Gaga 4 Gaga

Robert Sterling, Konformist.com

I remember the first time I saw Britney Spears sing quite vividly. I was shopping for electronics with a pal of mine at a West L.A. Best Buy in October of 1998. And there I was, in front of a bunch of large screen televisions, when she appeared, shaking her nubile, flexible body to the beat of "Baby One More Time" while clad in a schoolgirl uniform. When the song was finished, I turned to my friend and gave this simple review: "You know what? I have a new favorite female singer."

Little did I know that three months later, little Brit would have the number one single and album on the Billboard Charts, and would be on her way to becoming the biggest pop star on the planet. To my credit, I grasped how a then only sixteen-year-old Spears (something I didn't realize at the time of viewing, but the later revelation of which strangely didn't detract from her appeal) had already mastered the manipulation of video for mass consumption like few others. (Indeed, the entire video concept for the song reputedly came from Spears alone.) But in many ways, I (and others) clearly underestimated her musical talents. True, she rarely has written her own songs, and her voice isn't the most dynamic, but even if you want to dismiss her as pure product, the product she has put out over the last ten years holds up amazingly well. (I would even argue her music has stood the test of time far better than Eminem, who never quite fulfilled the potential of his skills.) And nowhere does that become more evident than when listening to "Baby One More Time" again, as it is one of those perfectly crafted pop songs where the success seems almost obvious in retrospect.

Thinks about it: has anyone changed pop music like Britney did since she hit the scene? For better or for worse, she is the one artist who has defined this decade in pop music. And while some may snicker at that opinion, there's a reason why even after quickie Vegas weddings, Fahrenheit 9/11 cameos, K-Fed, limo beaver shots and VMA meltdowns, the public still forgives her and hungrily laps up every new album of hers like it's an event. The 2003 kiss she shared with Madonna on MTV became a sensation in part because it was the passing of the baton, with even Madonna symbolically acknowledging, after twenty years, she had lost the crown as the Queen of Pop. No artist, male or female, has yet to come even close to ending her royal reign.

Of course, to some degree, she has won the title be default. In rock music, for example, even if you're a fan of Coldplay or Nickleback (and I'm not) it's not like their music caused any shocking shift in the music landscape. There's been no Nirvana and grunge, nor even a Nine Inch Nails and industrial rock. Even a band like Radiohead, who probably would make the best alternative case to Ms. Spears for artist of the zeroes, is more a unique quirk in the machine rather than a gamechanger.

For most of the decade, hip hop picked up some of the slack. It's remarkable that the gangsta sound could, so improbably, become the definition of pop music ten years after Straight Outta Compton. Unfortunately, rap music has become lazy, self-satisfied and derivative, aided in no small part by the devolution from NWA's authentic nihilistic social commentary to shallow celebration of thuggery and crass commercialism. My general reaction to rap music in recent years: okay, so you're bad ass, drive a Bentley and drink Cristal, when you have something else to say, let me know. (Indeed, the main reason behind the popularity of Kanye West is, for all the jokes of his raging ego, he's still more interested in sonic experimentation than repetitive boasts.) The declining sales of hip hop the last five years indicate there are millions who apparently agree. Maybe rap won't face a cultural massacre like hair metal did in the early nineties, but it definitely deserves to.

Meanwhile, the one bright light over the past decade has been female pop, rock and soul: Beyonce (either solo or in Destiny's Child), Gwen Stefani (either solo or in No Doubt), Pink, Alicia Keys, Nelly Furtado, Christina Aguilera, M.I.A., Fiona Apple, Mariah Carey, Norah Jones, Amy Winehouse, Rihanna, Katy Perry. I'm certainly forgetting deserved names here, and that's the point: females really have dominated the musical landscape. And though she's never been given the credit she deserves, Ms. Britney really is the key player in this battle of the sexes by making females the more marketable commodity.

Still, there appears to be a huge vacuum in the pop music landscape that needs to be filled, and I'm not the only one who's been grumbling about it. (I suspect the empty void in pop music is a large part of the YouTube craze caused by the UK's Susan Boyle, and yes, I admit it: I too sobbed like a little girl when I saw her sing.) Even if you give Britney her due, it still would be ten years since a real Next Big Thing has hit the musical scene. Napster didn't even exist back then. With no radical movement in rock or rap since, there's a real mass hunger for a new sound, and a new face, to change the face of pop.

At this point, Lady Gaga isn't exactly an obscure name in pop music: indeed, she already has two number one hits in "Just Dance" and "Poker Face" while her album The Fame has gone top five. Still, if you don't pay her too close attention, she could appear to be just another marketable pretty face, perhaps a bit more talented than average, and certainly a lot more attention-getting with her outrageous fashions, but nothing particularly remarkable.

To some degree, that's how I viewed her, at least at first. It didn't help that I usually caught her music in the background while doing something else, most often at my gym while working out. Despite this, I soon could tell she was fairly attractive and charismatic, had a good voice and had heard she was an amazing live performer. And while her musical style, usually described as elctropop or disco, may not be the favorite of an old hard rock fan like me, she certainly delivered it well, and I liked what I heard. All in all, she reminded me of Pink on her underrated first album, a promising talent who may just turn into something great with material that matched her gifts. Considering that I think Pink is one of the few real bright lights of the last decade, this was quite a positive assessment.

Cut to two weeks ago, and I'm driving around Las Vegas. A basketball game on ESPN AM radio is becoming a blowout, so I turn it to the FM, which I have set on a hard rock station. What I hear is a hard techno beat, and soon a sweet female voice cooing a quasi-rap. I have to admit, the song is a bit unusual for hard rock, but I like it. I mean, really like it. The closest thing I can compare it to is "Hella Good" by No Doubt, one of my favorite songs this decade. And as I continue listening, I get pissed that more rock bands don't try to do something a little more original like this one. And twenty-four seconds into it, that's when I hear it: "Can't read my, can't read my, no he can't read my poker face..."

As you can guess, the song was indeed "Poker Face" - a Grace Jones-esque number by Ms. Gaga. As it turns out, I picked up the song at the 2:18 mark of her video below, which is the only area of the hit I wouldn't immediately recognize. You can see and hear the whole video and song here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAoPJxTvZOQ

It also turns out I wasn't listening to a hard rock station: someone I had been driving with last had left it on a Top 40 station. But "Poker Face" booms so hard, I didn't even notice, and for twenty-four seconds, a disco queen rocked harder than Fall Out Boy, John Mayer and Maroon 5 ever have combined.

This shouldn't be too surprising in retrospect. Lady Gaga's stage name comes from the Queen song "Radio Gaga" and The Fame album title is clearly a nod to the classic David Bowie song. While her major influences include Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, you can also hear the sound of GNR, Motley Crue and Def Leppard in her work. Tellingly, her often partner in crime, Lady Starlight (named after the 70s glam rock song by Sweet) is a DJ who specializes in hard rock like AC/DC and Iron Maiden.

Intrigued, I decided to check out more of her work. And sure enough, she has one particularly tasty rock song on her album titled "Beautiful Dirty Rich". She has another great piano song, so far unreleased but easy to find on YouTube, titled "Honest Eyes" that is worthy of being a single in its own right. The rest of the stuff found on The Fame, however, though having rock influences, is pretty much a blend of Europop, disco and dance music with a few more conventional pop songs in the mix, a combination that isn't my usual tastes. Likewise, lyrically, The Fame is nearly a concept album about the celebrity lifestyle and the search for fame. Some may find it a celebration of the celebrity game, others a satirical critique: my guess is that she means it as both. In either case, though she is quite witty, the subject is not something I find particularly interesting.

So with these caveats indicating I may not be the best audience for her work, let me give my opinion of it: if The Fame isn't the best album at least since Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and I think it is, it's definitely the most ambitious.

And really, wanting it is over half the battle in success. Take Alicia Keys, for example. Keys is a woman with a ridiculously amazing voice, jaw-dropping knockout looks, and an extremely gifted songwriter to top it off. In a more just universe, I suppose I would have written an article about her in 2007 when she released her last album, which was indeed incredible. But for all her gifts, there is nothing in her work that changes the face of pop music, it merely makes it better. Gaga, in contrast, wants to be the gamechanger, and she is.

The proof that she is a gamechanger is I don't even like her main musical style. I am not a fan of disco, dance or even what goes under the "electropop" label - a term you'll likely soon hear thrown around like "grunge", "alternative" and "gangsta" were in the nineties.

Of course, this reminds me of a funny story: one of my friends is a gay guy who enjoys having affairs with married straight men. (To each his own hobby.) At some point during these affairs, the other guy always tries to insist that he's not gay at all and is still straight. My friend always replies to this one with the same response: "Well, if you're not gay, why is my dick in your asshole?" The point here is I may continue to insist that I don't like electropop, but it's going to sound increasingly unconvincing with Gaga's musical dick up my ass.

I'm not going to pseudo-intellectualize why The Fame is a great album, I'm just going to say that since I listened to it, I can't get the addictively catchy tunes out of my head. That may be the simplest, and most honest, definition of what great music is, and in this case, it seems shrewdly by design. The album is almost as much "pop" as "electropop" in style, different enough to sound decidedly unique, yet familiar enough to be certified for mass appeal, and dabbling enough in as many genres to make everyone an eventual fan. The last time I heard an album so cynically crafted for blockbuster status was when Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones teamed up on Thriller. Frankly, if I didn't believe that Gaga really was the album's main songwriter, I'd suspect The Fame was cooked up in some secret laboratory by a group of evil scientists plotting to take over pop music.

Strangely, despite the obviously sinister plans behind the whole Lady Gaga scheme, others have been even slower than I to catch on. Her album has scored a 71 on Metacritic.com, an impressive number but nothing particularly amazing. Likewise, her album has done well, but has yet to sell a million copies after nine months. It isn't by a lack of effort by Interscope, which has already backed the disc with six videos. (They certainly believed in "Just Dance" enough to push it so the bubbly party tune turned into a deserved number one single.) It seems at this point, the only person who really believes that Gaga will be the biggest star on the planet is Gaga herself. You can see it in her confident strut as she strides through the "Poker Face" video like she's the hottest woman on the planet. (The last time I saw an outrageously dressed, leather-clad blonde prance through a video with such narcissistic arrogance was David Lee Roth in "Yankee Rose".) Living in Vegas, I see too many women walk with that same attitude, and find it to be totally unappealing. But in the case of Gaga, it works, because, by all evidence, she is the hottest woman on the planet.

And that's why, even if Gaga is the only one who believes she's the Next Big Thing, that's more than enough for me. So mark it down, I want to be on record so when it happens, I can smirk with the same self-satisfaction Jose Canseco gets every time one of his outrageous claims about steroids in baseball is found to be completely true. Here is my prediction: at some point before the end of the year, Gagamania is going to hit hyperspace, and she will become the biggest pop star on the planet. And by big, I don't mean merely the hottest pop star of the moment big, I mean so huge the entire music industry has to react to the phenomenon and transform.

This is a done deal. If Lady Gaga was a stock, I'd be raving like Jim Cramer in 2007 to buy. And I say this because I can see the dam is about to burst. Thanks to her over-the-top fashion sense (a bizarre combination of burlesque and tranny stylings, which have lead to opposing rumors that she's a former stripper and that she's actually a man) she's beginning to turn into a tabloid stable just over her outfits alone. Other musicians are dropping her name as the artist they admire (Madonna and Katy Perry are among her fans) and doing cover tributes to her work. (Kanye West and Common teamed up for an interesting rap version of "Poker Face" on YouTube.) Perhaps most important, she gave an audience of over 20 million American Idol viewers a taste of her Warholian live shows last month thanks to a stunning guest performance on the blockbuster bourgeois brain rot. She's just finished the first leg of her first solo tour, and no doubt by the end of the year, she will have seen a million faces and rocked them all. These are the kind of things that happen just as a pop culture hysteria blows up.

But the real reason I know it's going to happen is because I also know the only thing that has stopped her so far. Electropop, or whatever you want to call it, is basically disco, and while it is popular among women and gay males, heterosexual males are pretty resistant to it. An audience of women and homosexuals is enough to top the radio charts, but straight males still won't be buying the albums. Only a few artists (Madonna, Britney, Mariah Carey and the Pussycat Dolls come to mind) have managed to have disco hits popular among guys, and in those cases the women were sex symbols merely dabbling as part of a pop-music sampler plate. So it seems that Gaga's biggest roadblock right now is turning men into fans of her music.

That's why I suspect that once her latest single "LoveGame" begins dominating the radio waves, the battle will be over. The cut is even better than "Poker Face" and plays like it was ripped off the Midnight Express soundtrack. Gaga herself appears to know this is her home run, as in her opening verse, she boasts via lyrics that no doubt will soon be part of the pop culture lexicon: "Let's have some fun, this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick."

"LoveGame" is one of those rare sonic assaults that on first listening, it was though I had heard it both never before and a million times at once. I don't think I'm the only one who will react this way to it. Meanwhile, when it comes to figuring out what appeals to straight men in music, a few questions usually answer this question pretty conclusively:

1) Can you picture this song being played in a strip club as you are getting a lapdance?

2) Can you picture this song being played on ESPN in the background on a Sunday evening while NFL highlights are being shown?

3) Can you picture this song being played on the radio while in an awesome car chase with cops in any version of Grand Theft Auto?

Based on this simple acid test, "LoveGame" passes with flying colors, even more so than "Poker Face" or "Just Dance" does.

But as great as the song "LoveGame" is, the video may be even better. With everything from hot choreography to lesbian kissing, it's the kind of video they used to make back in the ancient days when MTV actually showed music videos rather than really bad reality shows. The YouTube link is below, and I think it speaks for itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5-ZiNwv6kI

But let me just add the obvious here: the video's greatest asset is Ms. Gaga herself. As I've noted before, she's an attractive woman, albeit there's an oddball charm to her. I suspect if I were a nitpicker, I wouldn't label her a natural beauty like Beyonce or Christina Aguilera. Then again, I'm not a nitpicker, but even if I was, I'd say she uses what she's got better than anyone else. In "LoveGame" she uses it better than ever, and gives a sensual video performance that can only be compared to, you guessed it, Madonna and Britney Spears at their peak. Lady Gaga in "LoveGame" is Jessica Alba on a stripper pole sexy, Ursula Andress rising from the ocean in a bikini sexy. Needless to say, once this video is unleashed on the masses, I don't think she's going to have any trouble converting heterosexual males into fans.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the cheery pop ballad "Eh Eh" (with a title seemingly inspired by the unforgettable hook line to Rihanna's sultry hit "Umbrella") will do the trick, especially with her pinup girl charm in yet another great video. Maybe it'll come from another song that hasn't yet sucked me in yet, but eventually will. The point is, she's got so many weapons off this album at her disposal, it's only a matter of time, and it's gonna happen sooner rather than later.

So what do I think is going to happen by the end of the year? The same frenzy I have seen many times before. She will be the biggest pop star on the planet, with nobody even close. The days of albums selling 10 million copies or more appear to be over, but even that figure doesn't seem implausible. Meanwhile, every record label is going to be trying to copy the Lady Gaga sound, and Top 40 radio will become overloaded with electropop. Perhaps even more important, eventually there'll be some rock and rap artists so disgusted by the fad and their own irrelevance, they'll go out and record something really different in their own right. On this last count, I can only hope.

As for the future of Gaga, a quick fall is certainly a possibility. The rock era of music is notoriously ruthless for eating up its own, quickly chewing them up and spitting them out. Only the artist who can continuously reinvent themselves seem to last. But I wouldn't bet against her at this point. I suspect she may be holding the Queen of Pop title for quite awhile. This is why if I was to give her any unsolicited advice, I’d tell her to trust her instincts, because they clearly are working well for her. Oh, and one other thing, Gaga: buy some lipstick. You're gonna need it pretty soon when you get a big wet kiss from Britney...