Friday, September 09, 2011

Gaga is a fine actor but African music is way more fun

I love Lady Gaga's theatricality.


Her music itself is bland but good. It has technical merit, even if it's not rhythmically or melodically fun. It wouldn't survive the competition in Nigeria, like cheeseburger is not about to displace suya, shaki, or kpomo.

But what appalls me is how few of her songs I've actually heard. Should I try to become a fan?

One of the first I watched was Paparazzi - again, I love colourful theatrical videos, but really, what kind of melody is that? Also on TV, I saw a lot of Bad Romance, Poker Face, and (oddly enough) Telephone, in which Beyonce writhes and rasps on the video, to the taste of Nigerian audience viewers.

These songs all have obverse non-melodies, a bit like hearing a thrown pancake fall off a wall. What's the idea?

Then I watched You and I and much as I want to hate it, the video changed me, it's that clever, that artsy, very rich in story and imagery, very conscious of place - boring places where men and women kidnap each other for life. The melody too is actually good, in that middle-America (or middle Australia) kind of way. A little rock-history, bass guitar, country music = Not bad.

Today I saw a google chrome advert that featured The Edge of Glory and thought I've NEVER actually heard that before. Then I heard this tiny clip of Born This Way and yep, same thing: I've known for aeons that Gaga was "Born This Way" and that she has little devilsmonsters, the most twitter/facebook followers and most downloads or youtube views or something, but never heard one bar of the title track of her album.

Oh, did she do Just Dance? I know that one.

Guess I do live in a bubble inside a cave. Yet I run a kick-ass entertainment blog .

1 comment:

t said...

The missing video is I'm pretty sure a short-ish (5-15min) excerpt of this interview (see trailer/preview here). I can no longer find it online.
It features a lot of just actor with interviewer in the sparse studio, and generally without the hyper interruptions of clips from outside that studio. It shows how her self is stared at, and not by accident that this is so, she designs it so, that's the theatricality.

If you want to watch the whole interview, it's "Gaga by Gaultier". I should probably watch it too - it's very long and sometimes very hyper, so I don't think I will, but it seems maybe interesting.