Notbuckethead posted:

Bad Romance and Alejandro are best songs on fame monster, monster is great but it sounds like rihanna's disturbia too much for comfort

NicelyNice posted:

Pomplamoose, continuing to suck out whatever made the originals enjoyable in the first place

Kara Thrace posted:

I don't get Alejandro. I don't understand why it's there, for me every single song on the album is fantastic, but that. I can't bloody listen to it.

Final Fart Buttball posted:

I have a feeling Alejandro won't go to #1 and it'll break her #1 single streak she has going. I can barely stand it either

Toaster Beef posted:

Even as an avid Gaga lover I have to say ya'all are totally wrong about Pomplamoose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xycnv87N_BU

sakana posted:

Pomplamoose + Telephone = yay all day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vEStDd6HVY

The Remote Viewer posted:

I think Alejandro is good enough to be a single. It's one of my favorites on the album, so happy I could die is the only one I don't care for.

quote:

Let's Make a Sandwich: Lady Gaga's "Telephone," A Second Take

"Once you kill a cow, you gotta make a burger." So says Lady Gaga as she turns to the camera with a deadpan stare in her latest video for the Fame Monster track "Telephone." Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the clip is a sequel to the previous Gaga-Åkerlund collaboration "Paparazzi"—and it's an epic in music video terms, clocking in at nine and a half minutes.

Whereas "Paparazzi" was an extended riff on, among other things, Hitchcock and his voyeuristic sensibilities, "Telephone" has chosen the work of Quentin Tarantino as its visual and narrative inspiration. The video is full of nods to the director: the self-conscious dialogue laden with knowing winks to the audience; the fascination with the muddy waters of exploitation, of which the women-in-prison film is a genre favorite; and of course, the infamous Kill Bill Pussy Wagon. (The Tarantino connections are so strong, the first time I watched the video I was sure Gaga was making out with Steve Buscemi.)

Forget for a moment the Ouroboros meta-nature of crafting a pastiche of a filmmaker whose work is defined by pastiche; Beyoncé, Gaga's co-star and the Honey B(unny) to her Pumpkin, has Tarantino on the brain as well. Her clip for "Video Phone" (directed by Hype Williams and featuring Lady Gaga in a mirror-like inversion) riffed on Tarantino as well, with its opening scene a direct lift from Reservoir Dogs. However, "Video Phone" is a deeply flawed work; its pastiche descends into an incoherent hodge-podge, with ideas and images thrown into the blender without rhyme or reason.

"Telephone" itself flirts with the edges of coherence, crossing the line a few times. It's full of random references (including nods to sci-fi works like Dune), product placement that for the first time feels out of place (the flow-killing cutaways to linger on a dating site home page being the most egregious example), and interesting but strange visual tics (like Gaga displaying her thoughts in German right before she commits murder).

Part of the scattershot nature of the video comes from how the actual song is used. "Paparazzi" was lengthy for a music video as well, but it managed to keep the integrity of the song intact, saving the pure narrative segments for bookends. It also managed to push its story forward through the actual performance. "Telephone," on the other hand, has a definite stop-start feel to it, which is always problematic for a music video because it seems to do the song a disservice. Gaga's managed to make the form work before; the French New Wave-inspired "The Fame: Part One" interspersed music with narrative, but the medley in that short film blended seamlessly with the story. In "Telephone," it feels like the track is an excuse for the narrative rather than working with it.

Regardless, there is much in "Telephone" to recommend, and like the rest of Gaga's work, it's certainly a feast for the eyes. There's the opening in the "Prison for Bitches," where all the inmates dress like ‘80s crust punks while listening to The Fame on their Heartbeats earphones, and a metal-studded Gaga channels James Dean with a look that defines the word "fierce." There are the diner scenes, where short-order cook/dancers listen intently to heads of lettuce as Gaga and her hair-telephone teach us the best way to put rat poison in bacon and eggs. And the way there's just a random half-second cutaway to Beyoncé's chest—done in the same manner as every other product placement shot in the video—is a minor stroke of genius.

What are we to make of a Gaga who clothes herself in the American flag and dances among a roomful of corpses after serving poison to the people? One of the beauties of Gaga's work in both musical and video forms is how much of it is pop music tinged with a pervasive morbidity and sense of self-reflection. The songs are about love and romance, but they're also about the love affair between pop musicians and their audiences. "Monster," for example, is a track that's about a one-night stand gone awry. But if you've seen "Who Shot Candy Warhol?" then you know that monsters and hearts also mean something entirely different in Gaga's world. In this way, to contemplate the logic and meaning behind "Telephone," it's useful to view it alongside Gaga's other recent work—the videos for "Paparazzi" and "Bad Romance."

"Bad Romance" (directed by Francis Lawrence) has an intriguing duality with "Telephone." The "Bad Romance" video is about purity and transformation, with a captured Gaga being converted into a product to be bought and sold before she reclaims her identity in a destructive burst of cleansing fire. The visuals are striking in their sterility, with the whites of the bathhouse and the crystal clarity of water, vodka, and diamonds. The exploitation aesthetic of "Telephone," on the other hand, is all about dirt: the grimy prison grounds, the dust kicked up by the Pussy Wagon as it races across the desert, the visceral close-ups as Honey B's boyfriend (Tyrese Gibson) and the rest of the people in the diner wolf down their breakfast plates. The distinction makes sense, because "Bad Romance" is about the dilemma of the perfectly packaged and constructed pop superstar, while "Telephone" is that same superstar's Tarantinoesque escape fantasies brought to life. When looked at in this way, Beyoncé's turning to the camera after murdering her controlling boyfriend and saying, "I know you'd take all my honey, you selfish motherfucker," comes across as rather transparent, doesn't it?

"Telephone" makes references to the events in "Paparazzi," and Beyoncé murders her boyfriend with the same props and mannerisms Gaga used to murder hers in the first video. (Without the chillingly alien Mickey Mouse/geisha-robot vibe Gaga had, Beyoncé comes off as a pale imitation, but anything else would be a tall order.) Both videos are fascinated with the juxtaposition of death and art, but end up deploying that juxtaposition in entirely different ways. "Paparazzi" is about death as fashion, death as high art—the corpses in that video are all draped in couture and exquisitely posed and framed. The deaths in "Telephone" are anything but: We get close-ups of sickening eye rolls, choking coughs kicking crumbs into the air, and Tyrese collapsing face-first into his plate.

Like "Bad Romance" and "Paparazzi," the themes in "Telephone" revolve around control. Who's in control of the narrative, of the image, and of the music? The way Gaga and Beyoncé stutter-stop to the beat of the track and the editor's cutting turns the pair into marionettes, their heads bobbing up and down in time. Gaga starts off in prison, behind bars and bound by chains, before escaping to the expansive freedom of the desert. And the pair's act of mass murder? It's about seizing control: of their work, their art, and whatever piece of the culture they can claim as their own.

From the moment Gaga takes a bite out of Beyoncé's honey bun (no, not the most explicit part of the video—that would be Gaga proving "she didn't have a dick"), it's all about consumption: burgers, sandwiches, and poison. Consumption is a resonant theme, because it's the method by which the audience interacts with Gaga: We consume her, or as Gaga puts it in both "Candy Warhol" and "Monster," "He ate my heart and then he ate my brain." In their narrowest conceptions, high culture and high art are challenging; they're also inaccessible and abstruse. Art like that is meant to be experienced. Low culture, mere entertainment—a stigma pop music bears on its shoulders—is meant to be consumed. It's just another product being put on display: populist and vulgar.

It's always been one of Gaga's stated aims to shatter these narrow conceptions, and to bring down the walls between high and low culture; as she puts it, "Pop music will never be lowbrow." The goal of all her work, including "Telephone," is to pull on the avant garde while pushing against mainstream pop in an attempt to collapse the two into some beautifully monstrous amalgamation of high fashion, pop music, cinema, and performance art.

In "Telephone," such an act is an affront—it's dangerous, even poisonous. The climax of the video is set at a roadside diner, a place defined not only by the act of consumption, but by its quintessential American quality. It's an acknowledgment that she's firmly tapped into the pulse of American culture; and while she has everyone's attention, she aims to do something with it. Here, the death imagery can be seen not as an end, not as decay, but as a transition into something else—the marker of decisive change. Through her act of murder, she reshapes the environment as she sees fit, which is a facet that all three of her latest videos share.

So it's fitting that the ways "Telephone" frays at the edges—the scatterbrained collision of images and ideas, the fracture points between the narrative and the music—are exactly the types of problems the video should be having. It's a bold gesture, and not all the pieces fit together perfectly. But at a time when the music video is less and less able to even function as a promotional tool for the music, Gaga is bringing new life to the form: Her music videos are events.

Gaga has always been candid about her connection to her audience and her struggle to find that connection. When she was Stefani Germanotta on the New York music scene, she was just another girl behind a piano in a city full of them—talent without visibility. But when she started stripping down to leather thongs and setting cans of hairspray on fire, it certainly got people's attention. "Telephone" is an encapsulation of that same impulse, of that same moment. It may be backed by a bigger budget and glossed up for an audience of millions, but it's the same Gaga.

F.F. Woodycooks posted:

drainpipe posted:

I've actually gotten bored of the Telephone video. I guess all the story makes the rewatch value drop significantly for me. Bad Romance is more of an eye candy video and is just as fresh as ever (yeah yeah, there's some story about the sex slave trade, but it isn't that noticeable).

Also, the only song I really don't enjoy by Gaga is Beautiful, Dirty, Rich. Can't stand that song.

combee posted:

The local news just had a newsflash that Lady GaGa broke down mid song during her performance which is on right now in Sydney Wonder what happened. I'm seeing her in 2 weeks, at her 3rd Sydney show....

F.F. Woodycooks posted:

I didn't find anything that said she broke down midsong. It said at the end of the show she was crying and telling her fans how much she loves them.

Edit: yeah all the reviews of the show say it was really good.

The Saddest Rhino posted:

I grabbed some wallpaper-sized screenshots off the 1080p Telephone video and put them up for grabs in the GBS thread, so I'm gonna just repost them. Some cock went in to win an Internet argument about music tastes by lying about his age and got all these pretty pictures buried.


Click here for the full 1920x1080 image.

combee posted:

Why would television lie to me?

9 news posted:

An emotional Gaga also burst into tears at one point as she thanked her fans.

"She was outrageously theatrical, she kept crying and saying, 'I love you people'. There were close-up shots of her face and you could see the tears streaming down her face," Ms White said.

Free Market Gravy posted:

I have this fantasy of Gaga announcing a tour where she does stripped-down piano versions of her songs, maybe with a minimal backing band. And she does this in smaller venues for $30-$40 a ticket, where the tickets don't have to be outrageous to cover the cost of the crazy stage show.

I think the reason I have this fantasy is because with Gaga, it's not altogether impossible.

F.F. Woodycooks posted:

I wouldn't be surprised if she does this when she gets older and can't do the poo poo she does now. I would like to think she will not take the Madonna route and know not to do sexually charged shows when shes 50.

helsabot posted:

Yes, women are only allowed to be sexual until they reach 40 years of age. Then they must turn it off

Free Market Gravy posted:

I have this fantasy of Gaga announcing a tour where she does stripped-down piano versions of her songs, maybe with a minimal backing band. And she does this in smaller venues for $30-$40 a ticket, where the tickets don't have to be outrageous to cover the cost of the crazy stage show.

I think the reason I have this fantasy is because with Gaga, it's not altogether impossible.

TheJoker138 posted:

So does anyone have any idea how much tickets to her US branch of the Monster Ball tour are going to cost? She's going to be near here in August, so I want to make sure I've got the money when they go on sale.

emoticon posted:

The new version of the monster ball sounds like an amazing show, by the way. There's a narrative, costume changes, short films, giant fish monsters, flaming pianos, spooky forests, and a whole bunch of other stuff apparently.

ToxicWind posted:

I really would like to know also, she didn't come to Denver last year, so I'm really excited, but if General Admission tickets are 200 bucks, its really out of my price range/or I go alone/have poo poo seats.

ToxicWind posted:

I really would like to know also, she didn't come to Denver last year, so I'm really excited, but if General Admission tickets are 200 bucks, its really out of my price range/or I go alone/have poo poo seats.

Diamonds On MY Fish posted:

$200 for the San Jose, CA show. Thinking of actually flying up to Tacoma to go to that show as I've been meaning to get back up to Seattle anyways, and a friend up there told me there's still $70 tickets.

Rolling Stone posted:

You know you’ve reached The Fame when someone slaps you with a massive lawsuit. Lady Gaga is being sued for $30 million by producer and ex-boyfriend Rob Fusari, the co-writer of Gaga’s hit “Paparazzi,” who claims he discovered the singer in 2006 and created the moniker “Lady Gaga.” In the suit, Fusari seeks a 20 percent cut from Gaga’s two companies Team Love Child and Mermaid Music, saying he entered into a contract with Gaga in 2006 that also promised him a portion of her merchandising and revenue, the New York Daily News reports. Fusari, who previously had hits with Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” and Destiny Child’s “Bootylicious,” also claims that he was shortchanged on his royalty fees.

“It’s an age-old story in the music business,” said Fusari’s lawyer Robert Meloni. “You become famous and you turn on the person who discovered you.” According to the suit, Fusari initially recruited Gaga, then just Stefani Germanotta, to join what he envisioned as “an all-girl version of the Strokes.” “Fusari was expecting someone a little more grunge-rocker than the young Italian girl ‘guidette’ that arrived at his doorstep and was worried that he had made a mistake,” the suit contends. Recognizing Gaga’s ability, Fusari claims he helped craft Gaga’s songwriting to something with more of a dance feel. Their collaboration resulted in three songs that eventually appeared on The Fame — “Paparazzi,” “Brown Eyes” and “Dirty, Rich, Beautiful” — plus the bonus tracks “Disco Heaven,” “Again Again” and “Retro Dance Freak.”

Fusari also claims he accidentally created the “Lady Gaga” name, explaining in the suit “one day when Fusari addressed a cell phone text to Germanotta under the moniker ‘Radio Gaga’ [a song by Queen], his cell phone’s spell check converted ‘Radio’ to ‘Lady.’ Germanotta loved it and ‘Lady Gaga’ was born.” Rolling Stone told the tale a little differently in our June 2009 Lady Gaga cover story, where Brian Hiatt reported that Fusari was struck by some Freddie Mercury-like harmonies the singer recorded and began singing “Radio Gaga” to her as a running joke; Gaga texted Fusari her new name and never answered to “Stef” again.

Besides being collaborators, Fusari and Gaga also shared a romantic relationship, though Fusari’s suit claims that ended in January 2007, adding that Gaga was a “woman scorned” and eventually became “verbally abusive” to Fusari. “All business is personal,” the suit says. “When those personal relationships evolve into romantic entanglements, any corresponding business relationship usually follows the same trajectory so that when one crashes they all burn. This is what happened here.” When reached by Rolling Stone for a response, Lady Gaga’s rep said the singer has no comment on the suit.