Love her or hate her, I can guarantee you people will remember who Lady Gaga is five years from now. She is this generation’s Madonna. And I’m being totally serious. I believe she has that level of talent and marketing savvy.
She may be remembered, but I don’t think they will be fond remembrances. Maybe like Cher, or Grace Jones or Elton John during his duck-suit period. She’s got the courageousness and the marketing savvy, but I don’t see the trend-setting, outside the paradigm part yet.
I’ve got nothing against her, it’s not my kind of music but I’m fine with that. I just feel that she fits into a current trend of celebrity over talent, and whatever talents she has are not being asked for. The artists of my youth can sing very well now, but they can sing. What’s to become of those who’s entire act was big stage sets and dancing, with pre-recorded vocals? Twenty years from now, they’re not going to be as limber and hearing a thirty year old’s voice coming out of a fifty year old’s mouth is not going to work. The State Fair isn’t going to give you the kind of money that allows you to hire some bohunks to dress up like Egyptians and carry you around the stage in a giant egg.
Um, Madonna. And Gaga’s got a set of pipes, compared to say, Katy Perry or Taylor Swift - some of her less popular songs do require some range. Or hell, Queen Madge of the Undying herself. Have you heard her early songs? Even after Evita, she barely squeaks in on “vocal talent”.
It’s true that she’s making a lot of overproduced pop, but she really can sing and is an excellent musician to boot. I’m interested to see what she comes up with as she matures as an artist and develops some independence.
edit: The artists of my youth CAN’T sing very well, but they can still sing.
Yes, I see more talent in lady Gaga than a few of her contemporaries, but I don’t see greatness yet. It’s still early in her career. Madonna didn’t hit her stride until four or five albums in, and unlike many performers today Gaga is turning out albums at a rapid pace.
I did enjoy the, I guess you’d call it the “shoe-shoe” train.
Nunzio Tavulari:
You’re kidding me, right? Unless she had a number of little-known early albums (like Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor), her first album, self-titled, had at two hit songs on it (that I remember), and her second, “Like a Virgin”, was multi-platinum, including the title track that was # 1 for about two months, and the streets were full of “Madonna Wanna-bes”. Her third was “True Blue” which not only was also a smash and contained a bunch of hit singles, but also was released while she was launching into a movie career (however well or ill remembered, but still, it took music stardom to get her into Hollywood at all).
I’d say it was by her fifth album or so that she dropped her stride and instead became an over-sexualized parody of herself.
This episode was rerun last night, and I hadn’t seen it before. There were a few funny moments, but not a single one of them involved the guest star. A bad episode overall. Of course I may be a tiny bit biased, but Ke$ha would have been a lot funnier. This intro of the whole cast lip synching to Kesha’s “Tik Tok” a couple of years ago is probably the best Simpsons moment of all time.
In the context of The Simpsons’ heyday having been long, ***LONG *** since past (sometime around season 9 or 10 at best) and only judging it in terms of the past ten or so seasons I think it was far from the worst. A couple reasons:
[ul]
[li]I’m not a fan of Lady Gaga or pop music in general (she’s just Britney Spears on meth & Ecstasy) but I did enjoy seeing her be able to make fun of herself. And not just her music & fashion but her whole pseudo-believe-in-yourself (by buying my albums) nonsense. You’d never, ever see Madonna doing that.[/li][li]She was actually an integral part of the story, not just a cameo.[/li][/ul]
Back in its heyday The Simpsons would usually get celebrities by writing a whole, creative story around them. Sometimes playing themselves (Ringo Starr, Magic Johnson, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson, sorta), but more often playing a real character (Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Firestein, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lisa Kudrow, Winona Ryder etc.) and those are some of the stand-out episodes. At some point it just seemed like they started saying, “Ok, who can we get to do the celebrity walk-on this week”. It was nothing more than a gimmick, like celebrities wanting to appear in the windows during the wall-climbing scenes in the old Batman show, or saying ‘Sock it to me!’ on Laugh-In (both of which I only saw in reruns, not that old…)
As a Lady Gaga fan, this was the only episode of the Simpsons I have seen in years and years. It was bad.
This is the worst episode I can remember, it was little more than a crappy Lady Gaga commercial, I’m thinking of sueing Fox to get compensation for the bandwidth I used to pirate it.
Hail Ants is right in saying that sometimes a stand-out episode can be built around a guest voice, I especially loved the Micheal Jackson one, but at least he was humble and funny in it.
I enjoyed it- especially when Lady Gaga kisses Marge, M screams for Homer, & they are next both in bed, having had what Marge elsewhere has called ‘a triple-X throwdown’.