an open letter to Lady Gaga
to date, i have not been a Lady Gaga fan. i mean, obviously her visual aesthetics are awesome, but i find her music unbearable. as big of a Madonna fan as i used to be, i find the modern sound of techno-pop unlistenable. i don’t like house music or trance music, and someone singing over it just makes it worse.
but it’s kind of made me a little sad that i don’t like Gaga’s sound, because i want to like the rest of her. i saw her play piano with Elton John at the 2010 Grammys and was like….she CAN play and she CAN sing….so why does her music sound so standard and pop?
Gaga visited Google last week and gave a 1-hour interview. i watched the entire Google goes Gaga video, and have some thoughts and a question for the Lady.
i was impressed by the person i saw in the interview. i would like to be friends with Gaga. obvi we have a mutual love of couture fashion and really BEING a character and costuming. her positive attitude is special and her candid demeanor was attractive. but i am still confused about what feels to me like a disconnect between the artist i see visually and the person i heard speak and the music that comes out in the end.
during the google interview they show this amazing clip of a little girl playing piano and singing Born this Way. she’s right. it’s a beautiful song. i like the messages in her music. the lyrics, albeit cheesy sometimes, are literal and honest. i like that. but again, it’s the SOUND. for example, the Scissor Sisters, who i LOVE LOVE LOVE and have tix to see in SF on 4/15, have been opening for Gaga on this tour, and i think it’s the same kind of thing – campy, cheeky, and dancey but full of message. but their sound to me is much, much more organic and soulful.
Gaga talks about how when she parties with her friends she likes to listen to AC/DC and the like, and there’s a lot of punk rock vibe happening with Gaga. so when i imagine the sound, i imagine something that sounds a lot different than other pop-techno/house-dance music on the air, either more in the direction of Scissor Sisters or in swinging the harder-edge way toward Marilyn Manson or NIN. i imagine something with a more ROCK AND ROLL edge to it. but to me, her sound doesn’t have that edge. Gaga says she co-produces every single track and spends hours and hours in the studio with the sound engineers coming up with exactly what she wants to hear, so i have to believe this is the sound Gaga wants, not something imposed on her by a label/producers because that’s what they think will sell. she says she’s a musician at heart, not a performance artist.
i was thinking about this through the whole 1-hour+ interview, and then she gets to a point where she talks about how women are underestimated and we live with low expectations. and that’s when i was really feeling this disconnect. because to me, she’s playing right into that place. perhaps that’s presumptive of me, and maybe i really just don’t get it.
so my question(s) for Lady Gaga is: do you also feel this dissonance? do you spend a lot of time listening to a lot of other techno-pop/is that the genre you really dance to? if yes, then i guess i understand and it’s just a question of taste/preference. but that’s not the sense i get, that you really connect with other music in this genre. so if not, why isn’t your sound more organic? why aren’t you more rock and roll?
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i find your comparison to Scissor Sisters to be *spot* *on*, and your question is intriguing. i’d love to see her answer to this.
This is something I contemplate, too. I love everything else about Gaga, but I can’t say that I like her music. She wrote pop songs for J-Lo, Pink and some other people like that. I think her talent is pure pop. I mean not her talent, but her $talent$. I wonder how many people can consistently write global hit singles that appeal to everybody from 100 year olds to gay boys in the club? She was behind the scenes writing music for famous ladies, so she knew she had the chops to write radio hits. She wanted to be famous and she had a unique, behind the scenes view of what it takes to be pop-famous. She probs could write an Elton John song or Scissor Sisters song or whatevs, but would that get her Famemonster megastardom? That is what she really wanted out of her career. Also, I wonder if it’s age related. NIN and Marilyn Manson are like 100 years old in terms of pop music. It’s a whole different climate today. Would Pretty Hate Machine sell today the way it did when it came out? I would argue that NIN and Marilyn Manson (wtf is he doing, anyway) aren’t even relevant anymore. The climate of pop music back in those days of yore was completely different than it is now. I love the Scissor Sisters and I will be seeing them in April, too. How famous are the Scissor Sisters in the US? Not very. The SS are opening for her in a lot of places, so she def. knows what’s up w. them. I really think that FAME was her over-arching goal. Scissor Sisters famous doesn’t buy Armani Prive or being a Theirry Mugler muse.
She says the music is what she wants, but I don’t buy it. I think circumstantial evidence indicates that she is a tool of the mainstream corporatocracy. There’s even been conspiracy theories about New World Order connections due to some of the bizarre imagery in some of her videos…
Her music is terrible and honestly her “character”, style, whatever you want to call it isn’t really even all that original. She looks like a cross between Madonna and Marilyn Manson. NYC Club Kids did it first and better in late 80′s / early 90′s Manhattan. NEXT!