Fluxblog 520: Lady Gaga is soooooo cool
New and old writing about new and old classics by Lady Gaga
Your Full-Time Bedroom Demon
Lady Gaga featuring Gesaffelstein “Killah”
Lady Gaga seems more impressive and iconic these days because we have enough pop music history on either side of her prime breakthrough years to fully appreciate exactly how great she’s always been. She’s a prestige pop star who has maintained a presence in the mainstream despite consistently making art that’s far more tasteful, intelligent, well-crafted, and challenging than the market requires. She may stumble from time to time but she’s always interesting, and her big swings often yield truly excellent songs and performances.
Gaga’s new album Mayhem doesn’t break much new ground for her stylistically, but that doesn’t have to be the goal every time. (As the late Scott Miller once told me, novelty isn’t inherently musical.) This is a record in which Lady Gaga is being Lady Gaga to the utmost extreme, and in doing so she highlights the musical quirks that set her apart from the pop girl pack. I hear it as a flex, a 38 year old veteran superstar throwing down and proving that she can still give us songs on the level of her early classics. The music is too vital to be credibly dismissed as nostalgia and mostly too weird to qualify as pandering, but like her charm offensive media blitz in support of the record, it does prompt you to go “damn, Lady Gaga is so cool, I love her.”
And you know what? Lady Gaga is sooooo cool. I love her.
My favorite of the Mayhem songs is “Killah,” a collaboration with the French electronic producer Gasaffelstein that makes the most of his gift for spiky and stylish neo-industrial grooves. It’s part of a long line of sexy, strutting glamourous pop songs but I mostly hear it as an inspired collision of David Bowie’s Young Americans with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, with a dash of…hmm, is it Tina Turner or Grace Jones? Like most of my favorite Gaga songs, it’s mixing and merging familiar elements from the past in unexpected ways and scratches an itch I didn’t realize I had. It’s like she’s spent the past 15 years granting long-forgotten wishes I made when I was much younger, and my brain was being forged by the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s.
Also, did you see Gaga performing “Killah” on Saturday Night Live? The staging, the blocking, the set design, the outfits, the attitude and audacity – it’s one of the very best music performances I’ve ever seen on television.
Buy it from Amazon.
I’ve been writing about Lady Gaga for a long time now! Here’s some of my favorite pieces I’ve written about her music through the years.
July 11th, 2011 1:00am
This Time I’m Not Leaving Without Yoü
Lady Gaga “Yoü and I”
“Yoü and I” isn’t merely a love song. It’s a grandiose display of affection; a monument to the man Gaga loves. It’s a power ballad about Gaga and her on-and-off boyfriend Lüc Carl, a guy who, by all accounts, is the love of her life. He’s a rocker dude, so it’s a big rock song. There’s a bit of Shania Twain country rock in the mix, but it’s mostly a pastiche of Def Leppard, Guns N’ Roses and Queen. Since Gaga has the economic leverage to achieve stylistic verisimilitude through hiring her influences, Def Leppard/Shania mastermind Mutt Lange produced the track, which samples Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and features a guitar solo from Brian May. (Maybe an alternate version exists in which Axl Rose sings back-up vocals.)
The song plays power chords and glam metal solos on my heart strings. I get totally overwhelmed by the starry-eyed passion expressed in this music. I feel her joy, but I also feel a pang of envy. “Yoü and I” makes me want to love someone this much. It makes me wonder what it must be like for someone to love you so much that they need to pay tribute to you with a stadium anthem.
There’s an aspirational quality to this song. It’s a fantasy of something pure and wonderful, but also flawed. They break up, they screw up. She’s chasing him down for years and hoping that this time it might work out. This is the flip side of “Bad Romance;” the version where the drama and angst results in the happiest possible ending. In either case, Gaga presents her relationship as a narrative, an epic romance between two archetypes — the New York Woman and her Cool Nebraska Guy. As a result, her love life becomes a work of art as thoroughly aestheticized as any of her songs, outfits, videos or performances.
February 21st, 2011 12:33pm
Subway Kid, Rejoice Your Truth!
Lady Gaga “Born This Way”
Yes, this song echoes Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” and yes, a lot of what Lady Gaga does is essentially an updated version of Madonna’s paradigm for pop stardom. If you’re the type of person who thinks either of those points are equivalent to a valid negative criticism of Lady Gaga, I’m here to tell you that you’re an idiot and almost certainly a hypocrite too.
For one thing, it probably doesn’t take much digging into your record collection to find music by rock bands who are working within some easily identifiable tradition, or may directly call back to a specific artist. We, as a culture, have no problem with this, and if anything, we expect and desire familiarity from rock acts. (This is also true of rap and R&B to a large extent.) So why the double standard for pop acts? Is it because pop is more overtly market-driven, we feel compelled to overstate its cynicism and neglect its similarity to everything else in contemporary music?
Second, how can anyone get up in arms about borrowing ideas from Madonna when Madonna is the Queen of the Magpies? Like Madonna and David Bowie before her, Gaga’s genius isn’t profound musical originality so much as it’s about writing high quality pop songs that fit into a larger aesthetic framework that includes high concept fashion, theatrical performance and interaction with the media at large. Gaga is all about how it all fits together in the big picture, the sum of the parts. She makes the most sense in concert because that’s where it all comes together — the music, the singing, the dancing, the fashion, the setpieces, her interaction with the audience. The audience is very crucial to Gaga; her “little monsters” complete her performance with their physical response and by bringing their own creativity into the mix by showing up in costume, et al. This is a key difference between Gaga and Madonna — Madonna has always presented herself as being removed from her fans, Gaga encourages communication and intense identification. She’s very much of her time. Madonna never had to work with social media in her prime, but Gaga has found a way to seamlessly integrate the aesthetics of the Twitter era into the style of pop stardom that the Material Girl pioneered in the 80s.
I love “Born This Way,” but of course I would — “Express Yourself” has always been my favorite Madonna song, and I just love this sort of pop song. We don’t get that many of them, really. Even without the heavy handed self-help message, this would feel thrilling and inspiring. It’s a joyous, exciting, delightfully cheesy song. It really comes alive in concert, ending her show as a communal celebration of personal empowerment and self-acceptance. If you’re the type of person who feels like the world doesn’t need this sort of message, well, I’m glad you feel so great about yourself or that you’re comfortable in your self-loathing. I’m all in favor of it, though, especially since this song gets into specifics that most other songs with similar messages gloss over in the interest of playing it safe.
August 27th, 2020 2:11am
Ancient City Style
Lady Gaga “Babylon”
I’ve read that one of the reasons songs get stuck in your head is because something about them – the structure, the lyrics – breaks a pattern your brain recognizes from other music, so it’s left unresolved in your mind. This makes sense for how “Babylon” stays with me, it being this song that’s both totally familiar in its Shep Pettibone early ’90s house moves but totally alien in the way Lady Gaga sings a set of phrases that sound fabulous but don’t really add up to anything logical. “Babylon” is a song of inspired idiocy; absolutely glorious in its dumb genius.
Gaga has always been a creature of kitsch, but this song pushes her aesthetic to an extreme – a song ostensibly about gossip that’s somehow serving it “ancient city style” with a “pretty 16th century smile.” It’s like some bizarre cross-breeding of Madonna’s “Vogue” and Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” but with a vague nod towards the general concept of social justice. I am certain that if you talked to Lady Gaga about this song she could give you some sort of outline of the ideas that were on her mind as she wrote this, as it’s clear enough she was inspired by a few different things. But the magic here is in the goofy nonsense of it all, and in the how this is jumbled up in a fun retro dance song. It’s not easy to deliberately create something campy, but that’s exactly what she’s done with this song. She’s been immersed in camp so long, this is just what happens for her naturally.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 27th, 2016 11:54am
Mirror On The Ceiling
Lady Gaga “A-Yo”
Lady Gaga is a rocker at heart, and though that was obscured in her earliest, biggest hits, she’s been gradually foregrounding that aspect of her as she’s moved along starting with The Fame Monster. Some people cynically interpret this as Gaga searching for a way to reboot herself for the marketplace, but it’s really just her becoming more herself, and allowing herself the opportunity to try out types of songs – like, say, “Joanne” – that she couldn’t take a risk on when she was dominating the charts with straight-up dance pop. Gaga is at her best when she’s excitedly trying out new looks and sounds, testing the limits of her life, and being a proud freak. At a point, the conformist marketplace of mainstream pop is an unnecessary albatross for her, and being less prominent frees her of creative limitations. Gaga the cult figure isn’t going away, which means Gaga the rock star can finally thrive. This is good, just like how it was a positive development when Kanye West and Beyoncé gave up chasing hits and decided to just do whatever they wanted instead.
“A-Yo,” a collaboration with the veteran songwriter Hillary Lindsay and producer Mark Ronson, is exactly the sort of thing I want from Gaga. It leans into rock music quite a bit – it’s in her voice, it’s in the crunch of the chords, the nods to country, that vaguely Fripp-ish solo that sounds like someone playing a guitar that has neon tube lighting from a dive bar for strings – but the song is produced like a dance pop track. This is a contemporary version of the thing Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna did so well in the ‘80s, which is present pop music as a place where elements of all popular genres merged into something greater than the sum of its parts that welcomed all types of people. As catchy and joyful as “A-Yo” gets, I don’t think it has a chance at uniting people in that way, but I appreciate the gesture and feel like this big tent approach suits the utopian freakiness of Gaga.
Buy it from Amazon.
May 24th, 2011 1:00am
I’m Gonna Drink My Tears And Cry
Lady Gaga “Government Hooker”
“Government Hooker” is a bit out of step with the rest of Born This Way. It’s more of a Fame Monster song, really — harsh industrial dance music with dark, cynical lyrics at odds with the big-hearted affirmations on the rest of the record. It does makes sense that this one is sequenced back to back with “Judas,” which is just as bleak and intense. It’s like a little island of goth angst and pounding beats on an album that is otherwise focused on ecstatic, campy grandeur.
The track, written by Gaga along with producers Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow, is a harsh, sleek banger. It reminds me of KFMDM, Basement Jaxx and Goldfrapp in “Strict Machine” mode. It gleefully steals — and amps up — the best bit from New Order’s “Blue Monday.” The lyrics approach some kind of point about politics and sexuality and commerce, but it doesn’t quite connect. That doesn’t bother me, really — this song is all about the menacing vibe, and the words end up serving that feeling by suggesting ideas about identity, kink and power dynamics that you can fill in yourself.
My favorite detail in this track is the very sound of the male voice. As it turns out, the guy saying “back up and turn around” et al is one of Gaga’s bodyguard. There’s something incredible about this dude’s voice and it’s totally appropriate for his role in the song’s dynamic. He sounds smug, hyper-masculine, somewhat detached. He creeps me out and I love it, especially in direct contrast with Gaga singing, with a touch of longing, “as long as I’m your hoooooker!”
March 17th, 2020 10:01pm
Freak Out Look At Me
Lady Gaga “Stupid Love”
This is the lady Gaga I love the most – joyous, extremely catchy, and heavily indebted to the pop aesthetics of VERY SPECIFICALLY the late 80s. The last time she hit this mark was on the album Born This Way, particularly on the title track, “Fashion of His Love,” and “The Edge of Glory.” Most people hear the similarities to Blonde Ambition era Madonna, but Gaga goes a lot deeper – I hear Erasure, Debbie Gibson, Roxette, Stacey Q, Belinda Carlisle, T’pau, and late 80s Cher in the mix. As with everything Gaga does it’s the result of internalizing a personal canon and synthesizing it into familiar new things.
“Stupid Love” is a jolt of ecstatic, carefree pop in a moment where escapism has never felt more important. Gaga is no stranger to making supercharged dance records that are engineered to overpower the listener, but this time her repeatedly slamming every joy receptor in your brain with a hammer feels especially welcome. It’s a cliche to say you surrender to a dance song, but it really feels that way here. It’s like she’s force-quitting your brain.
Buy it from Amazon.
Lady Gaga | ARTPOP
Over a decade ago, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys coined the term “imperial phase” to describe the period of his band’s career when a sustained level of success opened up the possibility for them to do pretty much anything they wanted. For the Pet Shop Boys, this phase started with the four singles from their 1987 blockbuster Actually, and ended when the followup record Introspective didn’t perform quite as well on the charts. If you look at any pop star’s career, you can usually spot their “imperial phase” — for The Beatles it was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour in 1967; for Madonna it was Like A Prayer and the Blonde Ambition tour; for Michael Jackson it was the Bad era. It’s the time when an artist is so hot that no one will tell them they can’t follow through on their wildest ambitions, and no one would want to because it’s assumed that they have cracked the code of pop and can do no wrong.
Lady Gaga’s entire career to date is basically a meta performance piece about the imperial phase. Her guiding principle as an artist, even back when she was just an unknown upstart, has been to do whatever the biggest, craziest star in the world would do. She essentially willed herself into imperial phase status with her debut single “Just Dance” and now refuses to get out of it, even though her actual imperial phase — her stretch of Top 5 smashes from “Poker Face” on through “Born This Way,” all accompanied by increasingly ornate videos and live performances — is long over. This is a lot of what makes Gaga compelling as a pop star: She caters to the sort of fan who most enjoys pop music when artists take huge risks and are willing to make grand statements without being afraid of looking foolish. She fully embraces the peculiar mix of beauty and ridiculousness that can come from unchecked hubris.
When Gaga first announced ARTPOP last year, it sounded like she was going a bit too far, but not in the good way. The title was a bit too precious and academic, and the promise of the music being tied together by some kind of app was just a little too convoluted. “Applause,” the first single, was catchy but overly self-referential. It looked like Gaga was going to crash and burn from doing too much “imperial phase” stuff at a time when it was unclear whether the broader pop market even wanted new material from her in the first place. But now that ARTPOP is finally here — it’s out in Japan now, and will be officially released everywhere else in the world next week — those concerns have mostly fallen away. It remains to be seen whether or not this album will be a major commercial success on par with her previous records, but the album is proof that Gaga hasn’t become out of touch with her best instincts as a pop musician.
ARTPOP is interesting in that it’s somehow both deeply weird and conventional at the same time. Unlike her last two records, in which Gaga expanded the range of her sound, this album is almost exclusively focused on the sort of thumping straight-up Euro dance pop that made her a star. The lyrics and thematic conceits, however, go way further than ever before. She seems eager to push the envelope of what level of artsy absurdity she can get away with in a pop hit — name dropping Jeff Koons, quoting Sun Ra, sketching out a loose philosophy about “art pop,” having the chorus for one of the catchiest songs be “you’re just a pig inside a human body,” and generally coming off like something from Mike Myers’ old “Sprockets” sketches from Saturday Night Live.
ARTPOP sounds like it was recorded in an igloo made of cocaine and feels like diving headfirst into the most glorious extremes of her narcissism and pretentiousness. It’s gleaming and glamorous and relentlessly ecstatic, as if all the chords were just slamming down the buttons on every pleasure center in your brain at once. If you’re cool with Mother Monster’s excesses, ARTPOP is pure, uncut Gaga-ness and you will loooooove it. Everyone else should just skip it, because Gaga is at the point where she’s not really interested in entertaining anyone but her core fans.
There is a real thrill in hearing a major star be this willing to alienate casual listeners in the name of following her muse and rewarding her diehard fans. ARTPOP is the polar opposite of Katy Perry’s Prism, a bland pop record designed for mass appeal that is too lacking in quirks and character to have much resonance. Gaga’s obsession with fame, fashion, pop history, and her own cult of personality may be off-putting to many, but it results in music that is increasingly distinct and sui generis. Even though she puts up a front of being an untouchable pop deity, her music overflows with the humanity of someone who is unafraid to be vulnerable and ridiculous. Her refusal to compromise and monomaniacal commitment to living in a permanent imperial phase is genuinely inspiring, especially since it’s increasingly disconnected from a need for the market to validate her success. Gaga makes her own reality, and even if this album flops horribly, she has created a world in which she will always be a superstar.
[Originally published on BuzzFeed on November 4th 2013]
probably a separate post, if not an entire book / compendium to “hip”, but i’m curious when or even if you agree that the term “cool” has been denatured into just shorthand for “i like this.” bc if we’re going by convention, lady gaga is the definition of not cool, no? almost everything she does is openly effortful, theatrical, bright and comprehensible and relatively unmysterious, deeply affected and not for lack of a better word “real”. i associate “cool” with there being a little bit more work on the part of the audience to “heat it up”/complete the circuit. i say all this with love — gaga is an undeniable talent, with many great songs, an incredible performer. being uncool you could argue has served her and the music all the better commercially too. i promise this isn’t nitpicky — more so if anything i find actually “cool” stuff to be a dying subspecies of culture. great post as always matthew!