Listening Post

The new single Lady Gaga got a worldwide release yesterday -- and I have to admit it's more addictive than crack.

First of all, she's definitely entering her Lene Lovich phase, both stylistically and aesthetically, and there's something odd about the song in that it's all synth but it's actually so propulsive that it somehow feels like a guitar-and-drums rock song.

Here it is -- Applause.

I'm at least somewhat back after a really difficult weekend funeral and a decision to take a bit of a mental health day with Inara yesterday. At some point I'll come back fully.

Bored This Way

Lucas Kavner at the Huffington Post dissects the breathtaking silliness of last night's first ever "Best Video with a Message" award at the MTV Video Music Awards:

"Certainly there's nothing wrong with rewarding artists who release music based on personal convictions, but isn't that kind of par for the course? If, as MTV president (Stephen) Friedman said, he wanted to 'reward' these artists for digging into their personal experiences to create powerful songs, did we really need to point out exactly what message they were trying to get across?

The most powerful songs in history come from 'deeply personal' experiences. In fact, every original song is personal. The lyrics come from somebody's brain and are based around either specific or universal experiences and then, in turn, inspire personal feelings in the listener. That's... what a song is.

There's something oddly icky about MTV assigning more 'meaning' to a song, as if Katy Perry's pop anthem about personal empowerment, which netted her millions of dollars, contains as powerful a "message" as a song from a rock band whose lead singer lost his close friend. Do we need MTV telling us we shouldn't be 'mean' to other people? Does this even make sense anymore?

Somehow this category rivals even the lamest of MTV decisions in recent years, a strange pander to the most common denominator of superfluousness."

As Kavner points out, almost every video nominated for this great honor featured a "message" that was as comically trite as it was predictable, particularly in a year that saw the publicity surrounding the suicides of several supposedly bullied-to-desperation kids reach cacophonous levels. From Katy Perry to P!nk to Rise Against, the theme was the same: you're somebody, loser; please don't kill yourself; it gets better. In the end, of course, the song and video with the absolute least subtlety in its point won out: Lady GaGa's insipid and shamelessly derivative gay anthem Born This Way took the prize.

If I sound especially caustic, it's because I can't help but see this kind of thing as perfectly illustrative of the fact that we're now apparently trying to raise a generation without the ability to think for itself. When an engine of pop culture pabulum as egregious as MTV actually begins translating the meaning of songs for viewers and rewarding the ones that are the most obvious and not the least bit daring, you know that Generation Y -- or whatever the hell is following in its wake -- has one more reason to shut down its collective imagination. Personal inspiration gets trampled in the name of whatever democratized, prepackaged and Wiki-approved form of supposed creativity appeals to the largest and lowest common denominator.

Then again, does anybody really give a shit about the VMAs anymore? The irony of MTV continuing to hand out awards for music videos is pretty laughable; I play more videos on this site than MTV does these days. Somebody wake me when the YouTube/Vevo Awards become a reality.

Sexual Juxtaposition

Remember, it's not gay -- and if it is, Marcus Bachmann can cure it.

Meat Puppet

Yesterday, Lady GaGa mystifyingly injected herself into the debate over the American military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

It's always enjoyable when an entertainer, particularly a pop singer, reaches that special level of self-obsession where he or she honestly thinks people should give a shit about his or her opinion on important issues.

I'd elaborate on this, but Patrice O'Neal hit it on the head perfectly a month or so ago on Opie and Anthony.



By the way, how ridiculous is that entire image of Lady GaGa, looking like a Muppet with Down Syndrome, fighting the power in front of a big-ass American flag?

Listening Post

One of the most curiously entertaining pastimes in the world of pop culture these days is listening to -- and occasionally engaging in -- the endless debate over whether Lady GaGa is a pioneering genius or a derivative hack (or perhaps a genius precisely because she is nothing more than a derivative hack).

Regardless, she's brought a kind of visual flair back to music performance and the medium of the music video that's been sorely missing for years -- and for that I give her credit. I said this last year, when I called Bad Romance one of the best singles of 2009: Love her or hate her, you can't deny her as a cultural force.

Case in point: Her new video, for Alejandro, was released just yesterday and in that time it's gotten almost three-and-a-half million views on YouTube. Katy Perry's already labeled it "blasphemous" and, at the very least, I think it can be said that GaGa pulls off "inexplicably sexy" better than just about anyone.

So is it brilliant, ridiculous, or not even worth raising an eyebrow over? Well, you decide.

Here's Lady GaGa's not-at-all-homoerotic new video -- Alejandro.

Listening Post: The 20 Best Singles of 2009 (6 & 5)

6. Alice in Chains -- Check My Brain

Who'd have thought it possible? 14 years after their last album of new material, Alice in Chains thundered back in 2009 with a song that wasn't just a respectable post-Layne Staley effort -- it was damn well one of Alice in Chains's best singles, period. With new frontman William Duvall stepping in for the late, great Staley and Jerry Cantrell once again assuming the role of the second half of Alice's frontal assault of harmonic acrobatics, Check My Brain was a full-on powerhouse of a song. It was with a tip of the hat to irony that after a storied career sludging through the dark murk of Seattle's signature sound, Alice's new single focused on -- of all things -- California. The first line alone let you know that the band had somehow emerged into the light: "So I found myself in the sun, oh yeah/hell of a place to end a run, oh yeah/California I'm fine, somebody check my brain." But while the lyrics may have signaled a newfound respect for survival, the buzzsaw guitars and swirling harmonies let you know that some things hadn't changed -- and, man, what a beautiful thing that was. Welcome back, boys.




5. Lady GaGa -- Bad Romance

Love her or hate her, you can't deny her: 2009 belonged to Lady GaGa. Sure, Poker Face and Paparazzi were more infectious than Ebola and only slightly less dangerous when exposed to for long periods of time. But it was late in the year that GaGa unleashed her best single yet -- the song that allowed her to fulfill the promise she'd shown when she first grabbed pop culture by the balls: Bad Romance. It seems too early to call the single "classic GaGa" but in the kinetic, ADD world we now inhabit -- where a year ago seems like ancient history -- maybe it's not as impossible as you'd think. It's probably better, though, to just say that Bad Romance has the self-proclaimed product that is Lady GaGa firing on all cylinders and the result is hot, cool, sexy, and just plain bad-ass. Say what you will, it's a great fucking song.



Tomorrow: 4 & 3

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 7. Spinnerette -- Baptized by Fire; 8. Deadmau5 & Kaskade -- I Remember

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 9. The Dead Weather -- Treat Me Like Your Mother; 10. My Chemical Romance -- Desolation Row

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 11. Little Boots -- New In Town; 12. Miike Snow -- Silvia

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 13. The Sounds -- No One Sleeps When I'm Awake; 14. Blue October -- Dirt Room

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 15. Jay-Z (w/Alicia Keys) -- Empire State of Mind; 16. Company of Thieves -- Oscar Wilde

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 17. Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Heads Will Roll; 18. Doves -- Jetstream

The 20 Best Singles of 2009: 19. Mos Def -- Quiet Dog; 20. Florence + the Machine -- Kiss With a Fist

Listening Post

There's nothing I enjoy more than defying expectations, particularly when it comes to the music I like.

This is one of those choices that people will either love or hate, mostly because the singer herself is someone it's tough to be ambivalent about. To be honest, I go back and forth over whether I really like or completely fucking abhor Lady GaGa. On the one hand, she's pop music's answer to Marilyn Manson -- a really savvy artist who blends bits and pieces of just about every form of modern pop and arthouse culture and shoves the whole thing right down the throat of the audience; she's the new musical Andy Warhol and the perfect face and voice of a unique point in history -- a sort of ground zero era where the sounds and visuals from the past are easily accessible as never before, thanks to the internet, and therefore can combine with the present to create the feeling of a perpetual "now."

On the other hand, she's friends with that idiot Perez Hilton -- although that in itself could be an example of the sly joke she's playing on the world: both reveling in and mercilessly mocking our obsession with the shallow, vain and vacuous.

Regardless of what you think of Lady GaGa, though, her new song is damn catchy -- and the video, helmed by I Am Legend and Constantine director Francis Lawrence, is astonishingly cool.

Here's Bad Romance.

The Downward Spiral

"They don’t just put somebody with one little hit on the cover of Rolling Stone fucking magazine, man!"

-- Jeff Bebe, lead singer of Stillwater, in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous

The covers of the last two issues of Rolling Stone: