Lady Gaga needs her own thread

been listening to fame monster a lot lately and have concluded that 1/ there is no validity in any hipster free pass that remarks favourably on the dire and unnecessary 'speechless', and 2/ based on his work here redone stands up to any pantheon of producer/muse conceptual synergy ever, he's fantastic.

well like i said i haven't even watched the thing yet, just the length discouraged me from getting excited about the YOUTUBE WORLD PREMIERE and i'll just watch it when it's on MTV Hits instead. but "Paparazzi" is one of my least favorite videos by her so my hopes weren't really high anyway.

yah alright man no shots fired! fwiw 'paparazzi' does nothing for me either.

ok lmao @ all of this, especially the point where the song finally starts, all the dialogue in the car, and Black Ty getting third billing for coughing for 30 seconds and then dying

I dug this. I don't really watch music videos, though, so it was more like, hey cool, 10-minute movie with Gaga and Beyonce that features their song. The gleeful borrowing of B-movie tropes felt very Tarantino to me -- and this was before the Pussy Wagon even showed up.

B thought she was doing Jackie Brown but she was still Foxy Cleopatra

Thought the two of them were more like Vernita Green/Beatrix Kiddo.

rtc plz explain your distaste for the great "speechless"!!

well basically i guess it strikes me as a demonstration of her hokey vegas cabaret side that's needlessly explicit in comparison to how the furious intuitive synthesis of the uptempo europop stuff works (stuff which covers the 'speechless' ground just the same anyway imo). i can see the argument for it working in conceptual concert with the other songs, or even just as a change of pace on the album, but it seems strange if not outright suspect to me why anyone would foreground that track in particular as evidence of something new or worthwhile in gaga's oeuvre.

also i think it sucks.

yeah i'll get with that last thing you said - i do like it as a distilled one-off of her usually more subtle showtunish side. don't think i could deal with an entire album of them but i like it for what it is

lol and this is an xp

leaving aside 'teeth' maybe do you really find it so great you'd take it over any other of the tracks on the album?

it seems strange if not outright suspect to me why anyone would foreground that track in particular as evidence of something new or worthwhile in gaga's oeuvre.

― r|t|c, Friday, March 12, 2010 4:11 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

agreed insofar as i find it par for the course, as opposed to great.

no love for Teeth = no credibility

'teeth' in comparison i can leave up to personal preference - just not my style i guess - but again would you hold it up to the other 6 songs that aren't 'speechless'? those two tracks seem to me to be an aside from the tru meat of what makes fame monster awesome.

Teeth is definitely a stylistic aside, but i find the songwriting and vocal performance in it so genuine as to stand ground beside the other tracks. The retro styling isn't as contrived as it is on Speechless.

plus it's fun to sing

always lol @ the lyric " i cannot text u with a drink in my hand, eh "

haha that reminds me that i forgot to get round to mentioning lex being otm on the ilm poll thread about always hearing "je veux ton amour I DONT WANNA BE FREEENCH" on bad romance

I think I mentioned on Singles Jukebox that I am almost positive that it's "cannot text you while drinking my henney" but idk, I need to listen to a live performance and see if it's clearer there.

"There was this really amazing quality in 'Paparazzi,' where it kind of had this pure pop music quality but at the same time it was a little bit of commentary on fame culture," she said of her first hook-up with director Jonas Åkerlund, who also helmed the "Telephone" mini-movie. "I wanted to do the same thing with this video — take a decidedly pop song, which on the surface has a quite shallow meaning, and turn it into something deeper: the idea that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology and turn it into something that is more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are."

http://nolongerquivering.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/anim_smileyBARF.gif

haha seriously

super lame

ya'll are rong this is a great music video, much prefer it to the song. it's really funny.

oh i totally agree, so-so song, entertaining video

entertaining if you're into that ADD, recycled-tricks thing

well it's not 9 and a half minutes entertaining, but when they inevitably cut it down for TV it could be worth repeat viewings

pretty hilarious how she hyped it up like it was gonna put the "Bad Romance" video to shame though

My thoughts, from my blog:

The new Lady Gaga video, "Telephone," appeared today. As with her last four clips, it's an elaborate spectacle framing a song that's decent at best. I like Gaga's videos and many of her costumes, and her live performances - the bloody MTV Awards one in particular - are excellent. But her music continues to be utterly dependent on the visuals. It's a total package of which the purely sonic component is still the weakest part. "Bad Romance," "Paparazzi" and "Love Game" are good songs; "Poker Face" is half a good song (the imitation-Peaches portions sink the rest); I can't remember what "Just Dance" sounded like and don't feel like looking it up on YouTube to remind myself. And right now, less than a half hour after watching the "Telephone" video for the first and so far only time, I can't remember the song. This is partly because unlike any previous Gaga video, the song is not allowed to play from beginning to end; it's chopped up and bracketed by several dialogue and action sequences, some of which (the women's-prison segments) work very well, some of which (everything with Beyoncé) don't work very well at all.

Honestly, Beyoncé's presence is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for me. I don't like her music at all - her ballads are histrionic and bland, and her attempts to be uptempo and "hard"/"street" are unconvincing, when they're not just plain boneheaded ("Diva") - and her visual style is nowhere near as interesting as Gaga's. And perhaps most importantly of all, she's not weird or shocking, ever, which makes me wonder why she's in this video/on this song. What she does and what Gaga does are almost totally opposed. And crucially, Gaga looks like the future, while Beyoncé looks like the past. Which makes me wonder if the idea of the collaboration was Gaga's...

Oh, well; at least Beyoncé isn't just doing her usual thing here. Instead, she's dressed/made up like a RealDoll and singing/reciting dialogue in a hyper-stylized voice...basically, playing Nicki Minaj. Who has in turn been playing Lil' Kim (specifically, the Lil' Kim of the "How Many Licks" video) for a couple of years now. So she's found a new, twice-removed way to be uninteresting. An achievement of some small sort, I guess.

As far as Gaga's part of this production, it's a step down from "Bad Romance" and "Paparazzi" despite being a dramatically higher-budget operation - and yeah, you can see it all on the screen. Director Jonas Åkerlund has abandoned the labored grittiness of his videos for The Prodigy and Metallica and gone full LaChappelle here - I'm surprised the thing wasn't shot in Technicolor. The first third or so, which takes place in a high-glam women's prison and features a hermaphrodite joke in its opening minute that actually made me laugh out loud, is the best part of the whole near-ten-minute thing. The costumes are great, mixing the aesthetics of porn, gang culture, and Broadway in a way that really works. Gaga's thinner than she's been in previous clips, and she's wearing even less clothing, at one point dancing in a studded bra and thong with her hair half-bleached and curled with Diet Coke cans (the most subtle product placement in a film bursting with it) and looking like a demonic Amy Winehouse.

When she leaves prison and hooks up with Beyoncé, driving away in Uma Thurman's "Pussy Wagon" from the Kill Bill movies, my heart sank a little.

Previously, Gaga's stolen everything that caught her eye - costumes from old Samantha Fox videos and The Night Porter, imagery and a general vibe from Matthew Barney, Alien and The Warriors, Japanese kegadol (girls in bandages) fetishism...not to mention all the occult symbolism...but she's always made it her own. Gaga-world has always been its own thing until now, with references to Earth that were recognizable, but not blatant and pandering. The presence of the "Pussy Wagon" is clumsy, lowering the whole video to the level of rappers reciting dialogue from Scarface.

The video pretty much goes off a cliff from there - Beyoncé goes to a diner, poisons Tyrese (things perk up again when Gaga is seen in the kitchen, poisoning everyone's food as a recipe appears onscreen), and then the two women dance and sing in a diner full of corpses before driving off in the "Pussy Wagon." The End.

The mini-movie-ness of "Telephone" (which, lyrically, has nothing to do with any of this, though both Gaga and Beyoncé are seen using telephones at several points during the clip) points out what's been becoming more and more obvious with each succeeding Gaga clip - she's not writing songs, she's writing musical numbers. Without the visuals, they're no more interesting than it would be to listen to a Busby Berkeley number on TV in another room. I may well watch this video another time or two, though I doubt it - it's just not as good as her last two or three have been. But would I listen to the song by itself? Absolutely not. As I said above, even right now I can't remember what it sounded like. That seems like bad news for her label, which almost certainly had to lay out some money for a production this elaborate, no matter how many product placements they shoehorned in.

Well, to be fair, it says "to be continued ..." so I'm going to withhold judgement until I know for sure how it ends.

That said, I love how she changes costume from scene to scene ... in prison! Awesome.

haha there must be like 80 other music videos that end with "to be continued" that you're still earnestly awaiting the resolution of

it basically does the same thing that has pissed me off abt every music video ever that has as much talking as it does of the song, I feel like it would be a tougher act to compress her visuals and narrative into something that expands/explodes what a music video is w/o adding a five minute of a student film with crazy-high production values.

But would I listen to the song by itself? Absolutely not. As I said above, even right now I can't remember what it sounded like. That seems like bad news for her label, which almost certainly had to lay out some money for a production this elaborate, no matter how many product placements they shoehorned in.

― neither good nor bad, just a kid like you (unperson), Friday, March 12, 2010 6:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

had u heard the song before watching the video? it took me a few listens.

kind of hilarious to rate LoveGame over Poker Face, Telephone or Just Dance.

I like Gaga's videos and many of her costumes, and her live performances - the bloody MTV Awards one in particular - are excellent. But her music continues to be utterly dependent on the visuals. It's a total package of which the purely sonic component is still the weakest part.

i feel like this is the antithesis of my reaction to the whole lady gaga phenomenon. the costumery, shenanigans and bloodwork are all slightly cloying if entertaining in their shock appeal, but through it all, you end up finding out that the music is actually kick-ass.

yeah i didn't realize anyone liked that song -- it was pretty lucky for her career momentum that the "Paparazzi" video leaked before "LoveGame" could get a proper chance to try and fail

Always seemed like she was repeating Madge's career on ffwd, but between Bad Romance and Telephone, feels like Gaga's gone all the way from Vogue to Hanky Panky or something.

x-post Yeah, I think this is one of her strengths. She assumes that everyone recognizes that the songs kick ass, so instead moves on and turns her attention to the visuals, which don't really support the music or enhance it but supplement it.

she's already more pretentious than Madge in full British accent mode

the "Bad Romance" video totally supports and enhances the song

i dunno i think the papparazzi blood thing could have been exactly what you're saying surm, but the way she sang that line while she starts to drip with blood is what makes it amazing, its one of the few moments where she's temporarily gelled as the whole package for me.

wait sorry i didn't read your post properly, my one neither agrees or disagrees with u!

yea i totally love some of her visuals, but i find them secondary. like i don't put lady gaga on for the spectacle, i put her on for the songs.

the blood thing was so weak sauce! she totally broke character to look down and make sure the blood was coming out, probably because she wasn't hearing the gasps of shock she'd expected.

^ haha

Well I loved the video, it was so fucking cheesy! It was so knowingly kitsch and tongue in cheek, I even loved the god awful stilted dialogue, the broken mirror line is the best.
Fashion wise it was brilliant, the prison chic was excellent, Beyonce looked perfect as usual, I like her Betty Page wig and GaGa's telephone hair. Loved the 'eh-eh-eh-eh-eh' bits and Tyrese's surely award worthy performance, it was just all round hilarious.
Didn't like the incessant product placement or how long it was and I wish GaGa would stop trying to justify her 'art' until she can actually explain herself clearly.

"Told you she didn't have a dick"
"Too bad"

(Still not as great as the trolololololo vid tho)

ya the mirror line was great - and when B's feeding her the sammich in the beginning

did a side by side comparison of GaGa and Roisin Murphy videos last night, inspired by gin. GaGa's are so much more... American.

Roisin's videos are rediculous

I don't know why I ever had anything bad to say about "Bad Romance" on this thread

feels like Gaga's gone all the way from Vogue to Hanky Panky or something

not sure what you mean because Hanky Panky came straight after Vogue, so its the same timescale!

lol good point, i totally forgot Vogue was on the Dick Tracy soundtrack!

I think "Telephone" is a great song. For Rihanna, it represents probably her best ever single.

the 12 month variation in style between Dear Jessie and Justify My Love has never been matched by a pop star