Lady Gaga’s diverse but uninteresting outfits are the sort of things a five-year-old would devise if assigned to come up with “weird clothes”: It’ll be a suit that’s all white but has starfish stuck all over it! Yay! I’m reminded of the sorrow and the pity I felt about a decade ago when Britney Spears started wearing a sweat sock on her forearm, about as non-threatening and hollow a pretense of outre as the world has seen since Buzz Killington chose to wear his tophat at a slight angle. Spears and Gaga’s stage-show antics are the rock equivalent of signifying that you’re “wacky” by putting a lampshade on your head, though that perfunctory action at least has a certain archetypal value that raises it to the level of irony at this late stage in history.
People, any singer with a wardrobe budget and some monotonous drum machines could do this.
And Gaga’s music, of course, is the same stomping-bass-plus-diva almost-ready-for-Vegas inoffensive balladeering that has made most intelligent people ignore the Top 40 for decades. It sounds like all those terrible disco songs you hear playing in convenience stores run by Iranians late at night, some sort of simple, foghorn-like synth with a second-rate female opera singer being told by some bored producer to make it sound a bit more aria-like when the cymbals come in.
Any intelligent person who has been subjected to hearing about a Gaga TV performance the next day knows how empty the whole thing seems: She did what? Used some fake blood? Wow, that’s the most daring thing I’ve heard since…Halloween, I guess. That’s about as shocking as a horror movie using…an axe, I suppose. Where does she come up with these “ideas”? Maybe next she’ll ride a horse. Or ride a horse and then, in the big finale, have two horses. Where does she come up with her “ideas”?
But it is not Gaga I blame for all this: I blame you, America. You know damn well we have seen fake blood and horses and women with big voices playing the piano before. Do not pretend that you are rewarding this behavior because it is innovative. Like Spears, Lady Gaga succeeds precisely because she is bland. She is little different from half the other Stepford Wives robo-blondes America sends up the pop charts. Nothing more of interest to see here, people.
12 comments:
I kinda like her. The songs are catchy as hell. Sue me.
You would notice and relate to blandness! Poor Todd. What a dope.
Damn, that was actually some very solid and deadly accurate rock criticism there. No lie.
And U2 is better?
“Like Spears, Lady Gaga succeeds precisely because she is bland.”
I think it might be more accurate to say that Spears succeeded not because she was bland, but because she was a hot 17-year-old in a school girl outfit (appropriately enough, I suppose, as she was a schoolgirl).
I’m not a particular fan of Lady Gaga (indeed I think I would only recognize maybe one of her songs), but it does seem that there has to be something beyond being bland and like everyone else to explain what is, at least at the moment, a really extreme degree of success. Most bland imitators, one assumes, do you manage to become huge international stars.
I think a lot of bland acts make it big. But U2 is — or at least for a decade and a half _was_ — better.
I agree with Todd’s assessments here. Amusing piece as well.
I tend to agree.
One thing I’ve noticed about her though is that she actually does have some innate musical talent, notwithstanding the horrible “dance” music she uses to ply her trade. If you watch some of the Youtube videos which show her performing traditional pop standards, show tunes, etc., you’ll find she is a rather good musician-something that was alluded to briefly during the Steele-Graves debate.
If she were doing Sondheim, Lieber & Stoller, Rodgers & Hart, good music, in other words, I think most people would have a higher opinion of her talent as a chanteuse.
Again, I don’t care for (or more accurately, about) her music, but if someone sells over 8 million records then there’s clearly something going on beyond sounding like everyone else (or at least everyone else that sounds like “those terrible disco songs you hear playing in convenience stores run by Iranians late at night”). I’m just saying that I think the interesting thing here is trying to figure out what it is that makes her far more attractive to people than the 10,000 other bland derivative acts out there.
Lady Gaga might be bland, but she sure does attract attention. Witness the relatively large number of comments for this post.
And for what it’s worth, I think she’s great.
You’ve got this right. We consume such fake, manufactured “edgy” performance as consistently as we fall for fake, manufactured “outrage”.
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