The Curious Case of Lady Gaga

This hasn't much to do with lyrics, but bear with me.

Lady Gaga confuses me. Her fans insist that she's really musically talented, and they're right.



I mean, good God. She can sing, she's a first-rate pianist, and she can write her own stuff (all too rare in the pop world). So why does an artist who can make songs like this...



...insist on making crap like this?



Some of her critics have theorized that her appeal is really all about her image and how weird she can be. Honestly, the image has always felt like a pose to me, at least compared to the effortless weirdness of psychedelic music like this song by Pink Floyd in their early years:



It's like the difference between Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp in the role of Willy Wonka. Wilder convinced you that, at least through the character's eyes, all of this was perfectly normal--the weirdness was simply part of the character rather than an affectation of the performer. Johnny Depp's Wonka, however, conveyed nothing other than "here's John ny Depp trying to be weird, make of him what you will." Depp was just trying so very, very hard, and it made the result nothing so much as embarrassing.

The upshot of that tortured analogy is that while Lady Gaga does a lot of weird, she doesn't do it very well. And I might as well go on to say that I don't like very many of her hits. I don't like "Poker Face," I don't like "Alejandro," I hate "Telephone" with a passion...I mostly liked "Bad Romance" just for the BWAAHAAH value, in spite of the fact that it is, let's face it, basically just "Poker Face" but massively better.

What all these songs have in common is that they're all intentionally pitched low; she pretends she can't sing, dumbs down her lyrics, and waits for the cash to roll in, all of which constitutes a huge middle finger to those of us who like to listen to good music. I think "Love Game" represents the zenith of this.



To be embarrassingly honest, I can't actually bring myself to hate this song. It's so wonderfully, gloriously stupid that hating it is like hating an unruly puppy--sure, you don't like what it's doing, but it's a puppy, that's just what it does.

No my real problem with Lady Gaga became clear to me after I listened to the two-disc extended edition of her first album and realized that I liked far more of her songs than I didn't. As long as I made very sure to hit the skip button upon hearing the first few notes of any of the insufferable mega-hits, I could easily get through the album without having heard any bad music.

What really tipped the scale for me was when I got to one particular song, and let me tell you, it left me...well...



I don't care who you are, that is just a flat-out good song, one that Elton John would have been proud to write. So why does this song have to languish on the album while we make hits out of things like this?



That was sn excerpt from "Poker Face," her biggest hit. What is wrong with you people? We've been sending Lady Gaga the wrong message, we've been telling her that what we really want is stupid, tuneless, and loud. And if her "Born This Way" album is any indication, she took every bit of that advice to heart. Nearly every song on that album was noisy, overproduced, and grating. I liked "You and I" (I omit the superfluous umlaut deliberately), I liked "Edge of Glory," and after a few listens I can even summon up some affection for the demented "Government Hooker." I daresay some of the other tracks may eventually wear me down, but on the whole I felt like I had listened to the product of an unusually productive collaboration between a pretentious high-school poet and a particularly enthusiastic stadium of vuvuzelas.

Dance music doesn't have to be bad. Everything deserves effort, everything deserves scrutiny, and even the most stillborn songs deserve their day in court. If anyone is going to bring truly great dance music to the masses, it will be Lady Gaga. I just wish she would.

Collaborative Coherency, or I'm Kinda Busy

            To begin with, I had better define collaborative coherency. It is simply the term I use to describe the extent to which lyrics must coordinate themselves with the music they have been paired with. It is an essential but too-often overlooked concept.

There are two levels of collaborative coherency. The first and most basic level, which this article will seek to tackle, is simply a matter of professionalism: matching musical rhythms with natural speaking rhythms and ensuring that emphases supplied by pitch do not disrupt speech—stress coherency. A good example of how not on pain of death to do this is Lady Gaga’s “Telephone:”

The music isn’t bad, but Gaga appears to have given little or no thought as to how much the music disrupts the lyrics. Take the line, “I’m kinda busy.” First, read that sentence out loud, just as you normally would in conversation, particularly the last word. Unless you suffer from a crippling speech impediment, your pronunciation of “busy” will place emphasis on the first syllable and leave the second syllable briskly clipped. But then look at how Gaga sets the word; both syllables are given a rhythmically equivalent setting, contorting the normal emphases of the word into a tortured monorhythm. Given that, a lovely band-aid solution would have been to place the second syllable of the word “busy” on a lower pitch, thus giving it an appropriately subordinate position. However, Gaga uses the same pitch for both notes, leaving the awkward rhythm to fend for itself.

A subtler example comes from the beginning of the same song. First, read out “Hello, hello baby, you called, I can’t hear a thing” as you would in normal conversation, or as normal a conversation as it is possible to have when you are narrating your beaux’s telephone habits. You will tend to place natural pauses between phrases, breaking up the sentence into coherent chunks. Gaga will have no truck with this, opting instead to render the sentence as one continuous string of speech, absent anything resembling a pause. Before, the flaw was merely jarring. Here it turns the entire line into indecipherable gibberish.

As a general rule, the natural rhythms and emphases of the music and the lyrics must be coordinated if they are to be yoked to each other. If you do break collaborative coherency, it must be deliberate and must serve a purpose…but that is interactive coherency—another article for another time.