Resurrect Me

Lady Gaga Wants The World To Burn Candles In Honor of "Alejandro"

2010-05-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

Lady Gaga is releasing merchandise that goes along with her current radio single "Alejandro." The merchandise will be sold on her website www.ladygaga.com/store

The items tie in with the Latin theme of the song "Alejandro" as well as its upcoming video, which will premiere in three days, according to Gaga's announcement during the UK leg of her 2010 Monster Ball Tour.

The merchandise consist of four things: an "Alejandro: The Remixes" CD, a Latin Lover T-Shirt, a Lady Gaga prayer candle (like the Guadalupe candles popular in Mexico) and a rose ring. Stuff like this makes me excited. It makes me feel like a kid waiting to open gifts on Christmas morning. This is the genius of Lady Gaga at work. She's an expert at branding. She treats each single she releases as if they're individual popcorn movies that come with their own branding and merchandise, like the Spider-Man movies. Gaga makes her music videos like short films in the vein of Michael Jackson's 1982 spectacle "Thriller." She makes everything she does an event.

The music video is on it's way and should be here Sunday, June 2, since that would be three days from today. The video is directed by Steven Klein who shoots a lot of fashion photography influencd by leather, bondage, S&M in general and vampires. Wow, sounds just like Gaga. Those are all the ingredients for Gaga's current Monster-themed era. One of Gaga's dancers, Mike Silas (the cute Puerto Rican guy with the faux-hawk and the tattoos) said the "Alejandro" video will be seven minutes long. Ooh, the more the merrier. I can't wait.

The song "Alejandro" is currently No. 6 on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles Chart. Not too shabby for a song Gaga's label didn't even want to release.

Glee's Lady Gaga Tribute Is Really A Continuation of the Kurt and Finn Show

2010-05-26T12:45:00.001-07:00

Last tuesday's episode of Glee, dedicated to Lady Gaga is further proof that Glee is centered around Kurt and Finn. The storylines revolve around Kurt and Finn's relationship with each other and their relationships with other people. Even Lea Michele's main character Rachel Berry (who meets her mother for the first time in the Gaga tribute) seems peripheral when compared to the amount of screen time and character development Kurt and Finn receive.

Tuesday night's episode is titled "Theatricality" and the concept of theatricality applies whole-heartedly to the Glee's female characters, but mostly the show's flamboyant and sassy teenage boy Kurt Hummel. Glee defines theatricality as when a person expresses their true emotions on the outside in the most visceral way, and that applies to Kurt, Mercedes Jones and Rachel Berry because they all have a fashion sense that goes against the grain. They stick out like sore thumbs. Now this is where Lady Gaga fits right in.

For an episode so highly-anticipated, Glee's tribute to Gaga is underwhelming, but only in the context of a Gaga homage. As a story arc, Glee is as strong as it's always been, except it focuses mostly on Kurt. He's the biggest fan of Gaga and gets the most excited about Gaga when the music teacher Mr. Schuester announces that the Glee club assignment is to express themselves through Gaga's music and costumes. The costumes trump the music because only two Gaga songs are featured in Glee's Gaga tribute, but this was a wise choice. If the characters had sung a host of Gaga songs, the episode would be a Lady Gaga karaoke contest, and that would be zero fun. This wasn't like Glee's Madonna tribute episode "The Power of Madonna," and rightfully so since Madonna has been the biggest pop star in the world for almost 3 decades. Gaga has been the biggest pop star for really only a year in a half.

The biggest reasons to watch the "Theatricality" episode is for a pair of pieces de resistance. The first is a scene between Kurt and his crush high school football player Finn Hudson. Kurt somehow arranged for his father to meet Finn's mother and the two single parents become romantically-involved and they decide to move in together. Understandably upset, Finn takes it out on Kurt. The budding fashionista/interior designer decorates the bedroom that he and Finn share. Kurt decorated the room in the style of old Hollywood, replete with a privacy partition, for getting dressed. This sets Finn off.

Anyone who has kept up with Glee for a while knows that Kurt's showdown with Finn was bound to happen. In previous episodes, before Finn's mom decided to move in with Kurt's dad, Kurt was already picking out fabrics for the bedroom he and Finn would soon share. At a Glee club meeting, Kurt asks Finn's opinion on a selection of fabric swatches and Finn shrugs and then walks off with a confused look on his face.

When Finn confronts Kurt by saying "don't play dumb" referring to Kurt's crush on him, it's humorous irony considering Finn goes through his life playing dumb and just recently started waking up and smelling the stink of real life. It's reality that Glee stays away from for the majority of the time, but scenes like this showdown are pure realism. Glee is considered a musical-comedy-drama and the musical aspect of the show, where people break out in song and sing in front of backdrops of their names in bright Vegas lights, makes it clear to the audience that its watching a television show. The audience is not getting lost in the realism of most of Glee's scenes because it's mostly not realistic, but the audience does get lost in scenes like the showdown scene. When Kurt starts raising his voice to a tense shrill and even Finn recoils, it's clear that this scene is where Glee's campy, fantastic style becomes realistic.

There are so many gay men who relate to Kurt's denial that Finn doesn't like him and is probably quite straight. Still, Kurt wants to make his fantasy come true for the sole reason that it drives him and gives him something to focus on so he won't have to face the truth. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because deep down in his heart, Kurt knows his plan will fail, and end in disaster. It's sort of masochistic, although hopeful.

Kurt's dad Burt Hummel hears Finn use the word "faggy" to Kurt and Burt loses it. He gives Finn a verbal smackdown, however the audience doesn't feel angry at Finn because the audience knows Finn is a nice guy and he just started disrespecting Kurt in a fit of anger and frustration. Still, Burt speaks the truth. "When you live a few years you start to see the hate in people's hearts, even the best people," which means Finn.

The ending of Glee's "Theatricality" episode is its second piece de resistance. It's the final tribute to Lady Gaga. The two high school football players who stalk the entire episode playing parodies of all the jock-bullies from high school-themed movies and tv shows, approach Kurt dressed in his silver Gaga costume with a white George Washington wig on and a makeshift pair of the Alexander McQueen-designed lobster claw-shaped "Armadillo" shoes that Gaga made famous in her "Bad Romance" music video. The two football thugs say "Gaga's got to go" and Kurt sort of unintentionally channels Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker saying "Hit me" egging on his two assailants. An unexpected hero shows up in the nick of time.

This hero is dressed in a variation of the blood-red latex 16th Century farthingale dress Lady Gaga wore when she met Queen Elizabeth II last December. The hero has red sequin patches that circle his eyes. It's the Queen...Queen Finn that is. Finn is the hero who saves the queen named Kurt. The two thugs resist and then the rest of Glee club clad in their Gaga costumes stand up as an army of "freaks." Now the thugs back off. This theatrical fable has a happy ending.

The "Theatricality" episode may have been short on Gaga, but it did it so it wouldn't sacrifice the story arc and instead resulted in some thoroughly-satisfying costumes and an heated, but enlightening argument between Glee's two central characters Kurt and Finn. The audience gets the feeling that Kurt and Finn are closer because of their uncomfortable fight. It doesn't seem likely that the writers of Glee will make Kurt and Finn a romantic item, but the writers will probably create some kind of romantic interest for Kurt. It would be a shame if Kurt ended up with some doppleganger of himself because the contrast between Kurt and Finn is what makes their scenes appealing. Mostly all the other character have experienced romance openly, and I get this feeling it will be a while before Kurt finds anyone, ifever. If so, it would be art imitating the life that so many people lead in real life: a life of loneliness without romance. Please let that not be the case for Kurt.

Lady Gaga Channels Elvis And Annie Lennox In First Pic From Her "Alejandro" Video

2010-05-19T14:57:00.001-07:00

The first pic from Lady Gaga's highly anticipated "Alejandro" video was leaked two days ago on Tuesday, setting the blogosphere on fire. Everyone is buzzing about it, from MTV to New York Magazine.

New York Magazine blogged about it twice on their website, describing Gaga in one blog as "a Blonde Lady Elvis" and in another comparing her to The Simpson character Mr. Burns when he played a vampire on one episode. They both could be right, but one of them is definitely on the right track.

The blog comparing Gaga to Mr. Burns as a vampire is the most in line with the rumors about the "Alejandro" video having a vampire theme. Gaga's recent live performances of "Alejandro" also suggest vampirism, full of simulated biting into human flesh and fake blood smeared everywhere.

One of the most exciting things about the "Alejandro" video so far is that celebrated fashion photographer Steven Klein directed it. He's the man who made Brad Pitt a Goth in L'Uomo Vogue magazine and Madonna into a stuttering contortionist. Klein's work is freaky and thought-provoking. He has a fixation with bondage and sexuality. Many of his photographs feature men and women gagged and bound in only underwear or totally nude. The photographs are often sadistic and violent, yet beautiful.

Gaga's latest album The Fame Monster is heavily influenced by bondage. It is the thematic thread that connects the album's songs. From "Telephone" to "Teeth," she talks about being tied up and/or strangled by something, and her goal is to free herself from the bondage. "Alejandro" continues in that theme. Gaga has stated in interviews that "Alejandro" is about letting past loves and partners go. Now what does all that have to do with vampires, you ask? Well, I take it to represent that vampirish hunger people get when they think of their ex-lovers. It's tough when your ex's move on and you feel so hungry for their love that you feel like you could eat them up. You feel like if they would simply take you back and accept you, every problem in your life would be solved. It's why some people are afraid to be single.

Also, the vampire theme can be seen in Gaga's look in this pic from "Alejandro." Her pale skin and the pale skin of her male dancers (who sport bowl haircut wigs in the style of Moe from The Three Stooges and wear nothing but black-colored hot pants ) makes them all look like the same person. As for the Elvis Priestly likeness, Gaga's short platinum blond hair and lemon-yellow jumpsuit (with a cape) and red inverted crosses on it conjure up images of an early '70s Elvis in his trademark sparkly studded Las Vegas jumpsuits, except Gaga's jumpsuit (or rather a robe)has a matching telephone receiver and cradle attached to it. Get it? "don't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro." At the same time, Gaga's short hair and makeup make her look like a spit-and-image of Annie Lennox.

Save for the pale skin and inverted crosses on her robe, there isn't anything else vampire-related, but then again this is only one image and the only image from the "Alejandro" video. This scene may not even make it into the final edit of the video. We shall all wait and see. One thing is for sure, the leaked photo is intriguing and it has piqued my interest even more.

Katy Perry Welcomes You to Her '90s time warp for "California Gurls"

2010-05-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

Katy Perry's "California Gurls" featuring Snoop Dogg may begin with a synth riff very similar to Ke$ha's out-of-nowhere hit "Tik Tok, but the moment the percussion drops in, the song dives into a G-Funk aesthetic straight outta Dr. Dre's The Chronic era. This is a '90s time warp.

Back in April, when Perry dropped names like Ace of Base and said that her next album would be dripping in 1990s culture, she wasn't lying because "California Gurls" is a picturesque thumper tailor-made for playing in those jeeps that defined the '90s.

Lyrically, Perry paints a picture of her home state of California, specificially Southern California. The lyrics inspire a vivid mental picture of Dr. Dre's music video with Snoop Dogg "Ain't Nothing But A G Thang." Imagine beautiful women in bikinis playing volleyball at a barbeque. Imagine beautiful women driving in jeeps on their way to the beach with Snoop Dogg or Snoop Doggy Dogg as Perry refers to him in the second verse. "We freak/in my jeep/Snoop Doggy Dogg on the stereo. It's clever and appropriate since Snoop Dogg went by the longer moniker of Snoop Doggy Dogg during The Chronic era circa 1993. The chorus on "California Gurls" sums up the song in a few lines, that will be repeated countless times this summer of 2010.

"California Gurls, we're unforgettable/daisy dukes, bikinis on top/sun-kissed
skin, so hot we'll melt your popsicle/ah-oh-oh-oh, oh, ah-oh-oh-oh-ah/California
Gurls, we're undeniable/fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock/West Coast
represent/now put your hands up/ah-oh-oh-oh, oh, ah-oh-oh-oh-ah."

The song is also notable for containing Perry's trademark stuttering vocal tics "ah-us" "ah oh-oh-oh-oh." Perry's got a nice lower register voice that has some heft to it, probably due to her childhood training in the Penecostal church. Her vocals have always had that glam-rock vibe to me. Her vocal tics are great hooks by themselves.

Katy Perry's music and fashion sense has always been an homage to the '80s and '90s, but now with "California Gurls" she's made the style more specific. She hinted at an '80s/'90s hybrid sound with her No. 3 Billboard Hot 100 single "Hot & Cold" in 2008. It was a bouncy, pogo stick-paced song that my mom affectionately called her Jazzercise song. So many women in the '80s did exercise routines in Jazzercise, dancing to the most colorful pop music known to man, dressed in colors so loud that they could make they could blow the speakers out.

In the photo I used for this blog, Katy Perry is seen on stage on her knees performing at a concert. Dressed in daisy duke shorts, white Keds sneakers and a white and black polka-dot tank top tied to show her midriff, Perry is a dead ringer for the character Kelly Kapowski from '90s sitcom staple Saved By the Bell.

"California Gurls" is already No. 1 on Itunes and is being played on radio stations around the country, even though the song won't be released officially until May 25, 2010. I have no doubts that it will become a hit, maybe even No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. "California Gurls" may have similarities to Ke$ha's No. 1 hit "Tik Tok" in the way that they're both sunny jeep jams reminscient of the '90s, but the major difference is that Katy Perry can actually sing, in a throaty, full-bodied vocal style. And, if the song is good for nothing else, the vocoder-laced melody that closes "California Gurls" is guaranteed to make R&B heads nostalgic, with its nods to '90s G-Funk, Roger Troutman and that 1984 piece of sweetness "I Found Lovin" by Fatback.

Lady Gaga: The Deliciously Metaphorical Writer Beneath the Glam

2010-05-12T10:39:00.001-07:00

Her outfits may look like some Tim Burton creation, all grotesque and eye-popping. Her stage shows may seem like variations on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Her hair and makeup may be garish, hair the color of French's mustard and eyelids painted sea foam green. Her dark eyebrows look stark against her mustard-yellow hair, suggesting the over-the-top style of a drag queen. However, under all of those fabulous visuals is an imaginative songwriter who writes songs that are vivid and deliciously metaphorical. Her name is Lady Gaga.

Lady Gaga displays the effortless storytelling skill of a novelist in her songwriting. Her songs always tell stories, no matter how glamourous or grotesque. Most of Gaga's songs, if not all are based on her own experiences, but she filters the nonfiction of her life through a lens of fantasia and fiction. She proves that real-life can be stranger than fiction.

At once, the tone of "Boys, Boys, Boys" is claustrophic. You can imagine the stuffy, sweaty confines of a night club or a concert where there's too much body heat. The smell of cigarettes is in the air. Your ears feel blown out from all the loud bass and you've lost your voice from having to scream over all the background noise of electric guitars, drums and human voices. Imagine you're at a Killers concert. "Boys, Boys, Boys" is one of Gaga's real-life experiences where she went on a date with a guy to a concert by the New Wave/Post-Punk band The Killers.

Hey there sugar baby, saw you twice at the pop
show/you taste just like glitter
mixed with rock n' roll/I like you a lot,
lot/think you're really hot/...baby is
a bad boy with some retro
sneakers/let's go see The Killers and make out on the
bleachers/

Ironically, as dark and murky as the verses are, the chorus explodes like a cannon of glitter. The chorus doesn't even seem to be about Gaga's date to a Killers concert, but instead it functions as a tribute to her gay male fans who she thanks for making her career.

"Boys, boys, boys/we like boys in cars/buy us drinks
in bars/boys,
boys,
boys/with hairspray and denim/and boys, boys,
boys/we love them, we
love
them ."

In this way, "Boys, Boys, Boys" is two subjects wrapped in one '80s glam-rock package.

One of the songs that shows Gaga's best songwriting on multiple levels is her song "Dance in the Dark." Sonically, it's a track very much in the '80s New Wave mold of New Order's 1983 hit "Blue Monday." It's got the same somber synths that almost sound like Bach's harpsichord beauties. It sports a driving chorus that creeps along like death tightening its grip. Gaga
dresses her narrative in B-movie horror
clothes.

The narrative is about a woman bound by her insecurities and her weak self-perception. Gaga uses the first verse to show how paralyzed this woman is. She's afraid to move for fear of how she looks walking ("she won't walk away") and she's afraid to look at anyone for fear of the jeering she might see ("but she won't look back"). Gaga intros the song saying "inject me, baby I'm a free bitch"), and she injects some much-needed confidence and swagger into the meek, shy girl. Basically, the girl is Marilyn
Monroe before she was a blond bombshell, when she was a shy brunette who just wanted to be loved.

Gaga turns her heroine into a vampire and a werewolf. Gaga uses these two horror archetypes as symbols of her heroine's newfound sex appeal:
vampires are immortal as long as they drink the blood of others. In this way
they have eternal youth. ("Run, Run, her kiss is a vampire grin") Her kiss is like a vampire's grin because her kiss is immortal, much the way so many
of Marilyn's Monroe's images are immortal. Marilyn died young and beautiful, and she never grew old. ("The moon light's her way while she's howlin' at him) The moon light is the spotlight substituting for the flash of the cameras and the paparazzi. Gaga's heroine howls at men like a werewolf because the raw animalistic sexuality within her finally releases. The beast is free. She is free.

"Baby loves to dance in the dark/cuz when he's looking she
falls apart/baby loves to dance, loves to dance in the dark."

The shadows of darkness are off stage, the backstage where the heroine is
allowed to let her hair down, undress and be naked. She's in total comfort.
There are no staring eyes. There are no voyeurs, no paparazzi.

The stanza at the center of "Dance in the Dark" is a tribute to deceased superstars who Gaga dubs as "martyrs of fame." The first one mentioned is none other than Marilyn Monroe, followed by Judy Garland and Sylvia Plath. These first three are essential to Gaga's identity. Marilyn is the inspiration for Gaga's blond hairstyle, as well as the transformative nature of Marilyn's rise to fame. Judy Garland is Judy's vocal inspiration. Both Gaga and Judy have wistful voices with heft to them. Sylvia Plath is Gaga's songwriting inspiration. Judy also was deeply saddened by her misfortune with men. Gay men were Judy's solace. Sylvia was a poet. Sylvia's introspective poems of despair and darkness framed by imaginative symbols are similar to the way Gaga structures her songs.

The synthesized strings that serve as the opening chords of "Monster" are very similar to the synthesized string opening chords on Prince's 1983 hit "Little Red Corvette." On both songs, the tone of the chords is impending doom. Gaga picks up on this ominous tone by spinning her sexual experiences into a Grimm's fairytale in the vein of "Little Red Riding Hood" replete with a wolf and a girl who's good enough to eat.

"I wanna just dance, but he took me home instead/uh-oh, there was a
monster in my bed/we French-kissed on a subway train/he tore my clothes right
off/he ate my heart and then he ate my brain"

"Monster" and "Corvette" share more than synth chords. Gaga and Prince both built their songs around sexual metaphors referring to the genitalia of the opposite sex. A little red corvette is a metaphor for a woman's vagina (hence "red" and another metaphor "cherry pie" which Gaga frequently uses). Gaga uses a monster as a metaphor for a man's large penis, as well as the man himself and the creature he's turned her into. Both songs are also about promiscuity and the dangers of sexual attraction. Sexual attraction can cloud a person's judgment just as badly as alcohol and other drugs, and the consequences could lead to death, whether it's from natural causes or murder. Just think of Brian De Palma's 1980 classic film Dressed to Kill and you'll get the same point.

The one Lady Gaga song that I consider a masterpiece for reasons of melody, song structure and deceptive lyrical content is one of Gaga's definitive songs "Bad Romance." Despite the Satanic imagery and religious elements of her "Bad Romance" video, I think the song itself is a description of Gaga's interior mind.

This fact explains why some of the song's components seem a bit random or impulsive. She compares the dark part of mind to famous Alfred Hitchcock supsense films (I want your Psycho, your Vertigo shtick/Want you in my Rear Window, baby you're sick, I want your love"), she wants a leather-masked S&M guy (I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand) implying that the leather ad studs are located, which only leaves the image of a man in leather mask with a zipper on the mouth. Think like a zipperhead. Gaga then breaks int he middle of the song for a catwalk strut chanting in a trance-like cadence "walk, walk fashion baby, work it, move, that bitch crazy." She also starts speaking French on the song's bridge. These are examples of the randomness of Gaga's mind. It almost resembles a nightmare state or dream state, somewhere in within the symbolic unconscious. Think of Sylvia Plath's writing style.

"Bad Romance" concerns Gaga's urgent need to make her the dark interior of her mind into the light of the exterior world. She fears that she's go insane if she doesn't bring the darkness into the light. She doesn't want to be a vampire forever. By the song's end, Gaga comes alive. There's nothing trance-like about her vocal performance at this point. She explodes into a throaty vamp-out of vocal notes. You just want to pump your fists to the stirring thunderous techno bass and singing the chorus loudly with Gaga from the belly of your stomach and summon the bad romance within yourself. It's punk music with a stylish gloss of glam-rock.

She's a wig-wearing, glam queen with a Sylvia Plath-like obsession with introspection and various levels of mela. Often her vocals are a feminized version of David Bowie's smoky soulfulness. She writes her songs with texture, meticulous structure, intelligence and passionate histrionics of a glam-rocker. She's Lady Gaga.

Lady Gaga Paints it Black on American Idol

2010-05-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

Despite its Latin theme and title, Lady Gaga's latest single "Alejandro" has its roots more in Central and Eastern Europe than South America. The song's subtext is closely connected to the vampires of Romania and Hungary. The Gothic Romanticism of "Alejandro" is present everywhere in Gaga's performance of "Alejandro" on last night's episode of American Idol.

The moment Gaga starts playing those minor chords of "Bad Romance" on her raven-black grand piano covered with roses and thorns coated in black, it's clear that death is in the air. It's as if the roses and thorns are flowers on a grave or a coffin. Fog mists around transforming the American Idol stage into a mock cemetary with a statue of an angel in the center of the stage. Gaga turns her beautiful techno hit "Bad Romance" into a gothic piano ballad, given added intensity by the surges of an electric guitar. She's wearing a black veil, with her face barely visible. Her powerful, melancholic vocals sound as if they're emanating from darkness.

As the piano stops and a mournful violin plays the opening melody of Gaga's song "Alejandro," (which is also the opening violin melody on Vittorio Monti's 1904 composition "Czardas," which "Alejandro" interpolates) the camera pans revealing the black-coated vinery hanging from a vine-covered tree. This scene is definitely supposed to be of a cemetary. The towering angel statue is in closer view and it's propped up by a fountain, possibly the Fountain of Youth. The male dancers rise from the cemetary's fog dressed in nothing but black spandex hot pants (short-shorts) and black tuxedo cummerbunds (around their waists).

Gaga rises from her piano and one of her main dancers Jeremy Hudson holds her floor-length cape and guides it as she walks out towards the foggy cemetary revealing herself to be wearing a silk mesh bodysuit with embroidered Chantilly lace and crystal and jet beading with organza cape, designed by Giorgio Armani. She looks like a gothic version of Poison Ivy from the Batman comics. Even when one of her dancers removes her veil, her face is still covered in a black lace matching the black lace design on the rest of her body. The removal of her veil reveals Gaga to be wearing a shoulder-length blond wig on her head reminiscent of '60s actress Brigitte Bardot's blond hairstyle.

The Vittorio Monti-composed Romantic Period song "Czardas" that Gaga samples for "Alejandro" is based on the Hungarian dance that is called Czardas. The dance of Czardas has been called "the tango of the East." That statement points to the romantic nature of the Czardas dance because the tango of South America is quite romantic and quite sexual. So is the vampire. Hungary is associated with vampires, as is Romania where its region of Transylvania is forever attached to vampires. Gaga plays on these connections between sampled song and vampires and all things romantic, like South America and its Latin lovers. What better way to keep with the horror/monster motif on her album The Fame Monster.

Gaga's second album The Fame Monster, which "Alejandro" comes from, is driven by Gaga's overwhelming need to be liberated. As a woman dealing with the strange, complicated thing that is human existence, Gaga fashions herself as someone undead who's on a search to find the answers that will bring her back to life.

On the surface, "Alejandro" is a song about a woman who's reminiscing about a passionate love affair she had with a man in the exotic land of Mexico that had to come to an end. The song sounds like a romance novel set to music, but the subtext of "Alejandro" is far darker than a standard romance. Gaga's deeper meaning involves the taste and consumption of blood and the connections blood as a life force or to eternal life. She uses the mythical figures of vampires as metaphors for her unrest, her unfinished business.

The names of men that she sings during 'Alejandro's' chorus, Alejandro, Fernando and Roberto, are Gaga's past lovers. Fernando and Roberto died and Gaga grieves them deeply. It's not until Alejandro comes along that she finally finds enlightment. Alejandro is a vampire and transforms Gaga into a vampire. Together as the undead, they share a sort of "bad romance." The underlying message to take from that is that Gaga had to become something else in order to realize her destiny.

The male dancers represent Gaga's past loves come back to life in zombie forms, but her main loves Alejandro, Fernando and Roberto are undeniably vampires connected to her sexually and spiritually. Gaga is constantly dancing with the dead. She did it on "Bad Romance" and on "Telephone." She mock-killed herself at the 2009 Video Music Awards. Gaga's simulated hanging was symbolic of the death of the old Lady Gaga and the rebirth of the new Lady Gaga premiered on "Bad Romance" and its music video. Gaga is constantly trying to proceed with her new life as a new person, but she still struggles to make peace with the past and her old self.

One of the beautiful things that Gaga includes in this American Idol performance is the tango-like dancing. I doubt it's Czardas. It doesn't really look anything like the Hungarian dance, but one never knows. I think Gaga built more upon the Latin theme. All of the dancers on stage are male and she dances with Mark Kanemura (one of her other main dancers), but you know what that means. The other male dancers simply dance with each other and it's beautiful. There's something about the mirrored image of one male moving in space with another male. The symmetry of their bodies in space is sublime. At one point during the chorus, each dancer drives an imaginary stake through the heart of his partner. The vampire subtext never seemed more apparent.

Once again, Lady Gaga has worked her performance art magic. Her art seems strangely out of place on American Idol since none of the singers on Idol (even the professional guest artists who perform) come close to her artistry. Gaga's classical background in piano and knowledge of art history shows in this performance. Never have I seen the undead look so lovely.

Britney's early version of Lady Gaga's "Telephone" is hard to resist

2010-05-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

Now that Rodney Jerkins confirmed that the version of Lady Gaga's hit "Telephone" believed to be sung by Britney Spears really is legit, I felt it was okay to write a blog about the song.

First I'll give some brief history. Pop superstar Lady Gaga wrote and recorded "Telephone" with Rodney Jerkins for Britney Spears' 2008 album Circus. Britney declined to use the song for her album and Gaga decided to keep the song for herself and she put it on her 2009 album The Fame Monster and it became a hit.

I'm a huge fan of Gaga and her music, from her intriguing songwriting to her robust vocals, but I'm not ashamed to say I'm a fan of Britney's music. Regardless of Britney's limited singing ability, her voice works well as an instrument or sound effect that is meant to be manipulated.

Britney's voice on her version of "Telephone" (said to be an early unmixed demo, according to Rodney Jerkins) has the same processed brilliance that it had on her masterpiece "Piece of Me." Her voice goes from high to low, through so many different pitches. It's like a rainbow of different shifts in pitch. There's obviously a computer effect on Britney's vocals, but it's not Auto-Tune, it's something else. Maybe it's a combination of compression, filtered through Pro-Tools. I don't know. I'm not a recording engineer.

The major difference between Britney's version and Gaga's version is that Gaga actually sounds like a human and Britney sounds like a disembodied spirit or a computer malfunctioning. "Telephone" is probably the least vocally-complex on The Fame Monster, but Gaga still manages to sound dramatic delivering her vocals with gusto, especially on the big chorus.

Still, I just can't help but like Britney's version of "Telephone." I've had it on repeat for a while since it leaked. (Thank you to whoever leaked it. There was no point in keeping the song locked away). Besides it's catchiness (most of the credit goes to Gaga for writing such a great song), maybe I can't resist Britney's version because despite her limited voice, she always sings with poise or swagger. For instance, when she talk-sings and/or breathe-sings, she's still a master at rhythm and cadence on the vocals, mainly on fast-paced songs.

In the end, I'm very glad Gaga released it for herself, but as revered a dancer as Britney is, her dance moves just wouldn't have had the benefit of Gaga's input. Gaga's choreographer Laurie Ann Gibson is a dance genius and she is responsible for most of the choreography, but I think Gaga has a lot of input on the dance moves. For instance, I'm sure the monster claw is all Gaga's idea, as well as other elements. Bottom-line, Gaga's choreography is a collaborative effort.

Rodney Jerkins promised that he's writing "international hits" for Britney's upcoming album. Hmm.. we'll see about that. However, the prospect of Britney's new album is exciting because sources say that Britney will have a Glee episode dedicated to her where the cast sings all of her songs, that will film some time in late 2010 or early 2011. That kind of positive PR and press can only amount to good things and maybe Britney's biggest selling album in a while.

Gaga Sees Herself as a Tragic Hero from Greek Mythology on The Fame Monster

2010-05-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

Lady Gaga sees her album The Fame Monster as a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Gaga plays the role of Orpheus who was a gifted musician and songwriter who died because of his fear of death and obsession with the past. This myth drives every song on The Fame Monster, explaining the album’s religious elements and moral elements. Underneath all the stylish synthesizers and catchy pop songs lie sadness and uncertainty. The songs on Monster feel like a glimpse into the deeply disturbed, yet beautifully twisted place that is Lady Gaga’s mind.

In Ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus’ wife Eurydice died after snakes bit her and he begs the gods of the underworld to make his dead wife live again on earth. The gods agree to resurrect Eurydice, but only on the condition that on the way up from the underworld to the upper world (planet earth), Orpheus must not look back at Eurydice as she follows him. When Orpheus and Euryadice almost make it to the upper world together, and Orpheus reaches the upper world, he looks back at Euryadice and he realizes his mistake. Eurydice didn’t reach the upper world yet and then she died a second time, except this time forever. After Eurydice’s death, Orpheus refused to worship all the gods except the sun god whom Orpheus called Apollo. The wild Maenads were crazy, drunken harlots who killed people in insane rages. The Maenads killed Orpheus by tearing him to pieces, beheading him and cutting him into pieces as if he were Mr. Potato Head. The myth goes that Orpheus’ decapitated head and lyre (his instrument) floated down the river still singing sad songs. Women on the island of Lesbos took his head and buried it and built a shrine for him. His lyre floated up to heaven. He ended up reuniting with his wife Eurydice in the underworld.

Lady Gaga is a piano-playing singer-songwriter who sings beautiful songs, many ironic and many mournful. There are many things on The Fame Monster that represent Eurydice’s death. They include the death of good friends, the death of past lovers, the death of womanhood, the death of a father, the death of confidence, the death of labor, the death of obsession and the death of lies. The main lesson to take from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is to never “look back.” When Orpheus planned on returning to earth to recreate his life with Eurydice, he planned on living in the past. He wouldn’t be growing as a person, but only destined to make the same mistakes.

The 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo was driven by the main themes of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth of the perils of “looking back.” In the film, a man lost a woman that he obsessed over, and shortly after a woman who looks almost exactly like the dead woman comes into his life. He’s hell-bent on making the living doppelganger into the identical image of the dead woman, including changing her hair color and hairstyle and makeup and clothes. A life of repetition is not healthy. The Orpheus and Eurydice myth and Vertigo drive Gaga’s first single “Bad Romance.”

Set to a marching synth-fest of triumph (inspired by German techno music that Gaga discovered while touring Europe), “Bad Romance” is all about returning to life from the dead or getting a second chance, but swearing to never make the same mistakes. The object of Gaga’s affection on “Bad Romance” is someone from Gaga’s past who has been resurrected. For fear of losing her friend again, Gaga cannot make the same mistakes she made before. Gaga’s reference to Hitchcock’s Vertigo makes the theme of “Bad Romance” crystal-clear. The lyric goes: I want your Psycho, your Vertigo shtick/want you in my Rear Window, baby you sick.” In other words, Gaga is saying she accepts her friend’s Freudian craziness (Norman Bates, the killer and victim of Psycho). She accepts her friend’s obsessive tendencies (John “Scottie” Ferguson, the detective whose obsession gets the better of him in Vertigo). She’s accepts her friend’s voyeuristic pleasures (L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, a photographer who’s temporarily wheelchair-bound becomes a voyeur spying on his neighbors spending all his time in the confines of his bedroom in Rear Window). Rear Window is probably the most relevant to Lady Gaga’s essential message that defines her career: Hitchcock made Rear Window to show how Americans are all “a race of Peeping Toms.” It’s a reference to the power of the media and how the voyeuristic society that is America loves to watch other people live or exist. Their watching is made even easier by advanced technology like the Internet and cell-phones.

Gaga declares with immense urgency that “I want your loving, I want your revenge” to her friend. She wants to avenge his death by simply living a brand new life focused on building a better future, and not living in the past. Towards the middle, Gaga sings thunderously in all her throaty-voiced glory “I don’t wanna be friends!” It’s clear that she didn’t act on her romantic feelings for her friend in his previous life, and now that she has the chance to not make the same mistake, Gaga makes sweet, rapturous love to her friend. By the end of “Bad Romance” she’s celebrating in ecstasy because her grotesque friend is now her beautiful lover.

Now that Gaga found her beautiful lover, it’s unfortunate that she has to kill him. The Fame Monster is not necessarily told as a chronological story, but it could be. It could very well be separate experiences of Gaga’s. Still, all the strength and courage it took for Gaga to finally become intimate with her friend on “Bad Romance, “and it had to end. But all great things have to come to an end and on “Alejandro” it is no different. The genius of Gaga’s songwriting comes into play when concerning the Latin theme of the song. Gaga once said that she “writes music for the dress,” meaning she creates the visuals for her songs as she writes the lyrics. The visuals include the choreography, the music video, the performance, hair, makeup and clothes. The background music for “Alejandro” is ‘90s Euro-pop spritzed with Caribbean flavor. However, the violin strings are what give “Alejandro” its Latin flavor. There’s even the sound of the ocean getting swept by the wind. The song’s producer RedOne must have had a vacation on his mind.

Gaga is singing about past lovers who just won’t seem to die. Whether Gaga has trouble killing the memory of her past loves or finding it hard to resist their romantic charms, she can’t seem to get them out of her life. What type of men would be hard to resist with their golden-brown skin and sexy accents? Latin men, that’s who. In a recent performance of “Alejandro” in Osaka, Japan, each of Gaga’s male dancers performed a piece of choreography where the man holds his female dance partners down a bit so they dip in the air and pantomimes putting a stake through her heart just like one would kill a vampire. Now we’re getting into Gaga’s head, where she writes music for the dress. This is when Gaga combines ‘Alejandro’s two visual inspirations consisting of Latin men and death, and creates a Mexican vampire. I can already imagine the dancers wearing black beekeeper veils indicating the song’s sense of mourning. The opening violin strings also exude the song’s sense of mourning sounding as if they’re weeping. There’s also plenty of matador-influenced choreography that Gaga and her dancers displayed in Japan in April 2010, which again builds on the Latin theme of “Alejandro.” As the candles burn and the Latin undead become, well, dead, Gaga has to push ahead pondering her identity without a boyfriend.

It makes perfect sense that at the beginning of the ‘80s Italo-Disco-inspired “Monster” Gaga tells someone “Don’t call me Gaga” as if the person she’s addressing is supposed to address her by another name because she’s a different person. She’s been changed somehow. When she proceeds to sing she tells how she became changed in overly simple prose, as if she’s reciting a Grimm’s fairytale. Gaga tells the tale of a woman who goes out to the discotech and spots a guy who’s a bad boy. He’s probably the kind of guy with several tattoos on his body and a confident swagger. She sings the lyric “He’s a wolf in disguise/but I can’t stop staring in those evil eyes” in a slurred, mumbled manner, suggesting intoxication by alcohol, considering she’s in a night club. She’s supposed to be saying “evil eyes,” but it sounds very much like she’s saying “hero’s lies.” These two opposing statements, evil versus good, represent Gaga’s two states as two different people. Before the change, she thinks the guy’s eyes are evil, but after the change she thinks he’s a hero, but she doesn’t realize he’s telling her lies.

It’s as if her memory has been erased where the bad boy wolf disguises himself as a hunk each time Gaga goes out to the clubs to find a new love, when in reality he’s the same wolf in a human suit every time. The same thing happens every time Gaga goes to the club: she finds the guy, gets drunk and goes home with him. They have sex and he eats her heart and her brain, figuratively. Gaga compares his sexual hunger to the hunger of a cannibal or just some kind of beast who eats people.

“Monster” is an allegory for Gaga repeating the same old habits. She’s living in the past pursuing the same guys who will ultimately ruin her. Gaga said in an interview that “Monster” is about her fear of attachment and how she keeps falling in love with the monster, when what she really needs is responsibility of her womanhood and femininity. This sentiment explains her current state as a celibate woman who is now protective of her womanhood, physically and mentally, and exclusive to who has access to it. She figured that she has to figure out a way to live without men. She has to free herself from getting defined by the men she keeps and the sex she has with them. Before becoming celibate, Gaga’s past repeatedly killed her, deadening her spirit each time, but finally by taking ownership of her body, she killed the monster.

The depths of Gaga’s songwriting are most present on the song “Dance in the Dark.” Gaga’s songwriting is known to be three-dimensional in its scope, where different aspects of the song stack atop each other like a layered cake. It’s doubtful that someone would guess the true meaning of “Dance in the Dark” from simply listening to it because Gaga makes no mention of the actual subject at hand. There are three main layers of Gaga’s songs. The first is the surface layer, which appears to be quite simple and shallow. The second layer is the underlying meaning or story that’s represented by the metaphors of the first layer. The third layer is the way the background music relates to the lyrics. On the surface, “Dance in the Dark” is a song about a woman who’s afraid to dance at a night club because she fears her boyfriend is judging her with his eyes. The underlying meaning is a woman who prefers to have sex with the lights turned off, so her boyfriend can’t really see her naked body. An alternate meaning is the awkwardness that many people feel in their own skin, regardless of if they’re in public or not. The music is equal parts ‘80s New Wave, house music circa 1990 and techno. Both styles of music lend themselves to the cool, fashionable confidence that Gaga intends for the heroine of “Dance in the Dark” to attain.

Where does the existence of death, you may ask, and it involves the death of confidence, before the transformation. Like “Monster” Gaga (or some woman) transforms into something mysterious and not quite human. The transformation is her defense mechanism that kicks in to continue her existence. “Dance in the Dark” begins with a narrative, the first verse giving the story of a girl who now plays the role of Eurydice coming up from the underworld with hopes of entering the upper world, but is thrown back into the depths of death when her boyfriend looks at her. While the first verse is her first life, the second verse is her second life. She emerges as something beastly like a werewolf and something undead like a vampire, creatures of the night, of the dark. When Gaga narrates that the girl “still kills the dance,” she means she makes the sex deadly when she’s someone other than herself. The interlude at the center of “Dance in the Dark” is spoken. Here is where Gaga looks for strength in the gods and goddesses of fame who live in the underworld. Gaga calls on the blond bombshell actress Marilyn Monroe, the beautiful melancholy of actress-singer Judy Garland and troubled poet Sylvia Plath. She even calls on the spirit of child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey superimposing the words “Jon” and “blonde” (similar to the way Gaga played with the words “evil eyes” and “hero’s eyes” on “Monster”). Gaga says “work your blond/JonBenet Ramsey.” She even goes on to mention Liberace, Jesus, Stanley Kubrick and Princess Diana. What do all of these dead people have in common? They all died in the spotlight and remained in the spotlight even after their deaths. The dramatic natures of them live even longer in the public eye. One of the best lyrics on “Dance in the Dark” pulls the whole song together: “The moonlight’s her way, while she’s howlin’ at him.” The moonlight is the equivalent of a spotlight and having the moonlight her way is manipulating the spotlight, the cameras. It’s Lady Gaga’s modus of operandi.

The trusty songwriting of Gaga is the main reason the album’s second single “Telephone” is a richly textured piece of pop magic. Of course R&B/pop producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins’ beat is a sweaty mishmash of ringtones and dial tones mixed with some of the most rambunctious bass programming you’ll ever hear. There are two separate personalities at work on “Telephone.” The song begins calmly with a harp melody that sounds almost classical, and when the beat comes in to bury the harp melody, it becomes more of a bass line than a main melody.

Gaga uses a pedestrian concept of a woman trying to get rid of a guy (maybe a boyfriend) who keeps calling her when she’s trying to get her drink on at a night club and turns it into a metaphor for her struggle with balancing work and play. Gaga is a woman who some would call a workaholic and she doesn’t get much time to relax and party. She’s the hardest woman working in showbiz today. She treats her career or rather art as if it was her boyfriend that she needs a one-night break from.

As the song progresses, Gaga goes from mildly annoyed to full-on aggravated. The choreography Gaga and her dancers execute on stage when performing “Telephone” pantomimes eating, choking or shooting to kill when the word “call” or “calling” plays. Once again, Gaga wants to kill someone. She doesn’t want to kill herself, but she wants to kill the urge to work when she’s supposed to be playing and losing herself in the life of the night.

Whenever the chorus plays, it’s clearly the angry part of Gaga’s brain speaking. Guest star Beyonce plays much more of an aggressive role on “Telephone” than Gaga does. Beyonce rapid-fire sings her way through the second verse and the bridge. Gaga is the good cop, while Beyonce is the bad cop. Gaga sings things like “it’s not that I don’t like you, I’m just at a party,” but still the chorus makes it clear she’s irritated. It’s appropriate that “Telephone” ends the same way it began with the same ethereal harp melody. It’s indicative that Gaga has disconnected her phone. Her head and heart on are lying on the dance floor, as the chorus declares. Orpheus she really is.

The heavenly synths that flash like beautiful, yet unstable rays of hope make “So Happy I Could Die” into a dream world. Gaga wants to kill the illusions that addictive substances like alcohol create. She feels more free and frankly, happy when she’s drunk. The verses sound like Gaga in a sober state, while the b-section vocals signal that the alcohol is taking effect, it’s creeping into her brain. When the chorus hits, she’s high as the sky, sounding untouchable like she’s the Cheshire cat from The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland evaporating in thin air with her head spinning all the around. The best part of the song is when Gaga and her producer RedOne harmonize together at the 2:43 mark singing the word “ooh.” The short vocal part sounds like satisfaction. “So Happy I Could Die” may sound so euphoric that Gaga could mistake her surroundings for heaven resting on beds of clouds, but there’s a sense that something is missing. It’s artificial happiness. When she’s under the influence of alcohol, Gaga unifies with the hologram of herself as the ideal woman, but it’s an illusion, just like virtual reality.

Cannibalism is the metaphor of choice on “Teeth.” Gaga offers her body (her “bad girl meat”) as food to satisfy someone else’s divine hunger. Against music that sounds like voodoo would be close by, Gaga says she wants the truth, she wants to see “your fangs.” “Teeth” is a close counterpart to “Bad Romance” because both songs are about loving the ugly and dark parts of a person and turning those parts into something beautiful and luminous. Open your mouth, show those teeth, those blood-covered teeth. The truth is blood, it is religion.

Lady Gaga did a lot of slaying on The Fame Monster. She figuratively slashed herself and others to pieces and in the end became cleaner and more pure. She became more liberated. Let’s hope Gaga continues to never “look back” and continues to change the world “one sequin at a time.” Bless her sequined soul.

Jealous rapper M.I.A. Exemplifies the Kanye Effect by Attacking Gaga

2010-04-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

The recent comments from “Paper Planes” rapper M.I.A. chastising global pop superstar Lady Gaga for being “a mimic” and not as “weird as she thinks she is or tries to be” are nothing more than jealousy and attempts for publicity. Many critics say the “beefs” make music more interesting and that's the truth. If anything, M.I.A.'s criticisms will only make Gaga even more famous and more popular. Think of it as the Kanye West effect that he applied expertly in transforming Taylor Swift’s pop crossover into a stunning phenomenon.

I never understand why some celebrities or whatever you want to call them make comments that are obviously calculated to generate publicity for themselves, but instead backfire and generate publicity for the subject of their ridicule. Kanye generated public sympathy for country singer Taylor Swift when he meant to discredit her for winning an award he thought his friend Beyonce deserved more by interrupting Swift’s acceptance speech. Kanye’s stunt led to Swift hosting Saturday Night Live and becoming an undeniable phenomenon basically sweeping the 2009 Country Music Awards and 2010 Grammy Awards. It’s telling that Kanye’s stunt did nothing for his career. In fact, it quieted his career a bit because it just made him seem stupid.

M.I.A. didn’t interrupt a speech, but her comments in NME are definitely meant to discredit Lady Gaga, but she’s not saying anything that anyone hasn’t said before: Gaga is derivative and she doesn’t deny it. Sure, compared to her strange outfits meant to evoke the avant-garde and Pop Art, her music seems tame and is derivative of other artists’ music, but that’s part of who Gaga the artist is. She’s a pastiche of pop culture, from Madonna’s platinum blond hair and dark eyebrows to the '80s Italo-disco/house music influences that dominate her sound, as well as the few Queen-like ballads she throws into the mix. M.I.A. even goes on to say that Gaga “mimics” M.I.A’s quirky rap-style, I guess in reference to Gaga’s spacey rapping on her No. 1 hits “Just Dance” and “Poker Face.”

As one blogger noted, despite all of her fame and success Gaga remains a nice person who seems insanely devoted to her fans. She probably has one of the most loyal fan bases I’ve seen in a long time. She doesn’t trash-talk other artists the way M.I.A. has done. M.I.A.’s comments reek of jealousy. As the famous quote goes “Jealous people poison their banquet and then eat it.”

Gaga Turns Her Personal Fears into a B-movie Horror Show

2010-03-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Lady Gaga decided the best way to interpret her fears of life that concern love, sex, addiction, beauty and the importance of the truth is by reimagining her fears as archetypical monsters on her second album The Fame Monster (Interscope). The result is a collection of catchy hook-filled pop songs that are concurrently macabre and funny, and play like a 1950s B-movie replete with theatrics and gimmicks.

In horror master Stephen King’s nonfiction book, Danse Macabre he splits the archetypical monsters of the horror genre into three categories, which originate from three novels: the vampire (from Dracula), the werewolf (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and The Thing without a Name (from Frankenstein). Two additional archetypes include the Ghost (from The Turn of the Screw) and the zombie. King also classifies the horror genre into three levels: terror, horror and revulsion. He says “terror” is the strongest element of the three. The terror gives rise to the suspense a person feels before a monster is revealed. “Horror” the moment at which a person sees the monster and “revulsion” is an over-the-top, gross-out visual of a monster.

The Thing or the unknowable Other is the archetype of choice on The Fame Monster’s opening song, “Bad Romance.” Gaga herself said that “Bad Romance” is about being in love with your best friend. She portrays her “best friend” as an ultra-masculine leather daddy who cruises S&M Leather bars. Lyrics like “I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand…’cuz you’re a criminal as long as your mine” suggest the S&M image. This best friend sounds like he could easily be one of the extras from the 1980 Al Pacino thriller Cruising. The men who went to Leather bars in the late 1970s into the 1980s were homosexual and the homosexual is a prime example of The Other, the mysterious outsider of society. Gaga defines herself as an outsider who’s different in her approach on most things, and was an outsider in high school. The sound scape of “Bad Romance” fits the aesthetic of the song that is driven by the main theme of the Other, that is a darkly hopeful tribute to 1980s dark wave music with sprinkles of 1990s house/trance music. The leather-studded Other of the song is a person that is seemingly sinister, but Gaga says that this Other is a best friend that she can have sick, dark fun with. In the process of paying homage to the horror/suspense films of director Alfred Hitchcock Gaga exhibits a clever play on words twisting Hitchcock’s classic films into sex jokes (“I want your Psycho, your Vertigo shtick/while you in my Rear Window, baby you’re sick”). When she sings these plays on words it’s almost as if she’s sharing inside jokes with her best friend. The main message to take out of “Bad Romance” is that regardless of quirks, sexual orientation, gender, race or religion, love is something that is beyond the physical body and the physical world.
The fear that lies within “Bad Romance” is Gaga’s fear that someone else won’t accept her as freely as she accepts them.

While “Bad Romance” was about Gaga’s yearning for a love separate from sex and all things carnal the song “Monster” is all about sex. The archetype at the center of “Monster” is the Werewolf, which pertains to the Beast within all human beings that is just waiting to be unleashed. Gaga gives the song a narrative format, in which she casts herself as a club girl partying with friends, and her night is interrupted when a sexy guy catches her eye. Like most movies that feature werewolves, like 1981’s The Howling, Gaga notes in the lyrics that she vaguely remembers the sexual encounter she’s had with the sexy guy while he was in werewolf form, in monster form (“We might’ve fucked, not really sure, don’t quite recall/but something tells me that I’ve seen him, yeah”). By having a vague memory of her sexual encounter with the guy she makes clear that she sees something familiar in the man, despite having her most memorable experience with him as a hairy, massive werewolf. She looks into the “evil eyes” of the man and sees the familiar, alluding to the classic phrase “the eyes are the windows to the soul”; she can see the beast within in the man. The fear at hand on “Monster” is Gaga’s fear that her intense, sexual attraction to a bad boy with a “monster” in his pants will become nothing more than just sex. Gaga wrote “Bad Romance” as a love letter to her best friend who she loves, but with whom she doesn’t necessarily have a sexual relationship. On “Bad Romance” she actually sings that she doesn’t “wanna be friends,” that she wants to take the strong friendship to another level. On “Monster,” Gaga wants love and friendship, so she can get the chance to get to know the bad boy; so that he’s more than a sex object. Following the narrative of the song, Gaga’s fear becomes reality when the bad boy not only beds her, but sinks his teeth into her flesh, mixing their blood together. At this point in the song the bad boy transforms from bad boy into vampire who is cannibalistic (“He tore my clothes right off/he ate my heart and then he ate my brain”). It’s in the hypnotic chorus that Gaga is a zombie stomping around repeating monotonously “he ate my heart.” Gaga’s producer RedOne plays the bad boy “monster” by providing the male part during the chorus “I love that girl…wanna talk to her, she’s hot as hell.” His voice has a deep, menacing and mysterious tone to it. Before the zombie-like parts of the chorus, Gaga sings with her signature gusto “that boy is a monster” repeatedly atop RedOne’s midtempo production that sounds as if it was inspired by the warm, lush euphoria of early ‘80s Italo-Disco music. Her inner thoughts, presumably coming from her emotionally-driven heart, respond to the carnal statement “that boy is a monster” with the question “could I love him?” It’s this simple question that sums up the meaning of “Monster”: Is it just really good, kinky sex or could Gaga actually love this man?

In tone and in lyrical content “Dance in the Dark” is the most melancholic song on The Fame Monster, even more so than the album’s song dedicated to death, “Speechless.” Set to a 1980s Goth-dark wave musical score by pop producer Fernando Garibay, “Dance in the Dark” is the story of a girl who likes to have sex with her boyfriend with the lights off. Gaga alludes to the environment of a loud, nightclub where the lights are scarce and darkness dominates by singing lyrics like “some girls won’t dance to the beat of a track” and how the heroine of the song “kills the dance,” but it serves mostly as a metaphor of performing and moving one’s body like a “dance.” However, Gaga pointed out in a December 2009 interview that “Dark” is not just about being insecure when it comes to sex, but being insecure when it comes to everything. Gaga says that lyrics like “run, run, her kiss is a vampire grin/the moonlight’s away while she’s howlin’ at him” are meant to show how the heroine of the song is helpless without the moonlight (meaning the dark, since the moon is only at its brightest when it’s dark outside). The moonlight liberates her, but daylight and even bright artificial light paralyzes her and figuratively destroys her. Gaga says that “Dance in the Dark” speaks to “how women and some men feel innately insecure about themselves all the time. It’s not sometimes, it’s not in adolescence, it’s always.” It’s that inner voice that tells a person that they’re not worthy of attention and they end up feeling embarrassed and feel like disappearing into themselves. It concerns a fear of being seen, and ultimately judged. During a spoken-word rap-like break similar to Madonna’s spoken-word verse on 1990’s “Vogue,” Gaga pays tribute to dead icons that maybe inspired her self-image and reminded her that everyone has dark moments, even the rich, beautiful and famous. Tortured celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland are a few that are mentioned, and it’s no coincidence that Gaga mentions Marilyn and Judy who were gay icons like herself. The song says that there’s safety in the dark, and people can be anything they want in the dark, which makes me think of how alcohol can be used as a way to “dance in the dark.” Alcohol gives insecure people confidence and essentially hides their true, sober selves. The drunkenness acts as a mask. The first time I heard “Dance in the Dark,” I thought the same thing as Gaga’s explanation about perpetual insecurity before she even explained it, but I’m an insecure person and that’s how I naturally read into the song. Gaga’s explanation is really where the main purpose of “Dance in the Dark” lies: Gaga is insecure just like so many of her fans and the song is further reminder that Gaga understands her fans.

With the exception of the vampire/S&M allegory “Teeth,” the remaining songs on The Fame Monster aren’t overtly monster-like. Three out of four of them are romantic and lithe ballads. The smoldering “Alejandro” would be a slow ballad, but it’s bolstered by RedOne’s fusion of Ace of Base-like 90’s Euro-pop and the main violin melody from Italian composer Vittorio Monti’s 1904 concert piece “Csardas.” Of course the mention of “Fernando” during the lamenting chorus is clearly a nod to ABBA’s 1976 hit “Fernando.” “Alejandro” has more in common with “Fernando” than the name Fernando. Both songs share a theme about finding true love, and holding on to the hope of finding love despite failed experiences of the past. Gaga sings the names of three men, Alejandro, Fernando and Roberto: the men are examples of numerous relationships that only disappoint her. She puts the focus on Alejandro by repeating his name the most because he’s presumably her current relationship and the relationship that she desperately wants to work. She’s putting her faith in Alejandro. This interpretation of “Alejandro” as Gaga’s prospective savior exists because the lyrics during the second verse, “And all those flames that burned before him/now he’s gonna firefight, gotta cool the bad.” Alejandro is the firefighter who will save Gaga from the burning fire of failed love of the past. The monster that glides around ballet-like around “Alejandro” is the ghost of Gaga’s past relationships, as is the voice in Gaga’s head telling her that her current relationship with Alejandro will fail. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Often the worse monsters wreak havoc in a person’s psyche.

“So Happy I Could Die” follows the same slow, dreaminess of “Alejandro,” but it’s less romantic and more like an alcohol-induced mirage. “So Happy” speaks to the artificialness of drunken nights when everyone who’s been drinking seems to be “best friends” and it seems like nothing bad could happen, but sadly it’s all an illusion. I’ve experienced this and it’s a state of mind that I wish could be reality, but it just isn’t and I end up feeling intense disappointment the morning after, because it’s as much a dream, that exists in my head as a dream that I have when I go to sleep at night. The monster of “So Happy” is alcohol, and the fantasy it promises. On the dramatic torch song “Speechless” in the vein of ‘70s classic rock (think Elton John and Queen) Gaga serenades her father, as a plea for him to save his life. Gaga’s father needed an important heart surgery in order to live, and her father at one point refused to undergo surgery leaving Gaga in a world of grief, which led to her even reflecting on her own life. She’s left to face the monster that is death. She uses the word speechless as a synonym for death and lifeless because when a person is dead they can’t say anything. The theme at the heart of “Speechless” is the rugged brokenness of the human spirit and body. Gaga spends most of the song in second person describing her once-sick father through different stages of his life: as a teen who grew up in the aftermath of the rebel without a cause James Dean in the ‘60s and ’70s (“With your James Dean glossy eyes/in your tight jeans with your long hair/and your cigarette-stained lies”) and his life as a middle-aged man who consumes alcohol to deal with the disappointments of life (“I can’t believe how you slurred at me with your Johnnie Walker eyes/He’s gonna get you/and after he’s through…”)

Gaga plays with words again by simultaneously incorporating her father’s heart surgery and her friends’ disappointments in life. When she sings “Raise a glass to mend/all the broken hearts of all my wrecked up friends” she’s saying that her friends have broken hearts figuratively, and her father has a broken heart literally and figuratively. Gaga ends the song by saying “Some men may follow me/but you choose death and company” and this lyric is “Speechless” in a nutshell: it takes a lot to choose life over death when living in a world of despair, but Gaga wants to live and wants her father to live and she got her wish.

The remaining songs on The Fame Monster are two songs, one technologically advanced and the other organic and a bit supernatural. The song “Telephone” is something to prepare for because it’s so fast that it just might hop away frantically like a jack rabbit. “Telephone” is by no means romantic or lithe like “Alejandro” and “So Happy I Could Die,” but instead it’s sweaty, and erratic, and the fastest song on Monster. Imagine you’re at a club and you just bought your first drink of the night and your cell phone rings constantly. It’s either the same person or different people. It might be a friend who wants to hang out or your mother or grandmother calling to check in, when all you want to do is get tipsy and dance with someone sexy. It’s Rodney Jerkins’ kinetic dance track that signifies the hyper urgency of Gaga’s need for disconnection. In true Gaga fashion she makes her need for mental disconnection physical. She sings that “I left my head and my heart on the dance floor,” suggesting the macabre work of writer Edgar Allen Poe more than any pop diva I can think of. The subject matter and staccato pace lend themselves well to the vocal style of Gaga’s diva-in-crime Beyonce. The Houston native Beyonce is one of the pop singers who is responsible for popularizing staccato singing (read: rapid-fire singing) in R&B and pop music. The annoying threat of technology seems like a redux of Beyonce’s 1999 hit “Bug-A-Boo” with her old group Destiny’s Child. The monster that caused Gaga to dance around like a headless horseman is technology, but the monster is also the voice inside Gaga’s brain telling her that she doesn’t deserve to have fun, leaving her feeling guilty. In the end, when her cell phone rings Gaga is pressing the “f--- you” button on it that stops the ringing and sends the incoming call into voicemail. “Can call all you want, but there’s no one home, and you’re not gonna reach my telephone.”

The Fame Monster opened on an S&M note (“Bad Romance”) and closes on an S&M note (“Teeth”). “Teeth” is a Southern Gothic song replete with southern gospel vocal riffs and the type of brass section that plays at a traditional New Orleans funeral ceremony. The song plays like one of Anne Rice’s epic vampire novels set in New Orleans; like Rice’s novels, “Teeth” is carnal and humid. As on “Monster,” on “Teeth” Gaga uses cannibalism as a metaphor for the often bloody, ugly truth (“Take a bite of my bad girl meat”). Just think of “Teeth” as the club girl from “Monster” transformed and out of zombie form, and instead more like a receptive human being, but changed like Sigourney Weaver’s character in 1984’s Ghostbusters after she’s overtaken by the monster. Even though Gaga wants to love with her “hands tied,” she’s the aggressor who’s just playing the submissive sexual partner; it’s passive-aggression, but she’s really the dominatrix.

Gaga’s perpetual mission statement is about obtaining the truth, and inspiring people to be their true selves no matter how much society thinks they’re sick freaks. This all furthers Gaga’s fascination with transformation from one state to the next, which explains why she demands from her lover “Tell me something that’ll change me.” Untruth is the monster displayed on “Teeth.” Whether it’s telling lies to others or to yourself, you’re a monster because you’re not free and you might as well be a creature tied on a leash in a cage.

The Fame Monster runs the gamut of the monster archetypes Stephen King lays out in his book Danse Macabre, and Gaga’s use of them is inventive to say the least. It’s further evidence that she doesn’t care much what other people think, and she’s not afraid to look grotesque. Despite all the monsters present on Monster, the album is never terrifying, but instead it’s theatrical, which is a core part of who Lady Gaga is. In high school, she was a drama queen (literally) who acted, danced and sang with all the flamboyance of a female Freddie Mercury. Gaga succeeds in freeing herself a bit more and inspiring her fans, or at least she inspired me, but I, like many would give a lot to be as free as Gaga seems to be.

LADY GAGA RIPS HERSELF OPEN TO SHOW HER INVISIBLE MONSTERS

2010-02-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

I recently read Chuck Palahniuk’s 1999 novel Invisible Monsters for a third time and it reminded me uncannily of the plight of pop star Lady Gaga. Invisible Monsters tells the tale of fashion model Shannon McFarland who gets her jaw shot off by a rifle. After her disfigurement and a series of painful letdowns, Shannon has to find a way to feel beautiful and happy. Author Palahniuk uses colorful language to personify objects and objectify people, all in a beautifully grotesque way. Palahniuk makes a person’s large hands seem monstrous or a person’s “Plumbago lips” intimidating. A human being can be grotesque in mental and physical ways. Lady Gaga’s second album The Fame Monster is a struggle between herself and the physical world, that physical world where ugliness and old age make people feel like monsters. Having an out-of-shape body is called ugly. A long nose is called ugly. Wrinkles and gray hair are called ugly. This is why no one wants to be ugly, old or both. All of the songs on Monster express Gaga’s internal feelings about self-esteem, physical beauty, sex and love. Her internal feelings are grotesque like monsters because they’re scary and fatal if they overtake Gaga. As the fairy godmother of sorts pre-op transsexual Brandy Alexander advises in Invisible Monsters, “Do the things that scare you the most.” By way of avant-garde dance-pop, Gaga documents her mission to face her fears on The Fame Monster.

Half of Monster is a highly carnal affair. It’s an album that’s very in touch with the body. Generally, beauty is an expensive and plastic ambition, especially in America. Plastic surgeons mutilate people in the name of beauty, slicing and dicing their bones and skin and molding it into something disgusting and artificial. In Invisible Monsters, fashion model Shannon states how knowledge of plastic surgery altered her perspective. “It’s scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn’t: oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.” Going under the knife for cosmetic reasons is risky because death is possible. Even if a person survives their plastic surgery, for several days or months they have to stay wrapped up in bandages like mummies and who knows what person will emerge from the bandages. The first words Gaga speaks on “Dance in the Dark” are “Silicone, saline, poison, inject me,” which are plastic surgery in a nutshell. “Dark” is a gloomy zombie waltz that plays as a sort of electronic version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” “Dark” is sad and tragic, but somehow hopeful. The more you hear that chorus “baby there’s a dance in the dark/’cuz when he’s looking she falls apart/baby there’s a dance, there’s a dance in the dark,” the more it sounds like a mantra. “Dark” solicits visions of mummies and Frankensteins lurching around. The legendary monster Frankenstein is particularly apropos for the song because plastic surgery patients are like Frankenstein because they’re made of assorted parts. “Dark” also reminds one of hard, plastic mannequins with frozen expressions and poses. You can just feel the chilly, wintry air emitted from the industrial sound of the instrumentation. Gaga resurrects a few famous dead stars. She controls these celebs with a force that is Gaga’s fight to escape the dark tunnel to get to the light. Gaga wants the glitz and glamour of supreme confidence instead of the gloom and doom of insecurity. The famous zombies that Gaga brings back to life include movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, poet Sylvia Plath, musician Liberace, Princess Diana and 6-year-old child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey. All of the celebrities Gaga mentions on the spoken-word interlude are known for their camp value. Marilyn and Judy and JonBenet were examples of hyper-femininity characterized by pounds of makeup and big hair; this made Marilyn and Judy popular inspirations for drag queens around the world, which drag queens exaggerated. Sylvia Plath’s relevance is just overwhelming despair. The mention of JonBenet is unexpected, but it oddly fits with the macabre weirdness of “Dance in the Dark.” JonBenet’s life on earth was grotesque because she dressed like an adult Barbie doll full of hair extensions, wigs and makeup, which made JonBenet look grotesque. She was pretty, but never cute because she looked artificial. She was a living doll who was defined by garishness and ultimately horror. Princess Diana was pure classy glamour in the vein of Jackie O. In many ways, Lady Gaga is a pastiche of all the stars she namedrops. She dresses in the sparkly, garish costumes of Liberace, the blond haired glamour of Marilyn, JonBenet and Diana and the melancholy voice and brown eyes of Judy Garland. All of the celebs are icons (JonBenet was an icon of the media’s devastating power), and Gaga has become an icon in her own right. Let’s just hope that she never reaches a tragic end like the stars she mentions.

“The person you love and the person who loves you are never, ever the same person,” says fashion model Shannon McFarland in Invisible Monsters. The person who loves someone who doesn’t love them back is practicing unconditional love. Unconditional love is never asking the person you love to love you back, through the good and bad. Lady Gaga proclaims that she’ll be loyal through the bad. She desires a “bad romance.” Gaga says she will accept the things about a person that society deems freakish or inappropriate. She’ll accept the grotesque things that her proposed companion hates about himself. Gaga uses the leadoff single, “Bad Romance” as her vow to provide a sanctuary for whomever it may concern. Gaga sets her vows to a soundtrack constructed by Swedish producer/songwriter RedOne (the man behind Gaga’s past hit singles like the ride-off-into-the-sunset-on-horseback triumph of “Poker Face”). RedOne frames Gaga’s fervent vocals and catchy hooks with sinister synths for this techno pop opus. Whether having a “disease” (homosexuality, bisexuality or anything not accepted by society that society thinks will infect society) or the “ugly” of person because beauty is all in the eye of the beholder, she accepts them. On The Fame Monster, Gaga constantly seeks freedom from society’s trap full of restricting social norms and conformities. Hence, Gaga’s mantra “I’m a free bitch” that pops up on a few songs on Monster. By freeing herself from society’s trappings, Gaga is also free from the hate that restriction and oppression breed. The “lover’s revenge” that Gaga sings of on the chorus of “Bad Romance” is the emotional baggage that getting hurt creates. Most people say they don’t want to be in a relationship with someone, who has emotional baggage or stuck in the past, but Gaga wants it all. Since being truly free is all about being truthful, Gaga wants for her companion to rip themselves open and spill their blood and guts out to her. She wants no illusions. It’s the villains who want to destroy in order to rebuild a society. As Brandy Alexander says, “Our real discoveries come from chaos.” Lady Gaga wants a “criminal” who’s willing to destroy and rebuild in order make a better, more free world.

A pulsing, throbbing phallus that’s ready to attack. It’s a monstrosity. RedOne’s 1980s Italo-Disco beat buttresses some of Lady Gaga’s most striking hooks after “Bad Romance" on the song "Monster." The electronic sounds breathe and groan like digital creatures, with a strange urgency. The groans of the synths as the man and his “monster” equipment start to thrust. Aggressive in its danceability, “Monster” moves like an animal that’s dangerous, yet irresistible. As the beautiful Brandy Alexander says, “Do the things that scare you the most” and Gaga does this, by experiencing sex. It might be masochistic to seek a phallus that is too gigantic and could potentially hurt her physically, but Gaga is a free woman who wants her heart and brain eaten. Carnality is another way to free yourself by finding the truth, embracing the beast inside. Sexual penetration is like knowing someone’s darkest secrets. Vampires penetrate the human flesh to taste the substance that runs through the gamut of the human body, which is none other than blood, burgundy blood. Gaga wants to get to a point where she can write the truth in blood on the wall telling her story and everyone else can follow suit. She says “the truth is sexy” and is her “religion” on the song “Teeth.” The truth is the blood that keeps her heart beating. “Teeth” is at once tribal with its primal background voices and rousing energy, especially the rousing chant “help, need a man, now show me your fangs.” Since the truth is sexy, the truth is sex. It’s carnal as much as it is religious. There’s always a very thin line between carnality and religion.

The song “Speechless” involves the absence of talking, the absence of speech. “Speechless” is a tribute to a parent. Parents are like God to their children because the parents created them, as Shannon McFarland points out in Invisible Monsters. If one had their jaw missing as Shannon does then speaking verbally would be difficult. She doesn’t have lips to shape the words she wants to say. Lady Gaga wrote “Speechless” as a way to convince her father to undergo open-heart surgery because of his bad heart, who at one point refused to get the surgery. Faced with the threat of death, Gaga had no words to speak, so she used music to say the words she couldn’t speak. “Speechless” is the rare piano ballad (aside from Gaga’s frequent acoustic performances) that has Gaga in full Elton John mode circa 197 with a big, wistful chorus. Gaga’s vocal phrasing is pure Freddie Mercury of Queen. She pays tribute to her father by also paying homage to rock stars of the Arena Rock genre.

What will be Lady Gaga’s next act? That is the question. As much as she reveals some of her personal struggles and revealing the truth, she is still a mystery. With her elaborate costumes and headdresses, Gaga is a “sphinx, a mystery…indefinable” as Brandy Alexander described disfigured fashion model Shannon McFarland. Gaga has become the glamorous person she’s always wanted to be. She transformed from a brunette in frumpy clothes to a blond entity of pop music. She’s come back from the dark depths of addiction, listening to dreary New Wave of The Cure alone in her apartment while using heroine. Gaga survived all of that to become the person she’s always wanted to be, the creature she was always meant to be, as the Pet Shop Boys proclaimed on their exquisite 1990 single, “Being Boring.” The main message of both The Fame Monster and the novel Invisible Monsters is to “rip yourself open,” but make sure to “sew yourself shut.”

ON ‘THE FAME MONSTER’ LADY GAGA SEARCHES FOR A SAVIOR

2010-01-26T09:28:00.001-08:00

: Lady Gaga is the Red Queen of the Monsters

Vampires, werewolves and even Cookie Monsters all claw their way through Lady Gaga’s second album The Fame Monster. Gaga uses a monster motif as a platform to express her deepest fears, whether they’re fears of sex, love and life in general. Many people think fame, fortune and beauty solve all problems, all insecurities, but often those things only ease problems. Growing up insecure and still harboring insecurities, Gaga intends to show her fans that insecure people can achieve their dreams just as she did by conquering her fears, her monsters. She says that her fans (who Gaga lovingly refers to as “little monsters”) can be the people they’ve always wanted to be.

In today’s world of celebrity, reality shows are the main media that turn unknowns into instant celebrities. After these instant celebrities (more like pseudo celebrities) realize that their time in the spotlight is almost up, they become obsessed with extending their time in the spotlight. Like any addiction, an addiction to fame is a disease. Gaga used her first album The Fame to show how she, like many, viewed fame as the road to riches and diamond rings. The Fame Monster is a reminder that fame and fortune don't cure low self-esteem or pain, but instead they make a person more at odds with his problems. Instead of getting diseased by the falsehoods of fame, Gaga seeks purification and the truth.

On the humid “Teeth” Gaga seeks the truth in the supernatural land of New Orleans. “Teeth” conjures images of ghostly Plantation homes, alligators, gospel choirs and Anne Rice’s vampires. Like many of The Fame Monster’s songs, “Teeth” is a rallying song that acts as a call to arms to all the people in the world who seek the truth. Gaga looks to the vampire as an antidote for lies, and she seeks a savior. As she states in the song, she seeks someone who can be her religion. Once those fangs penetrate the skin of her neck, she will be bitten by the truth because as Gaga said, “the truth is sexy.” On all of The Fame Monster’s songs, Gaga is either searching for a hero to save her or turning to a vice to deal with the disappointment of not finding her hero. She’ll take anything she can find to cope with the often cruel world. Even on the Mexican lament “Alejandro” (the rare song on Monster that doesn’t sport a triumphant hook), Gaga is scared of love and sex, but she still looks at her boyfriends as father figures, and apparently these various boyfriends are disappointments. Her disappointments are all set to a coasting track designed by Gaga’s Swedish producer RedOne, paying homage to 90s group Ace of Base.

Instead of hoping that some Prince Charming saves her, Gaga hopes that monsters will save her. On “Monster” she dumps the bloodsuckers in favor of hairy beasts. Gaga becomes entranced by a “wolf” or a werewolf. On the last line of the first verse she sings that she “can’t stop staring in those evil eyes,” cleverly pronouncing the word “evil” like “hero” (Who even knew that was possible), so the sentence sounds like “hero’s eyes.” Once again, Gaga is searching for a hero to save her. During an interview, Gaga revealed that the monster of the song’s title refers to a guy’s manhood, the pinnacle of the male anatomy. That’s not such a clever metaphor, but her references to werewolves and even allusions to Little Red Riding Hood (“Girl you look good enough to eat”) make “Monster” colorful and theatrical. Sonically, “Monster” is a tapestry of earworm hooks just bubbling with melody set to a backing track that sounds as if it time-traveled from the mid to late 1980s, specifically from Janet Jackson’s 1986 blockbuster Control.

The murky first single “Bad Romance” is like Gaga’s Want Ad for a hero, a hero that’s “leather-studded” who’s a diseased “psycho.” It sounds like she wants the S&M killer from the 1980 movie Cruising or any of the kinky killers from Brian De Palma’s Alfred Hitchcock tributes. Speaking of Hitchcock, Gaga manages to reference three Hitchcock movies, Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window, and just like those films Gaga casts herself as a Hitchcock blonde wanting and needing to be saved. Ideally, Gaga wants to find someone like herself who she can share “lovers’ revenge” with. “Bad Romance” is armed with a statuesque chorus and aggressively catchy hooks. Gaga is like a world-class chef when it comes to cooking up some of the greatest hooks in pop history. The standout hook on “Bad Romance” is the chant, “Ra-Ra-Ah-Ah-Ah/Ro-Ma-Ro-Ma-Ma/Gaga, ooh-la-la-la/Want your bad romance.” The words are nonsensical and work more as sounds, but it’s Gaga’s delivery that makes it memorable: she sounds like Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, as if the nonsensical words she sings are garbled because she has a mouth full of cookies. Maybe Gaga is deliberately referencing Cookie Monster, and if so it would be a clever tie-in with The Fame Monster’s monster motif.

When Gaga isn’t on the hunt for a hero, she’s spending her time in clubs introspecting. She reflects on topics ranging from not allowing herself to have fun (“Telephone”) to turning to vices like alcohol to cope with problems (“So Happy I Could Die”). With all the talk of monsters, death would be an inevitable topic. The piano ballad “Speechless” is probably the most personal song Gaga has ever recorded so far. It’s not dressed in clever metaphors, so it’s quite direct. Gaga said in an interview that “Speechless” is about fearing death and how death leaves her at a loss for words, as it did when her father was suffering from a heart problem that would kill him if untreated. The song emphasizes Gaga’s powerhouse mezzo-soprano voice. The lyrics “I’ll never talk again” and “I’ll never love again,” point to that paralyzing feeling, which death inspires of a person ceasing to exist. The person’s earthly presence is gone. Lady Gaga continues to introspect on “Dance in the Dark.” As the title states, Gaga is saying that she’s afraid of the light because light equals nakedness. She fears sex on “Dark,” which is the result of insecurity about her body. Ridicule causes shyness and shyness is paralyzing. Gaga says that she feels comfort in the dark shadows where no one can see her and she can just be free without being self-conscious. Gaga’s fear of light parallels with nocturnal monsters like vampires and werewolves. Using this parallel, Gaga casts herself as a bloodsucker that has a smile that is “a vampire grin” and a werewolf who’s “howling” at her boyfriend. “Dark” promotes feminism. Like the majority of The Fame Monster, “Dark” functions as a call to arms to females in the world suffering from the media’s obsession with beauty. Gaga is also speaking to males because males have to deal with weight issues and overall looks. When thinking of “Dance in the Dark” imagine the gloomy 80s New Wave band The Cure singing a song about feminism.

The monsters that live inside Lady Gaga’s head and around her actually help her. Mistakes can be monsters, as the phrase goes, are something to be learned from. If people don’t make mistakes they often don’t become stronger people. Mistakes or monsters give people character. Whether Gaga wants a guy with a “monster” in his pants or a “monster” she can pour into a glass, they all make Gaga the inventive musician that she is. Gaga had always hinted at a darker, more gothic side to her personality on The Fame, but on The Fame Monster she approaches her dark side head on.

KE$HA’S ‘ANIMAL’ IS A EUPHORIC RELIEF IN THIS WARZONE OF A WORLD

2010-01-12T15:07:00.000-08:00

Warm skin that’s moist from the body heat. Ears are ringing from the music and everyone’s voices are inaudible. Eyes are blurry and your footing is off-balance. Confidence and euphoria overcome you and you feel like you’ll never get old and the night will never end. This is what it feels like when listening to Ke$ha’s debut album, Animal (RCA/Jive) A collection of rainbow-colored electro-pop full of punk-inspired hooks, Animal has the same effect as a bottle of Mike’s Hard Ice: Animal’s sugary intoxication is fast-acting. The album exists for the simple purpose of making people dance until their clothes come off and 22-year-old Ke$ha knows this. She’s young and she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Even on the more introspective songs she still makes clear life is her party, and in a cruel world full of layoffs and terrorism who wouldn’t want to be invited to her party?

Every song on Animal is up-tempo or mid-tempo making them always danceable. The album is a hybrid of electronic music and joyous pop-punk because of the futuristic synthesizers (that always lend themselves to thoughts of the future), and Ke$ha’s often Auto-Tuned vocals that have become requisite for pop-punk music and its emo leanings. Emo music is characterized by an emotional vocal style that includes a lot of belting. As much rapping as she does on her tracks like “Tik Tok” she also performs vocal runs that are definitive of pop music. Just think of Kelly Clarkson’s vocal gymnastics on “My Life Would Suck Without You” filtered through a voice similar to pop-punker Avril Lavigne’s and you have Ke$ha’s vocal performance.

Ke$ha sums up Animal’s theme in a matter of lines on “Tik Tok”: “I’m talkin’ ‘bout everybody gettin’ crunk, crunk/boys tryna to touch my junk, junk/and I’ll slap him if he getting’ too drunk, drunk.” Ke$ha splits up Animal into three subjects that are partying, obsessive love and invasions of privacy, but all the subjects revolve around partying. Ke$ha’s approach to music seems to always involve intoxication whether it’s becoming intoxicated by alcohol or obsessive feelings about love. This approach is executed perfectly on Animal’s opening song, “Your Love Is My Drug,” on which Ke$ha says she might “need some rehab” and her “heart is fried.” Maybe Ke$ha’s preoccupation with intoxication accounts for her tipsy persona, which she exhibits in interviews as well as her music. Since Animal is meant to be escapism for people to listen to when they want to feel carefree, the songs like “Drug” and “Hungover” seem like glimpses of the less carefree aspects of life that Ke$ha keeps to a minimum. She makes it clear that she’s aware that life isn’t always a party, but people should still try to party as much as possible. Ke$ha’s goal is not to remind people of their myriad problems, but to inspire them to be happy. On songs like “Tik Tok” and “Take it Off,” Ke$ha presents an image of herself as the ultimate party girl. The image Ke$ha presents of herself within these type of songs is of a party girl, but not like a Britney Spears who is the sorority girl type of party girl who gets dolled up in miniskirts and heels to party. Instead Ke$ha prefers to dress down to party in 80s memorabilia T-shirts, Doc Marten boots with her blond hair a mess. She’s the party animal who can out drink the guys and adopt their pimp logic and use it as a sort of female empowerment, but of course not in a too-serious way.

Throughout Animal Ke$ha channels her fellow female pop stars, who have all had #1 hits created by Ke$ha’s mentor super pop-producer Dr. Luke. Some of these pop stars include Kelly Clarkson (“My Life Would Suck Without You”), Katy Perry (“I Kissed A Girl”), Avril Lavigne (“Girlfriend”) and even Miley Cyrus (“Party in the U.S.A.”). Dr. Luke has made his career from always having big, urgent hooks that are maddeningly catchy, so it only makes sense that some of past hits would work their ways into Animal. Ke$ha is a songwriter in her own right writing a song on Miley Cyrus’ latest album. She even takes some “ooh-whoa-ooh-whoas” from Miley’s “Party in the U.S.A.” on Ke$ha’s somewhat melancholy “Blind.” Despite the influences, the perpetual facetiousness in Ke$ha’s voice keeps the Valley-born singer’s songs sounding distinct. The Max Martin-produced “Kiss N Tell” is very similar to Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” “Dinosaur” has that playground chant appeal that brings to mind Avril Lavigne’s Dr. Luke-produced “Girlfriend.” With its vocal gymnastics and urgency “Hungover” has a similarity to Avril’s “I’m With You.”

Animal’s coda is its title track, which Ke$ha uses to address her need to constantly party as a way to deal with life’s un-pleasantries. Lyrics like “I’m not asleep, I’m up for the fight/into the magic/and I don’t want the concrete, I am alive/comes with the tragic” make crystal clear that Ke$ha’s partying is essentially her fight for life. Maybe if she stopped dancing she would just become another victim of this warzone of a world. The title track has a driving pulse much like a heartbeat, and is urgent. It’s the song that steps aside from the other songs on Animal and reflects on what all the songs mean as a whole. As Ke$ha sings on the chorus, “the world is spinning at the speed of light” and time is not on anyone’s side, not even the young and people might as well enjoy life’s often fleeting moments of fun. Ke$ha’s Animal is not fleeting, but it is one of life’s rare moments of fun. Bring Ke$ha’s magical brand of party pop into your life and drink it up.

BRITNEY CHANNELS HER TEEN POP PAST ON ‘3’

2009-12-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

A platinum-blond Britney in her "3" music video

Britney Spears’ “3” is a feverish piece of electro-pop that is reminiscent of Britney’s virginal pop glory days despite its sexual innuendos. It’s the perfect pop song that sounds more in line with the Britney of ten years ago.

Swedish producer Max Martin provides “3” with a midtempo beat full of skittering synths that’s indistinguishable from any of the electro-pop songs on the radio ranging from Ke$ha to Adam Lambert, but the songwriting is “3”’s saving grace. Swedish songwriter/instrumentalist Shellback (man responsible for those catchy hooks on Britney’s “If U Seek Amy” and Pink’s “So What”) makes lyrical and melodic magic for Britney. Despite not having a muscular chorus that is usually synonymous with Max Martin and Shellback, “3” makes up for it by having a muscular melody.

Since its radio release in September “3” has been marketed as a controversial song about having threesomes and living sinfully, but ultimately “3” is a playful piece of glossy pop that possesses an effervescence closer to Britney’s teen pop past. She may sing rebellious lyrics like, “are you in, living in sin is the new thing,” but her vocal delivery of those lyrics is so peppy and cheerleader-like that the risqué lyrics have no weight. Sure, Britney used to be a Mouseketeer and she’s always sounded a bit Disney, but her last two albums, Circus and Blackout were surprisingly dark and mysterious. The albums sounded like a woman who’s had her share of partying hard and smoking cigarettes, but on “3” Britney sounds chirpy again. On the b-section (which really is a chorus/hook masquerading as a b-section) Britney moves in out of her head, middle and chest voices while singing “are you in, living in sin is the new thing” with a hopefulness on the words “new thing.” Britney even uses 1960s folk groups as sexual euphemisms citing “Peter, Paul & Mary” as a creative way of saying “a threesome.”

Despite its slightly pedestrian beat “3” has a starry-eyed bridge that serves as a period for people to slow their pace of rapid-fire dancing and catch their breath. The twinkling synths and fist-pumping bass are rave-like inspiring a vision of people waving glow sticks in the shadows of a club, and a DJ working the ones and twos. The marching bass winds “3” back up to its elementary chorus full of counting. There’s a sense of power-pop urgency about Britney’s pitched vocal delivery and as is “What we do is innocent” lyric, which sounds like a mantra for a generation or an era; maybe an era past like Britney’s glorious teen pop past back when the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync ruled the planet.

Maybe “3” is a sign that Britney’s music will take a brighter, more “innocent” direction. A change of pace might be just what Britney’s music needs.

RIHANNA TEMPERS HER ANGER WITH A MILITANT THEME ON ‘RATED R’

2009-12-22T14:36:00.000-08:00

After singer Chris Brown reenacted scenes from the film, Fight Club on his former girlfriend singer Rihanna’s pretty face earlier this year, it’s no surprise that Rihanna is no longer in the mood to sing trancey dance songs with Michael Jackson chanting in the background. Instead of trying to make people dance, with her new album Rated R Rihanna has recorded cold, metallic songs full of military references and quiet anger.

Most of Rated R’s songs bring to mind images of Rihanna singing the songs while riding in an army tank. The industrial production inspires this image of Rihanna as a soldier of war. The album’s most militant songs are its best songs because they suggest an evolution for Rihanna’s music, while the remaining songs are from her poppy past and sound as if they were left over from 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad.

On Rated R’s best songs Rihanna establishes her new hardened musical persona sounding something like a gangster. She is at her most thuggish on “Hard,” in which she inspires listeners to simultaneously think of apocalyptic warfare and fashion runway shows. With lines like “they think they test me now/run through your town, I shut it down” and “and my runway never looked so clear/got the hottest bitch in heels right here,” it’s easy to see that Rihanna still has an ego after admitting in a Diane Sawyer interview that she was “embarrassed” to have fallen for a guy like Chris Brown. “Hard’s” scowling bass line, which guides the main hook “so hard, so hard” sounds like the victorious bass line from The Jackson’s 1984 hit, “Can You Feel It.” That bass line and the Thriller homage, the introductory “Mad House” are the extent of The Gloved One’s influence on Rated R. On “Wait Your Turn” Rihanna wastes no time sparking the wartime imagery stating in the first two lines, “I pitch with a grenade/swing away if you’re feelin’ brave.” It’s one of Rated R’s angrier songs where Rihanna’s rage boils a bit over the surface and the listener can hear the clenched teeth in her voice. Musically, “Wait Your Turn” sounds like a Star Wars theme anchored by videogame synths. And last and least is the anemic first single, “Russian Roulette” that sounds like music fit for a funeral. Ne-Yo wrote the song, but he writes his best material for Rihanna when Danish production duo Stargate is at the helm, which they are not on "Roulette." The beat of “Roulette” matches the warfare motif of “Wait Your Turn” and “Hard” to a lesser degree, but it’s still one of Rated R’s weakest songs even next to the pop-lite songs like “Rude Boy.”

Rated R’s worth rests on two statuesque songs written by talented songwriter James Fauntleroy (the man who wrote Jordin Sparks’ airborne hit, “No Air”). The songs are “G4L” (Gangsta 4 Life) and “Fire Bomb.” Both are songs that broadly address Rihanna’s incident with Chris Brown by way of her muted anger to the point that you can picture Rihanna’s heavily eye-lined eyes glaring. She spits with venom on “G4L” “I lick the gun/when I’m done/’cuz revenge is sweet” and you sense that Rihanna is definitely capable of going all Red Sonja on someone’s butt. She tries a couple flows and cadences Bone Thugs-N-Harmony-style across a sinister synth beat reminiscent of a track by electro-thrash duo Crystal Castles. “Fire Bomb” is Rihanna’s own swelling rock opera that is a ball of tempered anger. The song’s main bass line is a guitar loop that resembles a steady-flowing machine gun. The guitar chords have a crashing pace that add sound to Rihanna’s lyrics, “Where I’m going I don’t need my brakes/Can’t wait to see your face/when your front windows break/and I come crashing through” during the b-section that’s sandwiched between the verses. The b-section is the car set in motion and the chorus is the crash, the explosion. The static of Rihanna’s voice is ghostly and the buildup is ethereal. The references to needing masks to breath relate back to Rated R’s military theme.

Rated R is an album that is not Rihanna’s best ever album because none of her albums are her best, but it is certainly her most vocally strong. Her anger finally seems like it has depth. Her past albums have the dance-pop songs that made Rihanna a superstar, so they will always have their value, but Rated R represents something new for Rihanna artistically though it may not be commercially successful.

Britney Gets Slowed Down by Syrupy Euphoria on "3' Remix

2009-11-17T18:21:00.000-08:00

Many songs are less than the sum of their parts, and Britney Spears’ latest single, “3” falls into this category, but it is by no means a bad thing because the parts are so sweet to the ear. It’s like eating a glossy, syrupy peach cobbler, but hating the crust. The original version of “3” with all of its arid synths and Lil’ Jon tendencies was nothing without the euphoric bridge that slow grinds its way into the mix. According to most of the people who have heard “3,” the bridge is the best part of the song. Taking that main ingredient of “3” and making it the sole beat for a “Slow Remix” is like taking the syrupy sweet peaches out of a peach cobbler and eating it by itself.

Presumably a fan of Britney is responsible for replacing the shrill synths of the original beat with the 7-note guitar loop that used to be the original’s bridge and the result is a thing of beauty. The beauty of the bridge was intensified on the original when heard in contrast to the aggressiveness of the rest of the original beat. Since the bridge has a larger presence on this remix, its trance vibe is even stronger bringing to mind glow-sticks lighting up a dark club full of horny, tipsy and/or drunk people. The bridge music conjures up that much beloved feeling of euphoria (usually alcohol-induced). When experiencing this euphoria, a person wants the feeling never to end, and doesn’t want the night to end; it’s a moment in time cherished through memory. People who partied in college know this feeling and people who party and go clubbing know this feeling too. This “Slow Remix” of “3” is a dance record, but it’s by no means a “club banger” because its purpose is not to get people energetic, but it’s more of song to dance to after you’re already intoxicated. It’s a song to listen to while basking in the blissful moment of intoxication when it feels like nothing bad can ever happen. This is the purpose of the “Slow Remix” of “3” and it is why I never get tired of listening to it; it inspires and exudes happiness.

Britney’s vocals are processed, but they reach a level of smoothness that fits the lushness of this “Slow Remix” perfectly. “3” is a set of melodic parts that work as a team, ironically a team of three, or maybe not ironically. The strength in melody can be credited to the song’s Swedish songwriters, Max Martin (the man responsible for “Baby One More Time”) and Shellback (wrote Britney’s controversial “If U Seek Amy”). The three parts are the chorus, the b-section and the bridge. The verses are good, but not nearly as melodic and catchy as the other parts. There are a few lyrics on “3” that makes one scratch their head because they seem so left-field. Most critics have said that “3” is a return to Britney’s bubblegum roots and is surprisingly wholesome, despite the whole threesome thing. However, on the b-section, Britney croons, “Are you in/living in sin is the new thing,” which seems like it would offend people—people have expected that it would since they have censored the word “sin” on some radio stations and in the “3” music video—but the whole “living in sin” thing is just another way of saying “I’m not that innocent,” which was Britney’s mantra when she debuted on the music scene in 1999. The fact that songwriter/producer Max Martin was involved with “3” makes sense of the reference to innocence since the song is a slight departure from Britney’s grimier (if that word can even be associated with Britney) songs on Blackout and some of her Circus album. “3” is sort of a blast from Britney’s past. Britney has always been a walking condition where she’ll perform a striptease on stage, but immediately after she will seem almost embarrassed by the striptease. It’s like Britney knows that the image she’s built for herself over the last ten years has been what people expect from her, so she stays true to that image in an almost workman-like manner. When Britney sings on the bridge on “3” that, “What we do is innocent/just for fun and nothing meant/if you don’t like the company/let’s just do it you and me,” she’s contradicting herself. She’s saying that if threesomes offend people then she wants to make sure they know that she also likes the more traditional one-on-one sexual encounter, and that she’s not really that much of a sex freak. Britney’s conflciting image of wholesome and devilish is her trademark, and it truly has become uniquely hers. The original version of “3” is the more sinful side of Britney and the “Slow Remix” of “3” is the angelic side, and ultimately the best and truest side.

The-Dream Touches Rihanna's "Hard" Single With His Oddball Magic

2009-11-12T22:48:00.000-08:00

One of the many outstanding characteristics of Rihanna’s latest single, “Hard” is that The-Dream’s songwriting is the star of the show and acts as the thread that keeps the song sewn together. The brilliance of “Hard” proves once again that songwriters really are the unsung heroes of pop music.

The-Dream (born Terius Nash)—he wrote the No. 1 hits, “Umbrella” for Rihanna and “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” for Beyonce—uses every centimeter and inch of Christopher “Tricky” Stewart’s unremarkable instrumental to fit in an abundance of hooks. The-Dream’s ability to create multiple hooks that support a big chorus has become his trademark. The “I’m so hard, so hard…yeah-yeah-yeah…” is immediately recognizable as a hook. Technically, there really is no chorus on “Hard,” but instead a barrage of hooks. The rest of the hooks are scattered around the song; for instance, the “and while you’re gettin’ your cry on/I’m gettin’ my fly on” line is only uttered once, yet it stays in the ear for a while. In contrast, the “I see you aimin’ at my pedestal/I better let you know” line is used twice, once at the end of the first verse and once at the end of the second verse, yet the “cry on/fly on” line is a bit more catchy, despite only sung once. The minimal repetition of the “pedestal” line is the sole conventional part of The-Dream’s songwriting on “Hard.” There also are no b-sections, no real bridge and no ad-libs. The-Dream just doesn’t follow the traditional verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus song structure.

Lyrically, “Hard” is a bragfest for Rihanna that acts to further affirm her as a fashion icon. She talks about having “all black on” and “black tall shades” and a “black tall Maybach.” We already knew Rihanna was a baller, and she has no problem reminding us. Rihanna even makes references to the song that changed her career, “Umbrella” when she sings one of the more subtly catchy hooks on “Hard”: “That Rihanna rain just won’t let up.”

Christopher “Tricky” Stewart’s overall sparse instrumental—which consists of a few tinkling piano keys, bass and a sinister groan that sounds sort of like a horn, but it sounds more like the product of a keyboard—would be a mediocre beat that sounds suspiciously similar to one of Young Jeezy’s past hits (who happens to spit 16 bars on “Hard”) without The-Dream’s oddball songwriting. Because of the beat’s sparseness, The-Dream is forced to create his own melody.

The official first single from Rihanna’s forthcoming album, Rated R is the Ne-Yo-penned “Russian Roulette,” but thankfully that dreary mess of a ballad slithered off and had a quiet death with little to no radio airplay, while Rihanna’s “second” single, “Hard” (the real first single) has had steady airplay, especially on R&B/hip-hop radio. I predict that audiences will respond well to “Hard” and its inventiveness. Plus, people don’t want to hear Rihanna’s sob songs, they instead want her to make them dance, which “Hard” certainly does.

Disembodied Soulfulness is What Has Made Songwriter James Fauntleroy Such a Gift

2009-09-21T09:21:00.001-07:00

James Fauntleroy wearing those mad scientist glasses.

Link of James mixing it up in the studio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x0BxAufH28

Ever wonder why Jordin Sparks sounded so elemental on “No Air” and why Chris Brown sounded so heroic on “Superhuman”? The answer is simple: James Fauntleroy. He’s the songwriter who makes anything he touches ethereal, as well as ghostly. The guy can write any kind of music, from R&B to Country. There's a lot about James Fauntleroy that suggests the purity and earnestness of a child. He has the cheeks of a baby and the smile of a Cheshire cat. He sings in a floating, otherworldly tenor, which contributes to his angelic charm. James writes songs of love like many songwriters, but he writes lyrics that transcend hackneyed song composition.

I always knew singer-songwriter James Fauntleroy was eclectic and could write any style of music to any beat, (he wrote a song called “Torn Down” for Brandy’s album, Human that has a subtle country vibe to it) yet still maintain his unique style, but it wasn’t until I heard his song, “Overhead” produced by hit country music songwriter/producer Luke Laird (the man behind Carrie Underwood’s “So Small”) that I knew James style was evolving. It’s no coincidence that most R&B singers and country singers come from religious Christian backgrounds based in the Southern states of America. With that said, God is a constant fixture of both R&B and Country and the presence of God gives each genre of music an organic quality, even if many of today’s R&B and country artists use a sizable dosage of reverb and studio effects on their vocals, the organic part might be only applicable to the ethos of the music. The music of Contemporary Country artists like Carrie Underwood is more pop-oriented in the way that Underwood’s vocals are slick, polished and melismatic, which makes her sound more like the Whitney Houstons and Mariah Careys. The more traditional idea of country music was that it was minimal, at times hokey and off-key. Country music producer/songwriter Luke Laird produced the sweeping midtempo, “Overhead” surprisingly sung by “No Air” songwriter James Fauntleroy. Fauntleroy primarily writes songs for R&B and pop artists—he wrote Jordin Sparks’ “No Air” and songs for Britney Spears, Brandy and Chris Brown—but now for the first time he’s worked with a country producer on a song that is recognizably country. The wobbly strings that sound like fiddle strings give “Overhead” a country vibe. Listening to “Overhead,” it’s assumed “overhead” refers to the almighty one above God who’s looking down on the world he created. During the bridge, James sings, “We try to find it in a backseat” (pickup trucks for all the country music lovers in cowboy boots and hats), “fast car on a long-end street/Put my hand to the ground/listen for the sound of a heartbeat…I found it in a blue sky.” Those lyrics are referencing nature and how people try to find God's presence within nature, as well as in human contact. The God theme of “Overhead” makes it a gospel song of sorts. The theme of nature and God also keeps in line with James’ overall musical style that is influenced heavily by the elements of the world.

James’ unique style consists of a use of dissonance existing in James’ often off-kilter singing and unconventional melodies. James’ off-kilter singing (not to be confused with off-key) is the product of dissonance. Dissonance consists of different melodies that are abrasive to each other if not timed correctly, but if timed perfectly, the different melodies will find a tonal common ground or connect at a harmonious chord. James’ voice moves with each chord of a song whether the chord goes up or down, so he’s fully aware of what chords to hit with his voice; this is the reason his voice stays in sync with the beat of a song.

Regardless of musical genre, most singers perform ad-libs, which James does very well. It’s not surprising that James is able to twist vocals in new directions since one of his main influences is R&B singer Brandy; like James, Brandy also uses dissonance in her singing and creates vocal arrangements together to form a richly textured composition. Ad-libs are arranged usually during choruses to add variation to the chorus melodies that tend to be repetitive without the addition of ad-libs. Choruses are meant to be repetitive for the purpose of sticking in listener’s heads, but songwriters create ad-libs that are of a different melody than the chorus to accomplish a sense of harmony. Just as in a four-part harmony where there are soprano, alto, tenor and baritone/bass parts, dissonant melodies combine together to form a harmony that is greater than the sum of its parts. Julie Andrews explained all of this very well when she taught the Van Trapp children “do re mi” in the film, The Sound of Music.

Even though most of James’ vocals have a bit of reverb effect applied to them, even without the reverb, James’ vocals would sound dissonant. Reverb is a recording studio effect that adds some elasticity and resonance to a vocal, which sometimes makes the voice float and echo. It’s a combination of the dissonance and the reverb that makes James’ voice sound disembodied, which then makes James’ voice sound atmospheric. The atmospheric quality of James’ vocals and lyrics defines James’ songs. The definition of nature is everything that exists on the earth except humans, which includes animals, water, air, oxygen and trees. The fact that James’ voice sounds disembodied fits perfectly with the idea of his voice being something that does not belong to a human, but instead to Mother Nature. James’ voice is not something that has a flesh-and-blood face, but something that floats through the atmosphere with the birds and buzzing around with the bees and hummingbirds. This atmospheric style is what makes James sound truly soulful simply because he sounds like what a soul is supposed to be: a collection of feelings, thoughts and actions that can never die.

The biggest hit song that James has written so far is Jordin Sparks’ “No Air,” which soars through the atmosphere flying above the windswept beaches and shining oceans like a good James Fauntleroy song should. When listening to “No Air,” one does get the feeling that they’re submerged underwater gasping for air (with all those huge ad-libs full of big, blasting high notes, anyone would be gasping for air, maybe that was the intention to stay true to the song’s title). It’s not until the bridge—which acts as a sort of resting period, even though Jordin and her duet partner Chris Brown are still singing during it—that Jordin and Chris seem to rise up from the water, and with all the new air they have to breathe, they can sing their lungs out. James’ demo of “No Air” is just as elemental as Jordin’s version, but with the ghostly, Enya-like quality of his vocals James’ version sounds more tranquil. James doesn’t have the bombastic Mariah Carey notes that Jordin has, but that’s what makes James’ demo original, like himself. Chris Brown has worked with James numerous times, including two of Brown’s singles, “Superhuman” and “Take You Down.” Again, “Superhuman” has listeners envisioning skies and people flying across the skies looking down at the world because a superhero like Superman flies with his red cape blowing in the wind. On “Superhuman,” Brown duets with Keri Hilson who is an accomplished songwriter like James who makes good use of her skillful vibrato.

Since the success of “No Air,” James Fauntleroy’s star has definitely risen. He was nominated for a 2009 Grammy for “No Air.” Recently, James made Britney Spears sound ethereal on “Mannequin” and wrote a song for Ciara and Justin Timberlake to out-dance each other to on “Love, Sex, Magic.” Music is said to be universal transcending race, gender and geography and this belief also goes for the versatile James Fauntleroy. From Youtube to Internet blogs, many people have commented that they often prefer James’ demos over the final recorded version by another artist. This is saying something. With such an elemental style, James could be the shaman who connects the visible world and the invisible spiritual world.

When Cassie Stays Sensual, She’s at Her Best

2009-08-25T14:29:00.000-07:00

There are no histrionics at works on Cassie, the debut album from Connecticut singer Cassie, unless you include the hammy sweaty, porno-like synths that are the starsof the show. That’s pretty much the theme of Cassie: grinding synths that drip of sex and conjure up images of the brilliantly trashy porno films from the 1980s. I can just see vintage porn star Vanessa del Rio puckering up now.

When Cassie was first released in 2006, Cassie Ventura was a baby-faced 20-year-old who despite her exotic Filipino-Black beauty exuded an aura of a typical young adult. Looking at her and the way she conducted herself, it could be assumed that she partied with friends, went to the beach in all her bronzed skin-and-sunglasses glory. It was when an unofficial video for “Me & U” showed Cassie in green night vision a la Paris Hilton’s infamous sex tape that the kittenish popular-girl quality started to pour out of Cassie. She was showing signs of maturity, some would say. The official video for “Me & U” ended up being a classier affair where Cassie channeled Janet Jackson more than Paris Hilton. The sexy sound of Cassie foreboded Cassie’s current sexed up, pop tart image.

Cassie is mostly written and produced by 80s aficionado Ryan Leslie who is the reason for the album’s synth-heavy appeal. Leslie treats Cassie as his lite-version of Janet Jackson, except Leslie produces Cassie as if he’s been watching some vintage porn. One of the best ways Leslie showcases his New Wave sound is on Cassie’s debut single, “Me & U.” Although Cassie’s vocal delivery on “Me & U” is calm, measured and devoid of melisma, her delivery is not robotic. Instead, Cassie sings in a fashion that is quite carnal. Cassie’s treble voice is the vocal equivalent of an ice cube melting into liquid on a hot summer day. Her voice is used as an instrument that works in synergy with all of the synths that make up Cassie’s “electro” sound.

Leslie’s synth tapestries are frequently sweeping and they lay the under currents of sex on Cassie. Leslie’s synths build to a climax, but that’s on only a few songs on an album as short as Cassie. There are ten full songs on the album, but only five songs are worth the listen. “Me & U” is the obvious centerpiece of Cassie, but “Miss Your Touch” and “Just One Night” are head nod-inducing midtempos. “Miss Your Touch” is refreshingly concise and resembles a song SWV might sing from the early 1990s, as does “Just One Night.” “Kiss Me” is a ballad that is the best song behind “Me & U” for sheer melodic perfection. The song is breathy, dreamy and arousing. “You don’t have to hold back or be shy/I can tell you want me in your eyes” are some of the lyrics Cassie sings during the chorus on “Kiss Me.” This song has a soulfulness that no other song on Cassie has. “Kiss Me” is so soulful that Cassie actually sings vocal runs such as “It’s intoxicating, I barely can breathe” with urgent desire. Some of the songs give off some New Edition flavor circa 1984, when Bobby Brown was still clean-cut. The song, “About Time” is the song that first planted the New Edition seed in my head that sounds like a typical song coming from a woman not far out of her teenage years.

It’s when Cassie and Ryan Leslie decided to keep it sexy that Cassie picks up steam. Unfortunately, the boring and annoyingly poppy songs bring the album down and interrupt the album’s momentum. Songs like the dragging ballad, “Not With You” and the pop-rap number, “What Do You Want” should never have been added to Cassie; the songs do not fit with the album’s sexual theme.

Current pop-R&B is heavily influenced by rap and hip-hop, but Cassie sounds like music from other eras. The album would fit more comfortably next to albums by Jody Watley and SWV than the Ciaras and the Danity Kanes of the world. Put on your dancing shoes or shed your clothing to the sexy synth music of Cassie.

KERI HILSON BRINGS AN 80S ELEMENT TO HER DEBUT, BUT ALSO BRINGS TO IT HER OWN BRAND OF WARM-BLOODED MUSICALITY

2009-08-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

Keri Hilson Brings an 80s Element to Her Debut, Also Brings to it Her Own Brand of Warm-blooded Musicality

by Chris Cole

The power of a woman and the power of her pen could conjure up many images: maybe of a woman writing her own check for payment or as a strong songwriter who writes catchy songs about the human experience. Mosley Music/Interscope artist Keri Hilson is an example of the latter. Hilson is a master of intertwining words and melody. As much as she’s noted for her songwriting prowess, Hilson’s physical beauty is also something duly noted. She’s this tall, fit and slightly curvier woman (than in the past several months) with hazel eyes, who wears a frosted bob and a Cheshire cat smile full of slyness and mystery—Sheila E. circa 1985, anyone? It’s also refreshing that the twenty-something Hilson is a woman who isn’t afraid to wear form-fitting spandex onstage. It’s an ode to the 80s—specifically to the early 80s when pop-R&B music was more warm-blooded, which is pretty much the theme of Hilson’s In A Perfect World.

The 80s was a booming decade of consumerism and the music reflected that consumerist air of the 1980s. The mainstream music of the early 80s hadn’t reached the coldness that overtook much of 80s pop music. The pop music released in the early 80s, such as Michael Jackson’s monster-of-an-album, Thriller (1982) was still full of warm energy that was recognizably human. Jackson’s album had some of the celebratory freeness leftover from the 1970s. As the world moved deeper into the decade of the 80s, Americans became more repressed and slaves to society’s consumerist standards, and most importantly people felt they had to keep up with the Joneses. The temperature of music cooled down into cold drum machines, synthesizers and robot drone-like vocal deliveries. Thankfully, artists like Sheila E, Janet Jackson and even Madonna (more on the pop side of things) brightened up the darkness that was the 80s with girlish sex appeal. On her long-delayed first album, World, Keri Hilson decides to be human and show the sensual side of human nature, but not quite in the Adina Howard “Freak Like Me” way, but in a way that adds flesh and blood to the robot syndrome of current radio.

Hilson’s image is of empowerment like most female R&B singers (yes Beyonce, I’m talking about you), but Hilson displays the same laid-back, yet self-assured personality on Perfect that she shows in interviews, which is nice to see. That’s probably the reason why Hilson has so many fans around the world because she seems like a real person.

Hilson is a commercial/mainstream artist, evident by her choices of radio singles—“Turnin’ Me On,” “Energy” and “Knock You Down” are all easily-digestible singles, although “Turnin’ Me On” does have a raunchy out-of-this-planet quirkiness about it that would make George Clinton proud—her tame hit singles were just used as tools to get consumers to buy her album and discover her album’s meatier songs.

Perfect is a rapturous album mostly because of its ballads and slow jams, whatever you want to call them. Hilson drenches herself in sweet, yet heavy sex on the moaning slow jams, “Slow Dance” and “Make Love,” that are both so sultry that the listener can almost hear the lovemaking taking place. Hilson's superb vibrato technique makes her rich alto shine. On vocal runs, Hilson uses her vibrato to move various notes around like an instrument, which is what her voice is. Vocal runs are constant on Perfect. With the grinding bass lines of “Slow Dance” and “Make Love,” the songs are so genuinely horny that one can almost hear Prince’s primal growls in the background. Even on a sexy ballad like “Make Love” where it would be so easy for Keri Hilson to take the submissive role, she remains the dominant one during lovemaking. Maybe that’s what she means when sings, “tonight we’re going to do something different.” When Hilson sings, “I’m going to wait on you hand and foot like the king you are baby,” it may sound derivative, but it again shows Hilson’s human side. She seems to realize that love is about giving and taking. Hilson doesn’t seem like a gold digger, despite some of the materialistic references on “Get Your Money Up.” Lyrics like, “Now slide, slide, one of them black cards, if you got it then show me how you getting it/diamond’s a girl’s best friend/if you can provide them/I might even act a fool while you hitting it” make Hilson sound like a gold digger, but she counteracts that previous line by singing, “when you see me and my dames/blow a lot of change/at the bar, don’t get jealous, get your money up.” In the end, Hilson makes clear that she has her own money and just wants a man who also makes his money and therefore won’t feel jealous and/or insecure about her money. Sounds fair enough. And as for the “stop, now let me see your booty drop” line, it doesn’t have much to do with the theme of “Get Your Money Up,” but it’s obvious that Hilson made the song with the clubs in mind, and that people would dance to it.

The singer switches the mood of Perfect to introspection and revelation, and the song titles are indicative of this mood. To name a few titles, there’s “Intuition,” “How Does it Feel” and “Alienated.” “Intuition” is Hilson at her harmonic best evidenced by the multilayered vocal run that opens the second verse, which channels Prince. “Intuition” isn’t Prince-like, but that particular part of the song seems like a subtle nod to the Purple One. Hilson sings about being insecure and knowing that her prospective love interest will inevitably “mess up.” That’s how most people feel when on the search for love and companionship.

“How Does it Feel” is a Timbaland-crafted thumper that has pounding bass that will blow speakers out if one is not careful. Hilson gets sassy on a dude when asking her ex if he can be empathetic and imagine himself in her place. Hilson sings the line, “I could take the knuckle route, but I got class,” is obviously an allusion to fist-fighting. This particular lyric is another example of Hilson making clear that she’s a tough cookie. Ms. Hilson also shows signs of her toughness on the album’s slithering intro where she sings, “baby please understand/Can’t have you all up on me, I roll with some killers man/…I see him muggin’ me/she don’t want no problems, I got a little bit of thug in me.”

“Alienated” is the centerpiece of Perfect because it’s this glittery symphony of heavenly synths and 90s drum programming courtesy of baby-faced maestro Cory Bold (formerly of the T.U.G. camp). Hilson admitted to the press that she originally wrote “Alienated” for Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger’s solo album, but label politics prevented Nicole from releasing her version, so Hilson decided to keep “Alienated” for herself, and it’s a good thing she did because it ended up being the glistening sun of Perfect shining its light on the rest of the album.

The warmness of Perfect will heat your body, as well as heat your heart. With all Keri Hilson’s great unreleased songs and demos floating around the Internet, it’s impressive that she was able to compile the perfect mix of songs that would collectively convey a cohesive message. After listening to Perfect in its entirety, the listener can tell from polished song-crafting that Hilson has an extensive background in all the dynamics of the production of music. A debut album that shows craft and experience—now that’s what a debut album should accomplish.

Bajan singer Livvi Franc goes emo!

2009-05-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

From the moment those first piano chords cruise in, the melancholy tone of “Sub Zero” is established. The song already has an emo vibe to it based on the first verse, but when the chorus rushes in with its first words “My world’s so cold/I’m hard as stone,” the emotional lamenting goes full-throttle.

When Livvi sings lyrics like, “Another blow and my heart might stop/I’m losing feeling, am I dead or not?” the song sounds like anything Secondhand Serenade would sing or many of the pop-punk/emo hybrid bands. Make no mistake, Livvi Franc is considered an R&B singer from Barbados (much more of a talent than Rihanna folks), and the song’s beat is what keeps “Sub Zero” close to the R&B category. Still, “Sub Zero” is pop with a sensibility that transcends genres and categories.

Atlanta-based producer Oak provided the beat for “Sub Zero” and female songwriter Frankie Storm (Rihann’s “Please Don’t Stop the Music”) wrote the song. Oak has been gradually making a name for himself producing synth-filled electro pop-R&B affairs for Jennifer Lopez, Lloyd and Toni Braxton. Dark, angsty guitars groan in the background, that help to give “Sub Zero” a proper mood of despair.

Clever, sexy and Sweet are all under Chasity’s belt

2009-02-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

With a voice that sounds bright-eyed and is enticingly feminine with a range of tones, Chasity is a new talent with an alternative state of mind.

Chasity makes songs that exude an 1980s sensibility abound with shimmering synths, often provided by progressive producer Warren “Oak” Felder. Her voice has a pop quality to it that is devoid of hard-edged attitude and rasp, but of something softer and inviting. Overall, Chasity is a pop singer who writes songs with muscular hooks and choruses, and songs that are held together thematically by clever metaphors, which are inherent on songs like “Glass House” and most notably the Oak-produced “Money.” On the song, “Money,” Chasity describes the currency that makes the world go round as something that evokes sexual arousal, as well as hunger. “Money” is clearly an ode to having money, but in the fashion in which Chasity sings about money, it sounds as if she could be laying her claim to a man who is the object of hers as well as the world’s desires.

Not only has Chasity written her own pop gems, but she has lent her intelligent song crafting to a string of divas including Jennifer Lopez (“In My Shoes”), Raven Symone (“Green” “That Girl”) and ivory-tickling New Yorker Karin Pasian (‘90s Baby”).

Blessed with smooth mahogany skin, eyes as bright as the moon and lips that are like slices of melon dipped in sugary syrup ready to be kissed, Chasity is a piece of chocolate delight with a coke-bottle body. Beautiful pop music is on its way to the airwaves by way of Chasity’s radio-ready music that is as R&B as it is glossy pop that will hook you.