Television: Why I’m Not Watching Gaga’s HBO Thing
Lady Gaga performing "Paparazzi" on The Monster Ball Tour (courtesy Josh Armstrong)
Lady Gaga’s HBO special, Lady Gaga Presents The Monster Ball Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, is airing May 7th and there is absolutely zero chance I will tune in.
I was never a Gaga hater before. I haven’t had a problem with her wild antics, crazy quotes, and meat suits. Her own personal brand of loud hyper-fame has done as much to create a zeitgeist of self-promotion as Twitter itself. I’m down with the whole kit and kaboodle.
But there’s no getting around the fact that her two most recent songs blow.
“Born This Way” is just sad no matter how you look at it – insipid and uninspired to the point of being cynical. The most elegant take-down of this trite Barney-the-Dinosaur-meets-Madonna flop was dished by the original Monster himself, Mr. James St. James:
“Gaga here isn’t allowing us the choice of deciding whether or not this song will be a gay anthem (like ‘Bad Romance’), she’s TELLING US that it is, and that makes it somehow less pure and less satisfying. It’s contrived.”
“Judas,” released last week, is similarly devoid of musical merit, but at least it doesn’t try to cram some ham-fisted Sesame Street moral down our throats. More than anything I found myself super bored. You’d think a song dedicated to the guy who sold out Jesus Christ and bought himself an eternity of being gnashed in the very jaws of Satan would have been a bit edgier.
What happened to the Lady Gaga of “Telephone”? I had that song stuck in my head for a least a month. I’d pop it on the iPod and walk too fast to the subway (so I could strut to the beat), and hope that people on the train next to me would hear my bubble gum beats on loop blaring in my ears so I could smile at them like “Yeah, I know, but what can I do? This song is SICK!”
I deeply appreciate how outspoken Gaga is about gay rights, but that doesn’t mean I have to like her new music. I want the old Gaga back. I want her to poison another diner full of people, not write boring jingles for gay tweens.
But, if you feel differently than I do, you’re in for plenty of the same old tired shtick from Lady Gaga’s HBO special. I won’t be tuning in, but tweet at me if she starts slaughtering the back-up dancers.
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:-( Sigh…it’s not always easy being a Gaga defender/apologist, but in the name of capital H-I-M, I swore an oath to that woman that I’d follow her to hell and back if she asked me, so here is my Chris Crocker moment.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you about her two latest singles. As much as I still love them, they’re never going to be the universally loved classics that her first six were. Yet, even if you find the lyrics too banal and the beats too trite, I’ll still take Gaga’s mediocre over Rihanna’s or Katy’s best any day. Both of Gaga’s new singles have a helluva lot more to say than anything Britney or Ke$ha have ever screeched into a microphone. I grade Gaga on a curve not just out of blind devotion, but also because she writes her own material and therefore musically takes a much bigger risk. Am I saying a third-grader should win a Pulitzer because he wrote his own essay? No, but I think writing off a great talent the minute she produces silver instead of gold is indicative of a fame culture Gaga was smart enough to both parody and exploit in the first place.
As for the Monster Ball, you will be missing out by not tuning in. For one, I think it was filmed barely a week after BTW came out, so it’s still going to be all of her old stuff anyway. Second, it’s an amazing big arena show, chock full of hot backup dancers, visually orgasmic costumes and sets, and intermission videos inspired by Warhol and Fritz Lang, among others. So while I clearly don’t expect everyone to have the same melodramatic response (art and pop are what you make of them), it merits viewership simply for its performance value. Most importantly though, Gaga is an intensely candid performer. She doesn’t just go through the moves and belt it out; she speaks to you as if you were five feet away from her at a piano bar, and as countless critics have said, her voice really is that good live. I am thrilled that she is sharing it with a wide television audience because now perhaps finally at least one person will understand why I take her so personally. My Monster Ball was as cathartic as it was breathtaking, and if she can inspire one (otherwise cynical, rational) fan to go on a diatribe like this, then I think she deserves at least a little more credit.
“I grade Gaga on a curve not just out of blind devotion, but also because she writes her own material and therefore musically takes a much bigger risk.”
If you had any idea the number of people that write their own music, you’d realize that this sentence means nothing.
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