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.
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