EVERYTHING BUT SHALLOW GAY DANCE MUSIC: LADY GAGA’S ‘BORN THIS WAY’

By: Rob Brayl
For BiggerThanBeyonce.Com

[Photo by Chris Polk/Getty Images North America]

Let me state for the record that I’ve never fully been on the GaGa bandwagon. I know, can you believe it?! A gay dude who doesn’t think GaGa is the coolest thing since sliced bread? Well, it’s true. And no, I am not a hater. I repeat: I am not a hater. I actually admire GaGa for her drive and passion — specifically with wanting to ignite change — but at the end of the day, I’m not on board with the behavior that surrounds her image, nor am I certain I ever will be.

I’ve gotten in numerous discussions over why I have resisted the newly crowned pop icon and it always comes down to hysterics/aesthetics. For instance, I sometimes feel as if she truly contradicts herself. IE: If you are not attention-seeking as you once claimed in an interview with Barbara Walters, then why show up late to a Mets game and then flip the paparazzi the bird? So there’s that. Not to mention, showing up to airports in underwear and Armadillo heels. The attention-seeking aspect of her “art” really annoys me if I’m being completely blunt and simply comes off as being ungenuine and phony.

As far as music goes — yes, I can get into Bad Romance just like the next person but I just didn’t feel any sort of connection to her debut record, The Fame. Perhaps it’s because, to me, a majority of the music GaGa has released thus far seems to be shallow gay dance music. I don’t mean that as an insult as I see nothing wrong with shallow gay dance music — it has a purpose and there’s tons of mindless pop that I enjoy on the dancefloor. But the fact of the matter is that for me, once the lights come on and I leave the club, I don’t take that music to bed with me. Bottomline: I always have a hard time clinging to shallow gay dance music.

Do I think GaGa is talented? Of course. I’m just anxiously awaiting a delivery from GaGa that doesn’t feel like it has been dipped in an ink of contrived thought, an ink that’s too superficially pop. I honestly feel like The Fame is not the type of music that GaGa truly loves the most. Nor is it the type of music that fits her sound/vocal ability the best, either. It seems to me that it was a record that her label knew would sell and make an impact commercially. After all, labels (especially huge mainstream giants) are businesses and businesses thrive on money. Even the most creative talents often lose a sense of their identity when signing major record deals.

I simply wish GaGa would do a more piano/rock Elton John-esque record in the vein of her You & I performance — a record that showcases her seemingly deep nature and sensitive heart. The same sensitive heart that delivered this speech last night. Although I have resisted her before and most likely will again, I will say that she never fails to win me over with her humility and tender touch in interviews (I actually love this about her). And from the emotional little snippet she belts, I have a feeling GaGa may eventually win me over as an official little monster on her next release, as Born This Way sounds like a song that is everything but shallow gay dance music — a song I would certainly take to bed with me.

Check out GaGa’s beautiful acceptance speech, below.

19 Responses to “EVERYTHING BUT SHALLOW GAY DANCE MUSIC: LADY GAGA’S ‘BORN THIS WAY’”

  • tanner:

    dude, how can you not like gaga? she wears dead animals for a dress lol

  • James:

    LONG LIVE QUEEN GAGA!!!

  • ani526:

    So over her

  • lilmonster99:

    gaga is the greatest thing to happen to popular music since madonna

  • j_dillinger:

    the only thing exceptional about this woman is her outrageous attire

  • Can’t wait for new music from her!

  • captain obvious:

    overrated

  • seraphine73:

    Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

    For two years, I have spent an irritating amount of time trying to avoid Gaga’s catchy but depthless hits. Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that. Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

    Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

    Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

    Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.

    Peeping dourly through all that tat is Gaga’s limited range of facial expressions. Her videos repeatedly thrust that blank, lugubrious face at the camera and us; it’s creepy and coercive. Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual. Going off to the gym in broad daylight, as Gaga recently did, dressed in a black bustier, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels isn’t sexy – it’s sexually dysfunctional.

    Compare Gaga’s insipid songs, with their nursery-rhyme nonsense syllables, to the title and hypnotic refrain of the first Madonna song and video to bring her attention on MTV, Burning Up, with its elemental fire imagery and its then-shocking offer of fellatio. In place of Madonna’s valiant life force, what we find in Gaga is a disturbing trend towards mutilation and death…

    Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

    Read more of the article here: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

  • ANGELICA:

    shes so talented its overshadowed by all that glam

  • POV:

    So very sad that this is what we call talent these days… wow… Leona Lewis has more talent in her pinky toe than Lady gag has in her whole stolen persona… shes a disgrace i wish ppl would wake up and stop letting the media control their brain

  • MarkyMark:

    I will never forgive her for what she did at the Mets game.

  • HENRY:

    haha nice marky mark

  • haupkepamma:

    t’s such a great site. fanciful, acutely intriguing!!!

  • Fin:

    I never comment on blogs, but this one is awesome! Thanks.

  • vobrec:

    She crooned as she opened

  • Augustine:

    Great post, I am almost 100% in agreement with you

  • Brendonoli:

    Like

  • Peji:

    Gay.

Leave a Reply