Music Banter

Lady Gaga’s been mildly amusing every now and then. I think there was a point in time when I quite liked her, though I was suspicious of the way her early releases and videos seemed to be rather deliberate syntheses of whatever was popular. I wasn’t convinced, though, and as time went on I found her more and more irritating. I noticed people started to talk a hell of a lot of absolute god-damn nonsense about her. I particularly liked the website that claimed she was an Illuminati Sex Puppet, but then this malaise started to infest my friends.

‘Oh, but she’s amazing,’ friends of mine would say. ‘She’s like a modern-day David Bowie, she’s just using whatever’s out there, like a cultural magpie.’

Oh, piss off and die, I would say. She’s not the modern David Bowie, she’s the modern Madonna- a cynical, ruthlessly ambitious pop star making chicken salad out of chicken shit and dressing it up so she can sell it to us. She knows that the best way to get attention and commercial success if you’re not actually that good musically is to find a way to appear shocking, say a few provocative things that you know the press will repeate Ad Nauseum, and then let idiots buy into the buzz.

‘Oh, but it’s like performance art,’ my friends (who had all finished Art History degrees) said. ‘It’s not really about the music, it’s about the aesthetic.’

Fine, I said, I’ll watch her videos with the sound turned down.

And that’s what I did for Alejandro. I heard about thirty seconds of the actual song, and it sounds ‘la isla bonita’ re-written by a group of concussed nine year-olds if you ask me. Still, I imagine it’ll sound good if you’re in a coma. The video is horrendous, too. I was going to go through it and dissect it but then I read This article in the Guardian which does it perfectly, so I thought no, let’s not be cynical, let’s be constructive. Let’s find a way to improve things.

If you’re like me and you want to appreciate the Lady Gaga ‘phenomenon’ without having to listen to excruciating mid-90s Europop, then here’s what you can do.

Here’s the video:

Switch that on. Turn the sound off. Oh, and fast-forward through the first thirty seconds that look like a couple of fetish models hanging out on the set of Pan’s Labyrinth to when stuff actually starts happening.

Now load up this video.

Play the two together. Of course, you may need to restart the second a few times, because it’s only twenty-seven seconds long, but I promise you the results will be a lot better than actually listening to her music.