kapi asked: What are your thoughts on Lady Gaga?
(I'm gonna need a long reply to this.)
You know, I don’t really listen to the radio, and I don’t have too many music channels nowadays, so by the time I hear of a pop artist or a particular song, it’s already pretty ubiquitous. This can mean it’s already reached annoyance level for most people, whereas for me it’s new.
But usually still crap.
When it comes to the genres I enjoy, then I’m absolutely always trying to hear something new, or eagerly awaiting a new album, looking out for it all the time.
With pop, it’s just not my thing. The only time I’ll hear that kind of music is in a bar or something, or on the car radio if the girlfriend is giving me a lift to the station. Even then, I usually have no idea who sings a particular song, nor their usual ouevre.
When it comes to Lady Gaga, it wasn’t really until last autumn that I really became aware of her, or realised that a couple of songs were hers. I remember being in a bar in Newcastle last year and seeing it go mental when Poker Face came on, and that was my first realisation that she was something big.
Musically, I guess I can understand the appeal. It’s fairly nonsensical, standard pop fare, ranging from the dancey stuff to the slower (yet still upbeat) ballads. It’s not really my thing, but as pop music goes it’s not bad. Better than the middle-of-the-road crap that we get from X-Factor and the like, but still pretty formulaic.
I wouldn’t say that she’s particularly turning the pop world on its head musically. Compare her stuff to Britney’s earlyish material: it’s basically the same style. I’ll grant that Gaga’s lyrics have a little more to them, but they’re still all about sex, love, relationships and fame.
Away from the music, and onto her image. It’s pretty clear that she fancies herself as a performance artist more than a music artist. And it does take a certain amount of confidence to wear some most of her outfits, so I’ll give her credit for that.
But there’s a fine line between being noticed for being outlandish, being on the bleeding edge of fashion, and just plain being ridiculous. She’s crossed it, for me.
Yes, I realise that she’s trying to make some sort of commentary on the public obsession with musicians’ looks and images, but she just looks like an idiot. I just don’t get the need to dress up loke that on a daily basis, or to go that far overboard with it all.
A coat made of Kermits? Really?
She’s canny and media-savvy in terms of milking publicity and infamy wherever she can (that video with Beyonce, for example), but too often she’s becoming what she’s in theory supposed to be satirising: she’s relying on her raunchiness and sex appeal to sell music, just like Britney, Christina, et al, before her.
Her videos are without doubt aimed to titillate as much as to entertain, as are most of her outfits and her stage shows. Take, for example, the crotch-tastic green thing she wore at the Brits. My eyes water at the memory of how tight that was downstairs, and I ain’t female.
It amuses me that so much of the media is in thrall to her, covering her every move whilst trying to say that they aren’t really obsessed with her. Gawker is particularly guilty of this.
Maybe the best thing I can say about her is that she really has made an impact on the public consciousness. I don’t listen to her music, nor the genres she operates in, and I don’t read celebrity magazines/websites, yet I still know a decent amount about her.
It’s a sign of her ubiquity, perhaps, that even people like myself are able to have an opinion about her, and in a fame-obsessed world, you have to applaud the amount of self-promotion that it’s taken for her to get to that level.
