LADY GAGA

I saw this woman perform on "American Idol" a year ago and I lost my mind because she had lost her mind and all those people who make "American Idol" run had lost their collective mind.

Then I read this article, and some of it made sense. Written by Sasha Frere-Jones




Dedicated fans of popular music have a certain conversation at least once a year. Call it The Question of Endurance. You and your friends are talking about music, and the conversation turns to a popular band. You express support. A friend voices her opinion, maybe as favorable as yours, but appends a qualifier: “I like them, but will they be around in ten years?” You may feel compelled to defend whomever it is you’re talking about, covering the present moment and the future with your positive take. After trying this approach, though, you realize that pop music has no Constitution and doesn’t operate like a de-facto Supreme Court: precedent is not always established, and isn’t even necessary. Pop rarely accretes in a tidy, serial manner—it zigs, zags, eats itself, and falls over its shoelaces. Some pop successes go head to head with Blake and Bach; others win their blue ribbons by doing everything upside down and out of tune.

Exceptional pop creates a precedent precisely by abrogating the presumptive rules. How did that grouchy Bob Dylan become a critical favorite by spitting back at interviewers with silence and riddles? (Didn’t being cute and funny help the Beatles? Why would the opposite behavior work just as well, and at exactly the same time?) How did the Jamaican shantytown hero Bob Marley become an American Ivy League dorm-room staple? How did the tiny, androgynous Prince become a hero to alpha-male guitar-solo fiends? Pop acts become classic when they reveal the contingent nature of “classic.”

So it goes with one-hit (or two-hit) wonders, who can also become classics—or not. The nature of pop recycling makes it hard to measure, or define, endurance. In 1980, Gary Numan’s synthesizer pop song “Cars” was a reliable presence on broadcast radio here and in the United Kingdom. By 1985, though, you’d have been hard pressed to find a trace of Numan in the mainstream of pop. Today, he’s ubiquitous—“Cars” has been referenced in television shows and pop songs steadily throughout the past decade, and Numan’s synthesizer sounds are audible in the work of tiny Brooklyn bands and enormous stars alike. Just because the anonymous Euro-techno group Eiffel 65 was on the charts for only one stretch in 2000 does not mean that its mission was not accomplished. Eiffel 65’s one known song—its nonsense hit “Blue”—is the basis for a new Top Forty hit by Flo Rida called “Sugar,” and has inspired many user-generated videos on YouTube that are all better than the official video, a C.G.I. monstrosity. The artist who stays on the charts for years without interruption sometimes does it by virtue of professional acuity and inoffensive predictability. Some of pop’s most delightful figures endure exactly because we can’t figure out what they are up to.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta would have you believe that she’s not just beating the system—in her version, she’s stormed the castle walls, spirited away the Dauphin, and changed the national language to semaphore. Better known as Lady Gaga, Germanotta was born twenty-three years ago in Yonkers and has had two verifiable worldwide No. 1 hits, which are definitely dance music: “Just Dance” and “Poker Face.” (The kids say electro-pop, I say disco, and I suppose we’re both right.) Less verifiable is her theorizing about her work. She cites Andy Warhol, claims to be a “fame Robin Hood” who has lost her mind, opines in public about whether a certain shade of red is “Communist,” and has dropped Rilke’s name more than once. Don’t take this skepticism for distaste—Lady Gaga and I share preferences, especially as far as well-written pop music goes, and I am thrilled to see Communism and Rilke getting ink. I am also happy that her album, “The Fame,” will be with us all year, even if you can’t find Marx or Rilke anywhere in the music. What is most amusing is watching a trained pro like Lady Gaga try to sell herself as the Flying Lizards. Who were they? A colorfully deadpan British art-school unit of brainy, primitive one-hit wonders (“Money”) who did business in the early eighties and are resurrected in spirit every seven years or so. They were really odd.

Gaga is not odd, give or take some warbles and that one time during a session for AOL when she pounded on her keyboard with her high heel, but she is as smart as she repeatedly claims to be. Germanotta went to Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and grew up on the Upper West Side. (Her parents call her Joanne.) After a stint at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School, she dropped out and, while still a teen, went to Los Angeles, where she got a contract with Def Jam. That gig ended in three months, so Germanotta came home—not yet calling herself Lady Gaga—and began performing songs and burlesque routines in New York clubs with a friend, the d.j. Lady Starlight. Eventually, she returned to Los Angeles, and signed with Interscope Records. She wrote songs for the Pussycat Dolls and one for Britney Spears (a strange, compelling love song disguised as a dance number, called “Quicksand,” which is available only on the European version of Spears’s “Circus”) and worked with Akon, the certified pop star with an ornately embellished criminal past, who signed Gaga to his label.

This is not as weird as it might sound. Gaga can really sing and really write. That said, she embellished when she says, of “The Fame,” that she “did the whole goddamn thing.” In reality, her collaborators on her début album are a wisely picked cast of new and old pros who know how to make pop records sound like pop records. Rob Fusari, who dubbed Germanotta Lady Gaga, after the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga,” co-wrote some of Destiny’s Child’s best work. RedOne is a Moroccan producer whose song “Bamboo” was named the Official Melody of soccer’s 2006 FIFA World Cup. More to the point, RedOne’s longtime residence in Sweden means that he has access to the enormous ice pool of Nordic hooks that Americans never seem to match. It makes sense that RedOne and Germanotta received a Grammy nomination for “Just Dance,” the song that presumably inspired Spears to enlist Ms. Gaga’s help for “Circus.”

How not dumb is Lady Gaga? Released exactly one year ago, “Just Dance” was one of the first big records to ride the sea change in pop, away from hip-hop and back toward disco, the music that has been in charge of the charts in Europe for a long time. (One current acknowledgment of this shift is a single by a rapper named Kid Cudi, who is currently jostling with Lady Gaga on the iTunes charts with his song “Day ’n’ Nite,” which re-imagines hip-hop as mumbling over disco rather than yelling over funk.)

With RedOne’s help, Gaga summons generations of dance music. “Just Dance” is built around the brawny, slightly overbearing synthesizers of Gary Numan and his British peers like the Human League. (Those keyboards are also the foundation for Euro-techno like Eiffel 65 and for dozens of Continental hits that Americans rarely hear.) Gaga’s hard vocal delivery lets her tone bounce off the walls, in the manner of Sharon Brown and Shannon and other eighties dance-floor workhorses. “Just Dance” is about being drunk in a club, which is a great idea, because songs for drunk people in clubs are rarely sharp enough to be so obvious: a lot gets lost in the quest for the clever. The Lady’s had too much red wine, turned her shirt inside out, and has a Playboy mouth, whatever that is. Her night could end up on the gossip blogs if she’s not careful—she “can’t see straight,” and can’t remember what club she’s in, but sings to herself that it’s “gonna be O.K.,” which will reassure anybody with a liquor license doing business while the song is on. Later in the song, Lady Gaga semi-raps and recalls the weirdo she’s borrowed a few moves from, Peaches, a Canadian musician who, like Germanotta, presented herself as a sexually ambiguous performance artist, though Peaches did it a decade ago. It was actually a plausible claim when Peaches made it—she has no worldwide No. 1s. (Yet.)

This is how “The Fame” works. Lady Gaga’s current, very big hit, “Poker Face,” will likely please the frat boys whom her pull quotes are designed to scare. As the punning title suggests, it’s a song about rough sex. (Another song is entitled “I Like It Rough.”) “Eh, Eh” echoes Madonna’s lighter work, like “La Isla Bonita,” and there’s even a ballad, to be released as a single when the people who don’t like dance music need to be pulled in, called “Brown Eyes.”

If you want melody and a cheerful embrace of the moment as it happens, Lady Gaga is a wise bet. Her recent client Britney is currently sleepwalking through her own tour. Not so Ms. Germanotta. On “American Idol,” Lady Gaga tore up “Poker Face” and short-circuited the conventions of the show by splitting the song into a drunken solo-piano ballad and an up-tempo truncated version of itself. Germanotta knows that the one-hit wonders are weirder and cooler than the well-paid musicians who stretch their careers over seven years on the stage and twenty more behind it. Can she have it both ways? ♦


Okay. Here are some of the references that Frere-Jones makes.

BOB DYLAN singing "Like a Rolling Stone."



Bob Marley singing "Stir It Up."



Gary Numan singing "Cars"



Eiffel 65 singing "Blue"



Flo Rida singing "Sugar"



Lady Gaga "Poker Face" and "Just Dance." Can't embed. Go to YouTube and check them out.

Andy Warhol talks....



Karl Marx, Papa of Communism, author of Communist Manifesto.



Rainer Marie Rilke, poem, "The Panther.: