roses have thorns they say/And we’re all gettin’ hosed tonight.” Seriously, she calls herself an artist with hosed in her lyrics? And that poison/roses/thorns thing…is she really referencing the band Poison here? Is it done on purpose?
Lady Gaga= CRAP on a stick!