Gagablahblahblah

A lot has been made of the "controversial" new Lady Gaga/Beyonce (Beyaga? Lady Geyonce?) and I thought I would throw my three cents (idiom adjusted for inflation) into the discourse.

First things first, the full "explicit" version of the video is here for the six people who haven't seen it yet.

Now, I'm not a Lady Gaga fan by any stretch of the imagination - and this latest video firmly cements my utter indifference towards her. At best, she makes fun pop music that make 19 year old girls yell "WOOOOO! I LOVE THIS SOOOONG!" before chugging the last of their RTD and hitting the dance floor. She isn't now, or never has been, either an avant-garde experiment in mainstream surrealism or the next step in the evolution of feminist theory. Shes what Maddonna was 30 years ago. End of story.

Let me just say, I generally dislike extended music videos that pretend to be short films. I agree that certain videos can tell a story (see the videos for Radiohead's Just or High and Dry) but I hate it when the song is interrupted for a sequence of dialogue or exposition. If you cant tell the story during the duration of the song, don't bother trying.

At a whopping nine-minutes-something more than half of Telephone's running time is narrative. This overstays its welcome really quickly.

The video is very cinematic and has been labelled as a homage to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino. Looking at the video as a whole, I can see superficial similarities (and anyone who knows me can confirm that I am a pageboy in the Church of Tarantino) but overall the structure, pacing, editing and mise-en-scene reminds me more of an Oliver Stone production (in particular Natural Born Killers) whilst the ending is clearly lifted from Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise. The only obvious Tarantino reference is the use of the yellow "Pussy Wagon".

Despite the video's obviously high production values and inherent cinematic quality, it just does not quite gel for me. Could this be perhaps that Telephone is an awful, AWFUL song? Absolutely it could.

Have you listened to the lyrics for this song? On the surface, its about getting pissed off that its hard to hear somebody who is calling you when you're out drinking. The subtext for the song is... well, non-existent. The lyrics are about as deep as Rob Schnieder's performance in The Hot Chick. And the line "Sometimes I feel like I live in Grand Central Sta-TION" makes me cringe. Because of this, the over-produced video seems utterly innocuous.

Compare the Just Dance video with the one she made for Bad Romance (here and here respectively) Just Dance is a song about binge drinking and features LG in some kind of club. Hardly thematically creative, but it works.

On a similar note, Paparazzi a song about the perils of fame and being in the limelight features a video in which that Swedish Vampire pushes LG off a balcony so that the photographers can do a snuff photoshoot. Again, this works as a music video.

Now look at Bad Romance. Here is a song with more surreal lyrics and a less obvious subtext and a video that is... more surreal and with a less obvious subtext. It seems like Gaga is striving to "push-the-envelope" with each subsequent video, and it's a pity that the time and effort expended in the production of the Telephone video was wasted on such a terrible, asinine song.

One last thing, feminists also hate this video for the none-too-subtle shades of S&M, girl-on-girl fetishisation and sequences of pure male-gazery that make the video look like it was made by a sleazy Scandinavian pervert for masturbatory purposes... oh wait...

Nah... give me Video Phone any day of the week.