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:

--------------

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.

-----------

(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.

------------

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.

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.