That old queen was all gimmick! Where is he now?* Exactly*.
I actually don’t mind Lady Gaga at all, myself. Just sayin’, is all.
I think she’ll be relevant, just based on her MTV Movie Award Speech where she announced her new album. If it really is called “Born this way”, I could see it having songs on it going the route of Aguilerra’s “Beautiful” in such the way of how that song became a female empowerment anthem- I could easily see a song called “Born this way” as easily being embraced by the LGBT/alternative community as an anthem.
And speaking as a non-fan of her music, I think that would be a pretty cool thing. :shrug: No clue why, but it seems nifty to me. I have no interest in it, but if she does end up going that route, then she may have some real lasting power, and maybe also some strong substance behind her as well (as she already made a nice lil’ statement by showing up to the MTV VMA with her escort of ex-military people who had been punished by the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” laws by the military.
I think this is pretty much guaranteed to be the route she’s taking- and honestly, that she’s been taking for a while now. She has also been exchanging Tweets with Harry Reid about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell— and today she is railing against John McCain for filibustering the vote. She’s spoken at oodles of gay rights rallies over the length of her popularity, too.
Lady GaGa is one of those artists whose music I’m not a fan of*, but who I am rooting for anyways, just because of her haters.
*I just can’t catch the feel for her work. I do like pop music though. Hi, Britney and Madonna, I love ya’ll!
OP chiming back in here. Great comments all. Let me be clear, I just don’t dig her music, that’s all. I’m cool with some of her other activities, actually wasn’t aware of her LBGT advocacy, I’m pretty impressed by that. Good for her!
I guess what I was asking is more the music side of who she is versus the personality/media sensation.
I went 20 years between Elton John concerts, so only time will tell if we will still know who Lady Gaga is in 20 years, or even the one year I posed in my original post. To stick around for a long period of time, you’ve got to have some depth to the music you’re putting out, it’s hard to have a long music career on all sizzle, no steak. Or at least that’s what RightSaidFred told me when I went through the McDonalds drive-thru this morning.
I disagree that we’d be “better off for the forgetting.” She’s a genuinely audacious human being, even if you don’t like her music. She has a brilliant grasp of self-promotion and how to maintain a media presence, and she’s actually using it for largely good things - the anti-DADT stuff, and the “little monsters” thing. She feeds her fans’ self-confidence in a way you don’t see many pop stars doing, and I find that moving. One can only hope that she won’t end up doing treacly ballads like “Beautiful.”
In an interview a while back, she claimed that she puts pretty much all the money she makes into her shows. I’m not sure I believe that, but I think the concepts and creativity behind pretty much everything she does are inspiring, and it’s obvious that she’s hugely dedicated to accomplishing the stuff she does, not just prancing around in a cone bra or being photographed in lame S&M postures. A world without people like her would be that much more drab and boring.
Not to mention that her videos are some of the best, ever. If she hadn’t done anything else and I hated the majority of her music, I’d still have to thank her for “Bad Romance” which is among the most visually compelling short films I’ve ever seen, period.
I’m quite a fan of Lady Gaga, but I’ve been kind of curious about this myself. Pop dance music relies heavy on production, not just personality and talent, and the production on Lady Gaga’s debut was amazingly good and relatively fresh/new-sounding compared to what was out there at the time. The unfortunate thing is that getting good production like that on sequential albums in the pop dance genre is like capturing lightning in a bottle.
If Lady Gaga’s next album has similar production values to The Fame, she will be criticized for not maturing, and she’ll be deemed irrelevant. If the production values are different, she runs the substantial risk of having a clunker of an album (Mariah Carey post Emancipation of Mimi) or alienating fans even if the album is good (Britney Spears’ Blackout). The genre demands that artists continually reinvent their sound, while being quick to dismiss artists who screw it up or lose their identity. Madonna’s one of the few artists who was able to do it, remaining relevant (IMO) for a span of five albums from Madonna in 1983 to Erotica in 1992; it’s been popular to criticize her for continually reinventing herself, but it’s what the genre pretty much demands.
Lady Gaga has the raw singing and performing talent to be a successful artist even if future albums are nowhere near as popular (think Christina Aguilera or Mariah Carey… or even Michael Jackson, who peaked in relevance over 25 years ago but remained pretty damn successful), but whether she’s the prime mover and shaker in pop dance music will depend on how good her production team is on the next album. I do think she’s running a bit more of a risk compared to Madonna, Britney, Christina, etc.; they rely heavily on ballads, which are far less risky than dance tracks, and often just as popular.
While she’s a gimmick artist, she is talented and will still have that to fall back on if she runs out of gimmicks. I worry that she’s going to self-implode, but I’m trusting that she is less “Courtney Love” than she seems to be trying to appear. She’s a good songwriter, she can play keyboards, she’s a good singer who doesn’t need to be autotuned to belt out a number, and she’s compelling to watch, even in her early Stefani Germanotta YouTube videos. As long as the quality of her songs keeps up, I think she’ll continue to be relevant whether she has a gimmick going or not. (This post would probably be better informed if I’d seen more than only one of her videos, though.)
While I’m not personally a fan, unless she somehow gets lobotomized, she’ll be relevant a decade from now, let alone a year, and probably even longer than that. Aside from her marketing smarts, she’s pretty damn talented songwriter and musician. Comparisons to Madonna don’t seem misplaced. She’s more than just a face placed on a product created by a corporate promo machine.
What needscoffee said.
I think so. She’s been big for at least a couple of years now, so I don’t think she’s going away any time soon.
I think it’s very possible she’ll have a long career. Lady Gaga strikes me as somebody like Madonna or Christina Aguilera (or David Bowie if you want a male example) - somebody who is aware of why she’s famous and is consciously marketing herself. She may just morph into a new persona every time the current one gets stale. And while she’s no creative genius, she does seem to have a base of genuine talent.
I think this is a silly question. Whatever one may think of her stage persona (and she can be annoying), Lady Gaga is an exceptionally good writer of pop songs. Unless that ability of hers magically vanishes overnight, she will continue to be popular and, whatever “relevant” means, she will be that.
She’s already more than just a flash in the pan. The Fame was released two years ago. She’s been running on the massive success of one album and one EP since then.
As other posters have said, she is a master of self-promotion. Even if, again, she magically loses that savvy tomorrow, her talent remains.
None of this is stuff that anybody would say about, say, Ke$ha.
Shoot, even I have heard of Lady Gaga, and the wife and I enjoy her music. I think she’s the new Madonna, someone who has sprung onto the pop stage with true originality amid a forest of shlubs and won’t be going away anytime soon.
I just hope she doesn’t turn into a sad old has-been with too much plastic surgery who doesn’t know when it’s time to leave like Madonna eventually did.
She came along at a good time. Madonna looks like a mummy now and it’s embarrassing to be a fan of Britney anymore.
There will always be a huge market for shitty music. Hell, shitty art of any kind; see: sitcoms, Harry Potter, Will Ferrell, Twilight, etc etc. I bet against Eminem having any lasting power back in the late '90s and we’re still stuck with the douchebag. So yes, I think Lady Gaga will definitely be around in a year, almost surely in 5 years, and probably even in 10.
I applaud Lady Gaga for her advocacy but she seems like an insufferable person and her music is like acid to my ears. And not the good trippy kind of acid. The burny kind.
And please save the Elton John comparisons until she puts out an album worthy of sniffing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’s boots.
I don’t see what is good about what she does. When she was still big on the not sexualizing thing, I could maybe give her a pass, but once she left that, she became every other pop singer.
And even that’s a while back. This is the first time I’ve heard anything about her other than people making fun of her. Has she even put out a song since Telephone? I honestly don’t know.
And I’m happy with that. Even from what I heard in this thread, she’s not someone I would want to have anything to do with. She’s helping DADT? No, she’s riding the bandwagon of people who don’t like it. She makes people feel good about themselves, while making herself look good? That screams narcissist–just like, say, Oprah.
Unfortunately, that last bit means that she’ll be around a long time. I just hope she continues to be someone I don’t have to hear about.
I’m not sure that being “this generation’s Madonna” is a rock steady claim to fame.
Back in the 90’s Oasis was the “next Beatles”. While they didn’t fail as a musical group, I’m not holding my breath waiting on “Rock Band: Oasis”.
Well, the claim of Oasis being on a par with the Beatles I for one always found ludicrous. Lady Gaga being the next Madonna, however, I can see.
There is no way she could be irrelevant in a year - have you seen her fans? They’re passionate enough to sustain ten careers, there’s no way they’re all going to suddenly drop her like a hot potato. She has a dedicated fanbase for life now, no matter what she does.
I love Lady Gaga to bits but I don’t think she’s the next Madonna. She’s still amazing though.
She keeps putting out consistently better music than other pop stars who have been relevant for over a decade like Britney, of course shes still going to be relevant a year or five years or ten years from now. Will she still be at it when shes 50 like Madonna? hopefully not.