Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster
5/5
By: Hayley Sleigh
It’s not that new, it might not be particularly ‘Rockfeedback’, and Lord knows the girl doesn’t need the extra publicity, but I felt I had to write something about The Fame Monster. I really need to do something to help pass the time until I can YouTube Lady Gaga ft. Beyonce’s forthcoming ‘Telephone’ video – photos have been leaked, and ohmygosh you guys Gaga’s hair is a phone. The song itself is glorious, and although both divas will have their work cut out topping Beyonce’s marvellous breast-juggling performance in the Gaga-featuring ‘Videophone’ video, Gaga’s hair. Is. A. Phone.
You see, perhaps that’s the slight problem I have with Gaga. The first time I heard ‘Roses’ from her one-time would-be tour-mate Kanye West’s 2005 Late Registration album, I was so strongly affected by it that I burst into tears, whereas now his public persona has overshadowed his music to the extent that I can’t remember the last time I saw, heard or thought of his name without the words ‘shut up’ prefixed in front of it. After an increasingly delightful set of public appearances on UK television, perhaps Gaga won’t end up pulling a stunt so obnoxious that the President of the United States will be caught on tape calling her a ‘jackass’, unlike a certain someone. But her image – the clothes, the hair, the videos – threatens to eclipse her music. Sometimes I worry that the songs I love so much right now will one day be lost under a mountain of multi-coloured My Little Pony hair, drowning in a bath big enough to fit thirty people.
She’s a confusing one, that Gaga. There’s something quite wonderful about someone so musically well-trained with such highbrow and eclectic influences choosing to slum it in the world of mainstream pop, in a Heston Blumenthal Takes On Little Chef kinda way: pumping her tunes full of radio-friendly hooks and singing about disco sticks and bluffin’ with her muffin. (While I’m riffing with my muffin, Lady Gaga Saves Little Chef #showschannel4shouldmake? Can you imagine?) She has a tattoo on her arm of a quote by the 19th century Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke which translates as 'In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?' This, adorned on the arm of the 21st century performance artist who wrote the words ‘let’s have some fun this beat is sick/I wanna take a ride on your disco stick’.
As sick as those beats were, it wasn’t until 2009’s ‘Bad Romance’ that I truly, madly fell for Gaga. Gaga’s 2008 debut The Fame, featuring many of the songs she tearfully told the Brits viewers had been years in the making, had the misfortune of being released in the year that the Western world started finding all that Beautiful, Dirty, Rich stuff rather tiresome and two-thousand-and-late. (Sample lyric from ‘Money Honey’: “damn I love the Jag, the jet and the mansion, oh yeah/and I enjoy the gifts and trips to the islands, oh yeah/It’s good to live expensive, you know it”. No we don’t know it Gaga darling, we’re broke, care to explain it to us?)
But ‘Bad Romance’ was something else entirely. One of my favourite things about this song is that its video was recently featured on ITN as an example of the hypersexualised media which is forcing young girls to grow up too soon. I just adore the implication that ten year old girls are that influenced by Lady Gaga – perhaps gluing pearls to their faces and wearing six-foot high lace pompadour wigs. Perhaps even greater than that image is the song itself, an 80s synth power ballad interwoven with 90s furious, pounding beats, its every strand of sound laced together as tight and taut as Gaga’s diamond-spangled arse. Produced by RedOne, Bad Romance is controlled chaos at its delirious best. If you can marvel at skill involved in that, you can even learn to love the ‘rah-rah-ah-ah-ah/Roma-ro-ma-ma’ bit in the intro, I promise. The lyrics are influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock: “I want your psycho, your vertigo schtick/Want you in my rear window/Baby it’s sick”. If Bad Romance were a Hitchcock film, it would be Vertigo: fairly disturbing, intoxicatingly beautiful.
Another stomping dancefloor ballad is the stunning ‘Dance in the Dark’, which formed (along with ‘Telephone’) part of the Alexander McQueen tribute which baffled Geri Halliwell and Courtney Love at the Brits and made the rest of us wish we had a keyboard with a built-in ‘BITCH!’ button. Here an overachieving Gaga perfects the icy, gothic electronic pop sound that Britney has been dabbling in on ‘Blackout’ and ‘Circus’. Dance in the Dark climaxes with our heroine lamenting the passing of a number of tragic icons (Princess Diana and JonBenét Ramsey among them) in a ‘Vogue’-esque chant.
And then there’s ‘Alejandro’, which sounds like Ace of Base. Gaga knows it sounds like Ace of Base. She wanted it to sound like Ace of Base. Lady Gaga is a critically acclaimed, Rilke-quoting, Tisch School of the Arts-educated performance artist who made a song that is meant to sound like one by Ace of Base. Hmmm. This song leaves me confused, emotionally orbiting the seventh circle of irony wearing a cloak made out of Muppet heads, listening to it on repeat over and over again because the bridge is just so damn good.
But the track from The Fame Monster currently giving my iPod the hardest pounding is ‘Telephone’. To return once again to the subject of Gaga and Beyonce’s forthcoming music video, I believe YouTube commenter sambabyx3 put it best when he/she said ‘I thought it was gonna come out today. F*** this lol.’ sambabyx3, I feel your pain. But the song is great too: a dizzying tornado of grinding beats with a killer chorus, Gaga at her most RnB and Beyonce at her Sasha fiercest. A special mention goes to Monster. Less idiosyncratically Gaga but with her trademark belting chorus, Monsterrr-uh-rrr-uh-rrr-uh-rrr stands a good chance at being this year’s Puh-puh-puh-pokerface, and perhaps even this year’s Umber-ella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh.
Gaga saves the full force of her talents, lyrically and vocally, for ‘Speechless’, where she belts, roars and all but screams on a powerful rock ballad inspired by her father’s battle with heart disease (“Could we fix you if you broke?/And is your punch line just a joke?... I can’t believe how you slurred at me with your half wired broken jaw/You popped my heart seams, on my bubble dreams, bubble dreams.”) I much prefer this song how she performs it live with just a piano (most memorably with Elton John at the 2010 Grammys), but either way it serves as the album’s best argument against Gaga’s own claim that she makes soulless pop music. Just imagining Lady Gaga as an actual human being with actual human parents who she cares about so deeply casts a fresh light on the rest of album: imagining the heart beating behind the ice cool exterior, not just the educated mind and the impressive set of lungs. I mean, Gaga wasn’t actually created in an evil genius pop scientist’s lab, formed by mixing the DNA of Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry and Grace Jones with some magic dust swept up from the remnants at Studio 54. I don’t think so, anyway.
Artists in this article: Lady Gaga
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