Remember that "Simpsons" Treehouse of Horror where the Krusty the Clown doll was trying to murder Homer? Turned out the problem was the doll had a switch on its back set to "evil" and with a flick of the wrist, it could be reset to "good." It feels like sometime late last summer, someone flicked a similar switch on Lady Gaga. For about a year, she was nothing but a lot of talk and a badge-- only without the badge. She filled her résumé and interviews with style icon namedrops-- Andy Warhol and his notions on celebrity, the denizens of New York's downtown arts scene, and avant couture designers like Thierry Mugler-- but her singles betrayed none of the artistry that she insisted was part of her package. "Poker Face" had about three big hooks, but next to her other singles-- which ran the gamut from forgettable fluff ("Just Dance") to "Muffin Top" ("LoveGame")-- it seemed like a fluke. Then, between the VMAs and "Paparazzi", she came into her own. And on "Bad Romance", the lead single from The Fame Monster, she became kind of awesome.
The rest of The Fame Monster-- out late last year, while we at Pitchfork were wrapping up our 2009 content-- isn't as strong as its lead single (although the Queen-like "Speechless" comes close), but it at least stakes a claim that Gaga is a potential new Madonna rather than simply a new Katy Perry. If I had to guess, I'd say once she became hideously popular Gaga was able to take more control of her career, the early result being "Bad Romance", arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009. And the video is part of the package: Like Madonna or Prince, it's impossible to separate the song from the performer. But unlike those artists, Lady Gaga isn't particularly attractive, and she uses this to her advantage by suppressing her vanity and making herself a slippery figure. She's still largely unknowable and also almost unrecognizable from moment to moment, as she contorts, disguises, masks and maims her face and body like a Matthew Barney or David Cronenberg creation.
Gaga comments on fame as she becomes more famous: It's in her record titles-- The Fame, The Fame Monster, "Paparazzi", "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich", "Starstruck". It's also in her wearable art, and the way she deconstructs her own look-- rigid, robotic dance moves as if she's a puppet on a string, moving in crutches after being damaged by her outsized fictional celebrity in the "Paparazzi" clip. In "Bad Romance" she alters whoever Lady Gaga the Pop Star might be into any number of female types-- at times recalling Britney Spears, Madonna, an Anime character, Angelique, Christina Aguilera, and Amy Winehouse. In that sense, she's a perfect 21st century pop icon-- a regular person willing to manipulate herself into whatever it takes at any given moment to be a star.
And yet, unlike the empty famewhores climbing atop the shoulders of reality TV and tabloid journalism to notoriety, we know next to nothing about her personal life. In that sense, she's the anti-Kanye, the anti-Eminem, and the anti-Winehouse-- the twists and turns of her private life don't inform her art. Rather, she is whoever she wants to be at any time, and her art is as much the manipulation of that image and notions of modern celebrity as it is music or fashion. And it's refreshing to have a big pop star communicating to us from afar, like pop stars used to.
Everything about "Bad Romance" is big but oddly clean and direct-- whooshing synths, jarring rhythms, and stratospheric choruses. It's not an earworm so much as something designed to just take over a listener, to force them to pay attention the way Gaga's image seems to have done to people in recent months. Sure, the choruses were also skybound on "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi", but they seemed bigger by working as a counterpoint to other elements of the song-- the odd way Gaga makes her voice go deep and guttural, the terrible sing-speaking she has ideally abandoned. "Bad Romance", on the other hand, has two volumes: 10 and 11. In that sense, it's almost template breaking-- reminiscent of stadium house with Gaga as a new KLF, fucking with us from the inside. (No surprise that it sounds so European either-- it comes across like futurist pop music without any hints of hip-hop's influence.)
Elsewhere on The Fame Monster, she morphs into other stars-- Freddie Mercury on "Speechless", ABBA on "Alejandro", Madonna on "Dance in the Dark", Britney Spears on "Telephone", Kylie Minogue on "Monster", and Christina Aguilera on "Teeth". Yet instead of hopelessly retro, it comes off very modern, in part because U.S. pop and hip-hop is currently drawing heavily from Europop, hi-NRG, and dance music. It's almost as if we're experiencing a sonic present that's whitewashed most of the influence of backbeat sample-based hip-hop-- from Kanye and Cudi to Jason Derülo and the Black Eyed Peas, it's all presets and synths and dance. All of a sudden, Eminem's claim that "nobody listens to techno" seems like a hell of a long time ago.
Where a lot of The Fame felt like rote pop with overt "comments" on fame, Gaga's recently acquired actual fame allows her interactions with an audience to become a theatrical experience. Her music, meanwhile, has become subtler, more playful, and more well-rounded, extending the electro-pop bubble she lived in on her debut. And instead of shoehorning references to celebrity into some tracks, she's borrowing elements and templates and simply focusing on quality control. The weird result is that, despite her flitting between personalities and personas, her music feels more like her own here than it did on her debut LP. The songs feel like they were written for Lady Gaga rather than simply for any modern pop star.
Whether Gaga can keep up the streak is another matter. Maybe she'll get chewed up and spat out in the end, or maybe her chameleonic image changes are just Madonna's career at the speed of the Internet era and we're seeing all of her ideas at once. But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around.
