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

: 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

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.