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When people remark on the strangeness of Lady Gaga, they will typically begin by singling out something she’s wearing — or, just as often, not wearing. Meat dress or bubble dress, hair bow or teacup, Kermit the Frog or caution tape, no pants or no shirt, nipple tape or bare nipples, and so on, in ever more complex configurations, into infinity.
But outré fashion is always in for pop stars. Though Lady Gaga might have better taste than Katy Perry (who has dressed as a bowl of fruit) or Ke$ha (whose primary inspiration seems to be Hungover Tour Guide at Six Flags), Gaga is playing the same fundamental game as her peers: giving sticky hooks a sticky package. She pairs radio-ready songs with a 10-inch Alexander McQueen armadillo heel and figures if one doesn’t get you, the other will.
Where Lady Gaga is, in fact, notably and genuinely weird is where stars on her level — according to Billboard, no one in the music industry made more money than she did in 2010 — are never, ever, ever weird. Gaga is weird at the level of syntax and grammar, lyric and verse, and sometimes chorus. “Judas,” the second single from “Born This Way,” her second proper LP, begins with a pair of couplets as tortured as you can hear now in pop:
“When he comes to me, I am ready / I wash his feet with my hair if he needs / Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain / Even after three times he betrays me.”
What? Later, in the same song, she will boast “In the most biblical sense, I am beyond repentance,” call herself a “fame hooker,” and advise offended listeners to “wear ear condom next time.” On “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga sings in German, French and Spanish, but even the English isn’t really English as we know it. Nevertheless, “Judas,” like the Madonna-cribbing, album-titled single that came before it, went straight to the top 10, her ninth consecutive single to do so. (“The Edge of Glory,” released last week, made it an even 10 in a row.)
“Born This Way,” when it is released tomorrow, will be sold not just on iTunes and in record stores but in Rite Aid, Whole Foods, Radio Shack, Starbucks, and nearly 21,000 other “non-traditional” retail outlets. Nightclubs from Miami to Las Vegas will hold “Haus” parties in honor of the record’s release. There is a themed Facebook game (“think crystals, unicorns, sheep on motorcycles”), this past weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” cameo, and two weeks worth of appearances on “American Idol.” On a recent Saturday, she became the first human to garner over 10 million Twitter followers.
Like Kanye West or Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga belongs to a generation of stars for whom celebrity is sport and transparency is paramount. She lives in public — on Twitter, on your television, in your local sports arena, and as fodder for increasingly elaborate Internet memes that play off of her outlandish fashion choices. This ubiquity and lack of mediation is part of her art.
Lady Gaga’s facility with fame as an instrument occasionally cloaks the quality her music, which is craftier and more complicated than it often seems. It is a common refrain among critics and fans that the paradox of Lady Gaga is that her songwriting often fails to live up to the delicious strangeness of her persona. But in fact, one of the strangest things about Lady Gaga is her enduring fascination with some of the most defiantly regular and unironic pop music ever made: ‘80s power ballads, straightforward, 4/4 European dance music, and the saxophone solos of the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons, who is featured not once but twice on “Born This Way.”
The critic George W.S. Trow once lamented the way time robs us of the traditions of the past, how something as seemingly regular and common as his father’s fedora was no longer available to him as an adult: “A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony,” he wrote, “would eat through my head and kill me.” So too, you would think, would a saxophone solo without scare quotes, but “Born This Way” is as sincere as any major work of pop art made in the last decade.
Pop stars often deploy something that looks like sincerity as a way to get people on the dance floor; Lady Gaga deploys it because it’s the only mode of expression she knows. She really does seem to think, as goes one of the more bombastic tracks on “Born This Way,” that she’s a “Highway Unicorn” — that’s why she’s got one tattooed on her thigh.
Logic rarely enters the picture. This is why the album’s most concrete political statement, on which Gaga brags about being a “blond high-heeled feminist” and, over a beat that is all rave whistles and flashing lights, avers that “when you’re a strong female, you don’t permission,” is called, inexplicably, “Scheiße.” A more calculating artist would’ve left both the obscenity and the foreign characters for, say, “Bloody Mary,” a comparatively subdued bit of blasphemy (“Like Jesus said, I’m gonna dance dance dance”) that immediately follows “Scheiße” on the record’s track listing.
Not Lady Gaga. “Born This Way” opens with “Marry The Night,” a Pat Benatar-worthy anthem on which she proudly proclaims herself “a loser” and ends with “The Edge of Glory,” which doubles down on one of Clemons’ two sax solos with synthesizers that would not be out of place playing on your dentist’s car stereo as he drives home from work. In between, she slips the word “boudoir” into her record’s best-selling single to date, builds a song around a nonsensical metaphor (“I am my hair!”), and yes, on “Heavy Metal Lover,” sidles up to a man and says: “I want your whiskey mouth all over my blond south.”
In its sheer willful bombast, loyalty to the seemingly exclusive schools of both big, dumb dance music and big dumb ballads, repeated allusions to both Christ (the religious figure) and Queen (the band), “Born This Way” is both completely out of its time and very much of it. The album provides its own context, even as it stands at a distance from basically everything else it shares the charts with. But then again, “shares” is probably the wrong verb for anything related to Gaga. Until another artist can match either her level of self-belief or her sales, Lady Gaga will remain in her own unique level in the pop firmament, willing her own weird self into pop’s unlikely ideal.
But outré fashion is always in for pop stars. Though Lady Gaga might have better taste than Katy Perry (who has dressed as a bowl of fruit) or Ke$ha (whose primary inspiration seems to be Hungover Tour Guide at Six Flags), Gaga is playing the same fundamental game as her peers: giving sticky hooks a sticky package. She pairs radio-ready songs with a 10-inch Alexander McQueen armadillo heel and figures if one doesn’t get you, the other will.
Where Lady Gaga is, in fact, notably and genuinely weird is where stars on her level — according to Billboard, no one in the music industry made more money than she did in 2010 — are never, ever, ever weird. Gaga is weird at the level of syntax and grammar, lyric and verse, and sometimes chorus. “Judas,” the second single from “Born This Way,” her second proper LP, begins with a pair of couplets as tortured as you can hear now in pop:
“When he comes to me, I am ready / I wash his feet with my hair if he needs / Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain / Even after three times he betrays me.”
What? Later, in the same song, she will boast “In the most biblical sense, I am beyond repentance,” call herself a “fame hooker,” and advise offended listeners to “wear ear condom next time.” On “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga sings in German, French and Spanish, but even the English isn’t really English as we know it. Nevertheless, “Judas,” like the Madonna-cribbing, album-titled single that came before it, went straight to the top 10, her ninth consecutive single to do so. (“The Edge of Glory,” released last week, made it an even 10 in a row.)
“Born This Way,” when it is released tomorrow, will be sold not just on iTunes and in record stores but in Rite Aid, Whole Foods, Radio Shack, Starbucks, and nearly 21,000 other “non-traditional” retail outlets. Nightclubs from Miami to Las Vegas will hold “Haus” parties in honor of the record’s release. There is a themed Facebook game (“think crystals, unicorns, sheep on motorcycles”), this past weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” cameo, and two weeks worth of appearances on “American Idol.” On a recent Saturday, she became the first human to garner over 10 million Twitter followers.
Like Kanye West or Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga belongs to a generation of stars for whom celebrity is sport and transparency is paramount. She lives in public — on Twitter, on your television, in your local sports arena, and as fodder for increasingly elaborate Internet memes that play off of her outlandish fashion choices. This ubiquity and lack of mediation is part of her art.
Lady Gaga’s facility with fame as an instrument occasionally cloaks the quality her music, which is craftier and more complicated than it often seems. It is a common refrain among critics and fans that the paradox of Lady Gaga is that her songwriting often fails to live up to the delicious strangeness of her persona. But in fact, one of the strangest things about Lady Gaga is her enduring fascination with some of the most defiantly regular and unironic pop music ever made: ‘80s power ballads, straightforward, 4/4 European dance music, and the saxophone solos of the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons, who is featured not once but twice on “Born This Way.”
The critic George W.S. Trow once lamented the way time robs us of the traditions of the past, how something as seemingly regular and common as his father’s fedora was no longer available to him as an adult: “A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony,” he wrote, “would eat through my head and kill me.” So too, you would think, would a saxophone solo without scare quotes, but “Born This Way” is as sincere as any major work of pop art made in the last decade.
Pop stars often deploy something that looks like sincerity as a way to get people on the dance floor; Lady Gaga deploys it because it’s the only mode of expression she knows. She really does seem to think, as goes one of the more bombastic tracks on “Born This Way,” that she’s a “Highway Unicorn” — that’s why she’s got one tattooed on her thigh.
Logic rarely enters the picture. This is why the album’s most concrete political statement, on which Gaga brags about being a “blond high-heeled feminist” and, over a beat that is all rave whistles and flashing lights, avers that “when you’re a strong female, you don’t permission,” is called, inexplicably, “Scheiße.” A more calculating artist would’ve left both the obscenity and the foreign characters for, say, “Bloody Mary,” a comparatively subdued bit of blasphemy (“Like Jesus said, I’m gonna dance dance dance”) that immediately follows “Scheiße” on the record’s track listing.
Not Lady Gaga. “Born This Way” opens with “Marry The Night,” a Pat Benatar-worthy anthem on which she proudly proclaims herself “a loser” and ends with “The Edge of Glory,” which doubles down on one of Clemons’ two sax solos with synthesizers that would not be out of place playing on your dentist’s car stereo as he drives home from work. In between, she slips the word “boudoir” into her record’s best-selling single to date, builds a song around a nonsensical metaphor (“I am my hair!”), and yes, on “Heavy Metal Lover,” sidles up to a man and says: “I want your whiskey mouth all over my blond south.”
In its sheer willful bombast, loyalty to the seemingly exclusive schools of both big, dumb dance music and big dumb ballads, repeated allusions to both Christ (the religious figure) and Queen (the band), “Born This Way” is both completely out of its time and very much of it. The album provides its own context, even as it stands at a distance from basically everything else it shares the charts with. But then again, “shares” is probably the wrong verb for anything related to Gaga. Until another artist can match either her level of self-belief or her sales, Lady Gaga will remain in her own unique level in the pop firmament, willing her own weird self into pop’s unlikely ideal.
