The Fame Monster

There were two blondes who were prevalent in pop culture in 2009.  One wears prom dresses and sparkly guitars around her tiny frame while the other prefers to let her fantastic pale bottom hang out of latex leotards and yields a glow in the dark “disco stick”.  One sings of unrequited love and growing pains, the other of a sick obsession with fame, fortune and fashion.  Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga share few things in common, their rise to fame in the past year is one of those things.  It’s easy to see why Lady Gaga blew up; she’s loud, she’s flashy and she has pop anthems with hooks Beyonce would kill for.  Taylor Swift is a more pleasant surprise; her voice is not incredible but what she sings about is. 

 

Having said that, Lady Gaga’s latest release The Fame Monster is a monster.  The charm of her first album The Fame has been swallowed by the monster and all that is left is synthetic white noise.  It serves its purpose as a solidly produced pop album, but it disappoints on being truly great because it has no sense of humor which all great pop music should have.  The Fame Monster’s lyrics just don’t resonate the way The Fame’s tale of a struggling Lower East Side Pop artist did.  Fantasizing about fame and touting about it are two different things and an America in recession can tell the difference. 

 

After all Lady Gaga is actually a brunette, Taylor Swift is a natural blonde. 

 

 

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The Fame

Stefani Germanotta is a good Italian girl who learned classical piano because her mother forced her to sit at a piano bench for an hour every day. She is also a New Yorker, a college dropout and an unnatural peroxide bleach blonde with a penchant for wigs. Stefani Germanotta is a lot of things because Stefani Germanotta is Lady Gaga. And Lady Gaga is the Elton John/David Bowie/Madonna/Alice Cooper of the second decade of the new millennium.

Lady Gaga’s debut album The Fame is a narrative of the desperate and ugly climb to fame and fortune wrapped up in delicious pop music. It has boisterous beats and clever lyrics woven elegantly throughout. Lady Gaga somehow has the ability to sing the line “Let’s have some fun this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick” without sounding lewd or unintelligent. She lets us know it’s a joke and allows us take her lightly. It’s everything enjoyable about pop and hiphop in the last twenty years in leather and a hair bow.

If you hate her music, you should at least acknowledge the woman’s capatalistic genius. In a world where reality shows and youtube have brought real meaning to Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame theory, Lady Gaga produced an album about creating one’s own fame. More and more it seems when a child is asked what they want to be when they grow up the answer is movie star or rock star. Firefighters and doctors seem kind of dull when you can be on the cover of magazines every week and have your own fragrance. The Fame is a soundtrack for the millions of American youth who long to be harassed by paparazzi and have their lives chronicled by Star Magazine. And for everyone else, the firefighters and doctors included, the album is great pop escapism for those long drives to work.