No, the fact you’ve seen maybe three things that Gaga’s done in the past two years, misinterpret those and basically say flat out you don’t care about learning more is what negates your point.
Start by actually watching her stuff.
(In no particular order)
Poker Face Live
Speechless Live
Telephone Live
Paparazzi Live
With Elton at the Grammys
This reminds me of the time Steve Allen recited Donna Summer lyrics deadpan on the Johnny Carson Show. It was hilarious. Imagine Steve Allen standing up there and reciting solemnly:
**Lookin’ for a lover who needs another
don’t want another night on my own
wanna share my love with a warm blooded lover
wanna bring a wild man back home
Gotta have some hot love baby this evenin’
I need some hot stuff baby tonight
I want some hot stuff baby this evenin’
gotta have some lovin’
got to have a love tonight
I need hot stuff
hot love
lookin’ for hot love
Hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot
hot, hot, hot, hot stuff
hot, hot, hot**
It was hilarious. Maybe you had to see it. 
That Beyonce video isn’t a very good basis for talking about her, I find it kinda stupid. (I like Tarantino movies as much as anyone, but I find it silly to make a tribute to them.) As for photoshoots, that’s one aspect of her self-presentation - she just as frequently shows up in stuff like this or this, which is weird but can’t really be considered sexualized on the level of your ordinary female pop star. Like DiosaBellissima says, it’s never just pantslessness, which would be dull - it’s always a combination of unconventional modes of dress.
Roger Ebert says something to the effect that you can’t argue someone out of a laugh or an erection, and I feel like pop music is like that a lot of the time - you get it or you don’t. People have tried to convince me that “Hey Ya” is “fun,” “the perfect pop song,” but that doesn’t change the fact that I just don’t like it. But I’ll try and explain what appeals to me about Gaga’s music:
[ul]the tunes, first of all, are just catchy as hell. I know a lot of people think it’s easy to write a catchy song (though I don’t know how many have tried doing so), but Gaga’s songs are infectious on a whole other level. I’ve had “Alejandro” intermittently stuck in my head for weeks now. If I had to generalize, the appeal of her sound is the combination of the quintessential elements of electropop with eccentric outliers from the genre: the occasional bellicosity and grittiness of her voice, the shift between affectlessness and impassioned delivery, the odd lyrical turns (the “rah rah” bridge in “Bad Romance,” the mention of the verboten subject of smoking in “Alejandro,” the extended metaphor of “Poker Face”).[/ul]
[ul]I don’t think her lyrics are totally original and transgressive, though I’m sure some would go to that extreme. And like I said, even though lyrics aren’t especially relevant to the art of perfect pop music, hers are just unusual a lot of the time. “Bad Romance” discusses an ambivalent fixation on love, its unpleasant facets (“I want your ugly, I want your disease”), the way it saturates one’s existence, and the way in which this whole subject is entirely hackneyed yet somehow deeply important, all turning around the central ambiguity of a “bad romance,” which is both something trite on the order of a Harlequin novel and something in which one is totally personally invested. And the video for the song shows that none of this is by accident: she’s literally born as a sex slave up for auction who finally finds her autonomy by ambiguously bypassing the sexual experience, by the simple fact of her physical presence.[/ul]
[ul]Which brings me to the videos. Like I said I think “Telephone” is pretty stupid, but there’s a youthful, amateurish exuberance even to something like “Just Dance,” and her videos have only gotten better from there. “Alejandro” isn’t my favorite video of hers, but there’s a style to it you don’t often see elsewhere - the outré images of boys in drag, the nun’s outfit (a Madonna allusion, obviously, but without the dated “We Are the World” trappings of the “Like a Prayer” video), and finally the simple grace of the scenes where she dances away from us dressed conventionally and looking more normal than she ever has before.[/ul]
Like I say, I doubt that anyone who’s temperamentally predisposed against Gaga for whatever reason will be convinced by any of these aspects of her career, but that’s pretty much what draws my interest in her.
Wait, what?
You mean every time I get stuck talking to someone about her and they insist that the thing that makes her so much better than every other pop star is that she writes all her own stuff, and I go: :dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:, and they go: :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: . . . I’m RIGHT?!
Sheesh.
Yeah, I think it’s wrongheaded to argue that writing your own stuff inherently guarantees that you’re a better musician than someone who doesn’t. People rhapsodize about Jeff Buckley’s cover of "Hallelujah, a lot of Scott Walker’s best songs were written by Jacques Brel, and so on.
No doubt all of the Lady Gaga haters are making her cry all the way to the bank.
I can’t believe how silly some of this discussion is - taking the lyrics of ‘Telephone’ completely out of context? Comparing Lady Gaga with Led Zeppelin? (I’ll go on record right now and say that I’d rather listen to Lady Gaga than Led Zeppelin, though I like them both.)
People see different things in music - what means nothing to you means a lot to other people, just like what means a lot to you might go right over somebody else’s head.
Believe it or not I’ve found a lot more to love and more meaning in the current pop music of today than I have in the classic rock of the seventies, for example - but I keep my mind open and I have grown to love a few of those bands (including Led Zeppelin) because I try to embrace and understand as many genres as possible.
It just doesn’t register with my brain to spend ages rallying against an artwork I don’t like - just accept that you don’t like it and move on. No need to be disrespectful towards the people who do like it, like some people in this thread have been.
These two things I’m responding to below don’t have anything to do with what I’ve just said, just in case anyone thinks I’m quoting these as examples or something.
Oh I know (I went to the Monster Ball too), but there was barely a break in between The Fame and The Fame Monster. She’s still riding the first wave of her fame, and when she takes a break and comes back, that’ll be her second wave.
Ke$ha has had six (count 'em) top ten hits and a number one album. So, not a one-hit wonder at all.
Well, it’s worth clarifying that RedOne produces and cowrites some of her songs, but not all of them. He appears to be the Dre to her Snoop, if that makes sense :D. Beyond that, though, even before she was Gaga, she was a songwriter for other pop stars.
But is she a Prince? Does she write and produce every single song on every album all by herself? Of course not-- most artists don’t do everything on their albums themselves. Though it looks like she did write Speechless herself, though she still had a producer.
Are you freakin’ naieve? She has more creative assistants and fashion designers behind “her style” than any pop singer has ever had. Her “style” isn’t even her own, she’s entirely propped up by other artists. It’s none of her ideas, someone elses creation. Her ideas and style is a an entire corporate marketing facade and scheme. Look behind the curtain Dorothy.
Hell, the music isn’t even her own, she’s frontin’.
Since you are apparently so well versed on the matter: cite?
I didn’t notice any of the other artists at the VMA awards thanking Fashion designers/houses for their awards the other night
If you are insinuating she has nothing to do with her music - I’d like to see some proof of that, because official credits, interviews, pretty much everything suggests otherwise.
If you are insinuating she has nothing to do with the production side of things - nobody has ever claimed she doesn’t have help from outsiders, so she isn’t frontin’.
I realise you don’t appreciate Lady Gaga, but making wild claims about how she has more stylists “than any pop singer has ever had” and that the music “isn’t even her own”. doesn’t make your opinion on her any more valid than somebody who is a fan.
It is okay to just not like her, you know, you don’t have to come up with bogus reasons and tell people who do like her that they are “musical simpletons” and “naive”. That’s just rude and uncalled for.
Well, considering she considered Alexander McQueen a good friend and she was wearing a piece from his final collection (yanno, before his suicide this year), it makes sense she’d point out that she was wearing one of his pieces as a tribute to her friend.
If you’re talking about the Armani dress–well, again, if you are as well versed on pop culture and trendiness as you claim to be, then you’d know if Georgio Armani makes you a custom dress, designed specifically for you, you thank him. I would.
Go ahead and provide me a cite for your previous claim. It shouldn’t be hard, what with your vast pop culture and hip fashion knowledge. Hey, at least that bitch didn’t show up wearing Bermuda shorts, amirite?
Don’t you “Ha!” just yet. Lady Gaga can actually read and write music. You’d never know it from her terrible music, but I guess playing the piano wasn’t as marketable as wearing lampshades on her face, and singing over synthesized pop beats. Hilarious cracked article here. Excerpt:
Post 102. She plays the piano all the time on her albums, in her concerts, on awards shows, and on television shows. How any one could say she doesn’t market her musical abilities on the piano is amazing to me.
All right, I’ll admit it: I skimmed the thread. I read most of it, but skipped most urls… yet still included a url in my post. I’m terrible, and I know it! It’s all part of my charm.
Edit: Seriously though, you think she “markets” her mad piano skillz? I mean, she can play the piano, yes, but she doesn’t sell herself as a pianist. She markets herself as, well, whatever it is her persona is, but she doesn’t include the piano as part of the Lady Gaga Experience.
She also seems to genuinely love pop music, so it might not be simply a case of what was “marketable”, it is possible that she is making the music she likes to listen to rather than doing it solely to sell records.
I disagree- I think she certainly markets her piano skills as a huge part of the Lady Gaga Experience. It seems like on every TV appearance (awards show, talk show, whatever), she splits her time pretty evenly between piano performance and. . . bloody, dinosaur bone performance :D. Hell, if anything, I’d say she actually maybe spends more time doing piano performances than crazy Gaga dance dance performances. Maybe I’m a little biased here because a huge chunk of her concert involved her sitting behind a piano. The majority? Nah, but a big, long chunk.
I think what may be leading to confusion is that her singles have not been piano songs. That I’d certainly agree with, though I have to wonder how much of that is her and how much is the record company dictating what should be a single. Over and over in interviews she’s talked about wanting Speechless to be a single, but it never happened— she still performed it all over TV though.
I used to moderate on a pop music forum where Lady Gaga was the most talked-about current artist, and ‘Speechless’ divided her fanbase - some thought it was the greatest thing ever, some really, really didn’t. I love the song, more than ‘Alejandro’, her latest big hit, but it is easier for artists these days to succeed with a dance song rather than a piano ballad.
I think Gaga/the record company/whoever made the right choice not releasing it as a single, as the focus of a single should be to reach the widest audience possible, so that Gaga can be put in a position where she can become more adventurous and make sure there are plenty more songs like ‘Speechless’ on her next record. To avoid becoming a “flash in the pan” Gaga just needs as many hits as possible, it’s too early for her to be taking too many risks. Releasing something out of left-field too early risks alienating people and that might turn her into the next Cyndi Lauper rather than the next Madonna.