Gaga Stigmata

Photo courtesy of MuuMuse.com

I’m rather tired of the media revering Lady Gaga’s performance art bravado and mindless exhibitionism. In a recently released interview with British music publication New Musical Express, M.I.A. revealed, in no uncertain terms, that she is fairly disgusted with the accolades Lady Gaga constantly receives. Though I share her sentiments, I would have augmented her statement to opine: “None of her music reflects how weird she so desperately tries to be or presently thinks she is. She models herself after Grace Jones and Madonna, but her musical catalog sounds like raucous and discordant Ibiza music.” Am I the only one who watches her endless, dizzying spectacles and feels utterly nauseous?

The 24-year-old dance-pop sibyl is such a work of entertainment engineering that giving her due as an artist brings with it a certain ruefulness, the sensation of being manipulated. Lady Gaga is so beyond any kind of embarrassment that she’s made mercantilism its own aesthetic. Not that I begrudge her the millions in album sales or the inevitable mantel full of Grammys, I just feel that the rampant obsession is overreaching.

She is the commodification of our own hysteria; the personification of her fans’ overrun imaginations and false realities. Lady Gaga is a product—her body and specter available for purchase and consumption through a range of media. Her music has taken a backseat to her visage. Her excellent voice, her classical training and her musical imaginativeness are all hindered by her vast inability to craft great songs.

The static notion of her celebrity is a figure of blind worship. Lady Gaga is the flywheel in an enormous piece of media-eating machinery. No other advert, print, video, blog or billboard has so thoroughly knitted itself into our consumerist culture. Ebola isn’t as viral. To all of her fans, she is an incendiary extravaganza of music, dance and performance art. I, however, fail to see why she is revered so highly as a pop musician when her music is sorely lacking.

Her performance constructs a constellation of ignorant ideologies. The temptation to deconstruct should be avoided. She embraces the sordidness of being a pop icon while making it part of her aesthetic. Though the media might laud her as being subversive and preeminent, I see her as being contrived and factitious. Just as Freud’s imposition of oedipal and hysterical narratives onto his patients did not yield tidy and conclusive results, the media’s exaggeration of Lady Gaga’s ostensible burlesque is far from the mark.

Read your pokerface? We can’t even see it any more under all that lace. Talent, she seems to say to her breathless female fans, is all well and good. But what it’s really all about is using your painted poker face to get yourself splashed onto TV screens.

Artifice, not music, is her chosen art form. Her admirers confer that it’s ironic. It’s postmodernistic. It’s Haus of Gaga, darling. Except that we’ve seen that conical bra before and thrilled at its subversiveness when Madonna wore it 20 years ago. A little pyrotechnics display tacked on just serves to emphasize its lack of cutting edge.

Photo courtesy of Collegian.psu.edu

Her message is crudely simplistic: that with the right amount of frightening self-belief and furious media savvy, ladies, you too can call yourself an artist while singing the lines: “We like boys in cars/ Boys, boys, boys buy us drinks in bars.” Lady Gaga properly demonstrates where being vacuous, incoherent and absent minded becomes a fashionable thing. Isn’t it rather ironic that she settled upon “Gaga” for her alias, as it is often the first sound emitted by babies when trying to imitate speech.

While Gaga continually reinvents her appearance, her music has been slow to evolve. Much has been made of her latest single, “Alejandro”, which sounds like a ripoff of Ace of Base’s 1993 hit, “Don’t Turn Around”. Its music video is a little too reminiscent of Madonna’s ’90s fare. It’s like walking by the neighborhood miscreant who is ranting and raving about how we’ll all be damned to hell while on your way to work. No need to stop and listen, he’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. A shiny veneer is all well and good, but a well-built product beneath it is what will truly stand the test of time.

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Review of John Mayer’s Battle Studies

Photo courtesy of JohnMayer.com

Nursing a broken heart? Now is the perfect time to get acquainted with those despondent and despairing morsels of the music world. Yes, I’m talking break-up albums: those weepy, bitter and tragically alienated song cycles that create the beautiful illusion, for at least 45 minutes or so, that being alone is far more meaningful and fulfilling than all of that mushy “love” nonsense. So break out the Kleenex and crank up the volume on John Mayer’s well crafted break-up album Battle Studies.

Those of us who hoped that John Mayer’s last two releases (the phenomenal pop-blues compilation Continuum and the hard-edged electric blues album with his trio, Try!) were foreshadowing for the shedding of yet another, perhaps the final, layer of his pop skin on Battle Studies should go ahead and toss that hope aside. Mayer has said “As a pop musician, I want to be the prism for taking what I know is a very powerful style of music [blues] and somehow crystallizing it into something that is identifiable as being now.” If this was his goal with Battles Studies, unfortunately he is no closer than with his last attempt on Continuum. In this respect Continuum was no failure, it took steps few others have attempted, like a perfect cover of Hendrix’s “Bold As Love,” and Battle Studies only falls short in its inability to top its predecessor.

With this in mind, the new album gives a strong pop performance and Mayer’s musicianship and guitar virtuosity do not fall between the cracks. “Heartbreak Warfare” opens up the album sounding like a symphony tuning up, and quickly materializes. It chugs along with its atmospheric soundscape and groove oriented drums, which feel like a slow train carrying a somber melody on top of it. The pop-star’s very public love life and break ups shine through throughout the whole album, but especially on the two tracks following “All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye,” and “Half Of My Heart (with Taylor Swift).” The two are throwbacks to the John Mayer of Room for Squares, full of multilayered harmonies, soft acoustic guitar, and somewhat disparaging lyrics about love.

Any musician will tell you that the order of songs on an album plays an important role, and what the opening three on this record demonstrate is Mayer’s dynamic, virtuoso style melded with passionate singing and a highly attuned pop sensibility. Bizarrely enough, as soon as Ms. Swift whispers her final line, Mayer shuffles in “Who Says,” with the affecting and humorous lyrics “who says I can’t get stoned?” This helps shift the whole tone of Battle Studies, especially when followed by “Perfectly Lonely,” complete with the raw guitar and passionate vocals Trio fans yearn for. “Perfectly Lonely,” is a great song. Subtle vocal harmonies from drummer Steve Jordan in just the right spots and simple instrumentation give it the understated feel of the blues-rock Mayer is so good at, and it leaves him room to explore. The subsequent tune, “Assassin,” is even better, beginning with an airy tinkling of a xylophone accompanied only by a groove oriented bass line and Mayer’s empyreal voice. The second verse adds sparse delayed guitar chords hinting a build up and when the drums come in with full force at the chorus, we’re there. “Assassin” has all the qualities of a Mayer song, but with an intangible sound he’s never really shown before—perhaps an indication of his growth as a producer.

A la Continuum’s “Bold As Love,” Mayer cover’s a blues classic with Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” He takes the tune in a different direction, and certainly has the chops to pull it off, but it seems unnecessary. A superb finale, the opposite is true with “I’m On Fire” (Bruce Springsteen), as the slow acoustic ballad finds Mayer at his best vocally.

Battles Studies shows flashes of brilliance and certainly warrants a listening from beginning to end. The production is strong and musicianship on point. It is unclear, however, if this is the John Mayer we can continue to expect or whether the artist is still struggling through a musical identity crisis—“Am I a pop musician, or am I a blues-guitar God?” Unfortunately in this MTV influenced generation of immediacy and impatience, many gems of the album that lack radio appeal will be lost at the wayside.

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