Gaga's Problem Identified

One of the most illuminating pieces about Gaga from her Fame/Fame Monster, 2010 prime was Overkiller Queen by David Schmader. Schmader's best point comes late in the article:

Much is made of Gaga's extensive plundering of Madonna, but not enough is made of the speed and intensity with which this plundering has occurred. It took Madonna six years to get from dance-floor diva to international hit-maker to high-art pop icon; it took Gaga four singles, all culled from her debut album. Much like Bo Diddley sped up the blues to make rock 'n' roll, Stefani Germanotta sped up the pop machine that made Madonna to make Lady Gaga.

In the light of all of the singles from Born This Way, this now seems even more right to me than it did in 2010 only with a darker twist. Yes, Gaga leapt directly from Holiday to Like a Prayer/Vogue/Justify My Love/Deeper and Deeper (take your pick), i.e., to the Madonna of Cultural Studies departments. But that's a problem: while there are obvious high-points from that more conceptual, overexposing 1989-1992 Madonna (esp. the tracks I just mentioned), that's a period in which Madonna's music feels secondary to exhibitionism, cultural provocation and domination for its own sake. During that period Madonna burned through a lot of the good will she'd accumulated from her first three, pretty immaculate albums, and she just plain wore out her welcome with a lot of people. Madonna the self-conscious media artist/student of her own image had its moments, but taken as a whole it was too much, too calculating, and ultimately just tiring and boring (in the special way that only the over-wrought and over-stimulating risks - 'Oh, you again. Always with the wanting of attention. Go away!').

It's mildly heretical to say it, but that middle period Madonna, while superficially triumphant was actually a bit toxic. Madonna had to go away for while after it and come back with a more self-contained, more musical focus. Bedtime Stories, Ray of Light, and Music were the result of that pulling back from excess, and they jointly constitute the second great career peak for M. after her initial not-putting-a-foot-wrong/breakthrough period that continued up through the True Blue album. (I count Confessions on a Dancefloor and its tour as M's much lonelier third career peak - five years later we're still waiting to see whether that's all she wrote for M. at pop's top-table - she'll have lasted longer than anyone else if it is.)

Again, heretical though it is to say it, the 'Madonna Studies' period of M. that Gaga has indeed fast-forwarded to, while impressive in certain ways was also obnoxious and unconvincing, and with the perspective of distance was a kind of creative low for M. (notwithstanding its special resonances with certain sub-cultures).

Gaga is currently only superficially triumphant: all of the Born This Way singles have been tiring and boring, hectoring, un-musical attention events. They may deepen Gaga's connections with certain core fans and true believers, but for a wider public it's a disastrous turn. Madonna had all the cultural political capital gained from her first three albums to spend down, whereas Gaga's obnoxious and exhausting phase has to be 'funded' out of only the handful of broadly appealing singles up to Bad Romance. That's a problem. Schmader (and others) called the phenomenon right back in 2010 but they didn't see the problem that posed for Gaga and for the public alike.

Another pedestrian Gaga song

Hard to believe that this turgid rehash of some of Cher's and Bon Jovi's less inspired moments (via, perhaps, some of Pink's and Kelly Clarkson's lesser moments) will excite anyone not already besotted with Gaga (poor Clarence Clemons gets a dreadfully reigned in/limp sax solo and re-entry that's quite dominated by thwacking drums and synth whooshes so that there's no feel to the episode at all). Enter Shikari's aping of (in their case, van Halen-style) big '80s/'90s MOR rock from a few years back feels truly joyous by comparison:
In general, best to avoid Gaga in favor of Robyn or newies Glasser and Ronika for one's interesting-young-(dance)-diva needs for the foreseeable future. (Unfortunately, Gaga doesn't seem inclined to allow that to happen - she's frickin' everywhere, from Oprah yesterday to Farmville today to Cannes tomorrow...)

Update May 16, 2011: Another Gaga song, 'Hair' dropped... v. similar to Edge of Glory, but even less interesting. I continue to think that Gaga needs to take a break - try to write some songs with real feel and musicality, learn how to arrange stuff (Transitions between sections of songs! Is that too much to ask for? Jesus, it's getting embarrassing. Go and take some lessons from Bat for Lashes or Newsom or Elton or Mark Mothersbaugh or Andy Partridge or....) , explore different lyrical approaches, learn to rely less on the same chundering chorus over and over, and so on.

Update May 23, 2011: Slate's review of the BTW album raises a point that crystallizes something for me:

'Gaga is a rocker at heart. She has little feel for, or interest in, black music; there's almost no hip-hop on her records. Her songs are powered by blunt foursquare house beats—a European sound that, thanks to Gaga, has become the default pulse of American pop.'

While I hold no special brief for hip-hop, I've increasingly been alienated by the lack of feel in Gaga's rhythm section: her records mostly plod, they aren't geared to move to (the Gwen Stefani-Sweet Escape/NoDoubt-Just a girl hybrid Summerboy from Gaga's first album is a pleasant exception). The bass drum hammers you, the bass is never sinuous or slinky (I'm not asking for James Jamerson or Bernard Edwards or Louis Johnson here, although that would indeed be pleasant. Jam and Lewis or Steve Bray-style keys would be fine!). And that's a huge problem: there's nothing especially dance-able or dance-worthy in Gaga's music, and yet dance music is allegedly what she's selling. Note that all of this really does set Gaga apart from Madonna, a dancer, who grew up with Soul Train, who was drenched in Sylvester and Chic, who sought out Reggie Lucas, and Rodgers and Edwards, and so on.

Gaga does not write/perform Abba-worthy songs

To be fair, Gaga never said she did that I'm aware of (although, now, when her recorded output is becoming increasingly plodding and redundant and unpleasant, Gaga has exhibited a willingness to assert that her latest records are best-of-decade items), but many of Gaga's fans have made versions of the claim. Why it wouldn't have been enough to say that in 2009 Gaga got onto the sort of (largely producer-driven) hot streak of 3 or 4 excellent singles that Janet Jackson got onto with Control and then again with Rhythm Nation (and, beyond music, had one of those, culture-convulsing 'year of [insert artist name here]' years in 2009, the way only 20 or 30 pop music figures have ever done) is never explained.

Consider the following from The Stranger's David Schmader:

Lady Gaga's music is deeply conventional, but ingeniously so, marrying hooky verses to hooky bridges to hooky choruses (which are often split into two increasingly hooky parts), with one-off bonus hooks thrown in here and there for kicks, all of it produced with a consistency that's positively ABBA-esque. Just as Stephin Merritt (himself a die-hard ABBA fan) has made a career out of studious distillations of the Great American Songbook, Gaga's doing the same with dance pop, identifying the genre's most effective intoxicants and boiling them down into unprecedentedly effective pop crack.

Schmader never quite comes out and says that Gaga is as good as Abba or his beloved Stephin Merritt, but the overall impression is that, yes, Schmader thinks that that's her level.

Well, no. Not close. (I'm not sure that even Schmader thinks Gaga's so ingenious these days.) Just as Oasis had a few good songs but were never close to being as good as The Beatles and were made to look especially ridiculous by their own and others comparisons to this effect, so it's just obvious that Gaga 'is' Janet Jackson if she's lucky (although BTW isn't shaping up to be close to the equal of Rhythm Nation). That's still an amazing achievement for someone so young and relatively unformed, but if Abba-quality is going to be in the cards for Gaga, she's going to have to take some time off and really think about writing and about finding the right collaborators. Gaga's (evident to me at least!) manifest destiny - putting her piano and performance skills to work playing Jobraith covers and playing Judee Sill in a Sill bio-pic (or maybe playing both in some funky new miniseries for HBO) - remains undiscovered.

Gaga's Born This Way. My 2c.

Simultaneously hectoring and pandering, lyrically inept, poorly performed (since Gaga's lyrics on this one are supposed to be very important to her, it's staggering that her diction here is easily her worst, i.e., of all her singles - compare Gaga with, say, Loretta Lynn when she's got something to say about 'god making no mistakes'),^[1] musically pedestrian (at best), busy but hookless with cluttered/muddled/airless production.^[2] In sum, this is a genuinely bad, reputation-deflating record a la, say, Michael Jackson's Bad single or Oasis's D'you know what I mean? I imagine that the BTW album will be more the sort of tepid-by-comparison-with-previous-triumphs disappointment that MJ's Bad album was than a laughable fiasco like Oasis's Be Here Now, but who knows?

Avoid in favor of contemporary wonderfulness such as:

and

Update March 1, 2011: Born This Way's vid. has dropped. It uses about two minutes of Herrmann's Vertigo score for an intro.. I can't decide whether I'm angry about that or not! At any rate, it's a complete mismatch with the (somewhat grotesque) images, which are heavily indebted to Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. Moreover neither the Herrmann nor the Cremaster-meets-Transformers -meets-The Jackson's Can You Feel It images seem to have anything much to do with Gaga's own musical contribution. It's all a little bewildering. Realistically, too, Gaga's song just drowns in this mass of allusion and overdone ornamentation: you'd need to have written something as assured as Life on Mars or Station to Station or Somebody to Love or Cloudbusting or Paranoid Android to survive it, and BTW isn't close to that level. I do suppose that we have to give Gaga credit for her obsessions: she referred to Vertigo and other Hitchcock films in the lyrics to Bad Romance, and here we go again.

Update April 16, 2011: Gaga's next single, Judas has dropped. Bloody hell, what a horrible mess - Bad Romance sped up minus the hooks. Gaga appears to have completely lost her way both musically and lyrically - she needs to take a break from the music business to recharge, find herself is my guess. Judas also features the same cluttered/muddled/airless production as BTW. Awful. Can't wait for the inevitable, overbearing video. :(

Update May 5, 2011: Judas's vid. has dropped, and while it's an overblown/incoherent mess, it at least gets through its business without too much faffing around. To me at least it feels like a net positive for the song. It's being reported that the vid. cost $10 Million = Gaga does her bit to keep the economy moving perhaps! Can't see her accountants being amused.

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^[1] Note that Lynn's use of 'God makes no mistakes' is relatively coherent: it's part of a broad embrace of the (admittedly unsatisfying) Book of Job defense against the so-called 'argt from evil' (to the conclusion that the God of monotheist tradition does not exist). Gaga's use, by way of contrast, is completely incoherent: she doesn't want to get God off the hook for 'evil', as it were, rather she wants to encourage a specific attitude of acceptance/tolerance/don't try to overcome/cure anything by humans. But that's a stupid non sequitur: someone can think that all manner of hardships are God's deliberate testing of us and still think that overcoming/curing/struggling against/preventing future instances of that hardship is an appropriate response (i.e., what constitutes passing the test), and that passively accepting that that's just the way things are and ever will be is inappropriate (i.e., constitutes failing the test). More generally, Gaga's insinuation is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy-mongering that's one of the banes of much modern gay-rights activism (cf., 'born this way', 'we're here, we're...', 'love doesn't discrim., neither should the law', and so on). Insofar as this fallacy-mongering is strategic, it's contemptible, and insofar as it's sincere, it's idiotic.

^[2] How compressed and loud is BTW? I'm no audio-maven but the whole thing sounds like 'bricked' static to me. I therefore expect that a formal frequency analysis will be very telling in this case.