The song is depressingly conventional. It could be Shania Twain or the Dixie Chicks - you know, MOR country music. But, the video is a slick machine, sexy, beautifully shot, and so outclasses the song that they seem to come from different universes all together.
This is what happens when an artist is expected to constantly up the ante while running out of fresh musical ideas but still has a terrific sense of theater. Huge disconnect.
Oh, I nearly forgot…the song is called “You And I” and it was produced by Mutt Lange, who a DM friend just reminded me is Shania Twain’s ex. Thanks Tim. Now it makes a little more sense, but it doesn’t make it any better.
Brian May on guitar.
Oddly, I can’t find any information as to who directed this mini-epic. It’s like a mash-up of Peter Greenaway, David Fincher and, as DM reader Framk noted, Matthew Barney.
This photo of Missing Persons’ frontwoman Dale Bozzio is from a 1980s issue of CREEM Magazine, but if you didn’t know that and I told you this was Gaga would you be able to tell the difference?
Of the most searched-for topics on Google that lead random people to Dangerous Minds, perhaps the single most popular is “Is Lady Gaga a member of the Illuminati?”
I kid you not, there is usually at least one person, at all times of the day or night, who is visiting us to research whether or not the world’s biggest pop star is, in fact, a member of that most secretive of secret societies. Another way way it gets phrased is “Lady Gaga” and either “Satanic conspiracy,” or “Revelations” but that’s obviously a dead giveaway of a Christian conspiracy theorist. Apparently, some people truly seem to believe that Lady Gaga figures into Bible prophecies (and it’s not just Gaga, it’s Jay-Z as well). This post is dedicated to them. It will be one of our most popular posts ever, in the long run, trust me.
Not saying that she is in the Illuminati, but if she is, Lady Gaga is certainly milking her membership for all it for all it’s worth to forward teh gayz agenda. From Joe.My.God:
The fastest-selling single in iTunes history, “Born This Way” has already sold millions of copies worldwide and has gone to #1 in more than 30 countries. Whether you’re a Gaga fan or not, you cannot deny the unprecedented impact of hundreds of millions of people singing out loud, that yes, we were born this way. Lady Gaga is pushing the movement forward in ways few could have possibly fathomed.
He’s absolutely right. That song is a wonderfully subversive, absolutely unstoppable meme. It’s a magical incantation of social engineering—it’s a spell—and Lady Gaga knows this. The nursery rhyme simplicity of the lyrics gnaw their way into your brain and don’t let go. The idea of a homophobe having that song stuck in their head all day is a pleasant notion, and you know fully well that’s happened a lot.
I think you really have to hand it to Lady Gaga. When she turned down the Target deal after they wouldn’t guarantee to her that they would shun donating to all anti-gay politicians, she was truly proving to her fan-base that she is who she says she is. It took a lot of integrity to turn down that much money. There could have been a way to “spin” it and still collect their cash. She could have played it off, if she wanted to, and yet she didn’t. The Illuminati could use more like her!
Striking a blow straight to the heart of celebrity vanity, the newest edition of the Popbitch newsletter contained the following item:
Neatly proving just how ineffective social media actually is, 18 celebrities (and Jay Sean) sacrificed their “digital lives” for charity last week, vowing to stop updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social network silence from Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and others until their fans donated a million dollars to [Keys’] Keep A Child Alive campaign to help fight AIDS.
With six days gone, donations were still under $300k. The celebs got restive - Usher just plain gave up and started tweeting - so a billionaire patsy, and longtime AIDS funder Stewart Bahr, was drafted in to pay it off.
It would have cost the celebs’ 35 million combined followers less than 3 cents each to buy back their lives and get them tweeting again, so it appears their fans are staunchly pro-AIDS, or no-one really cared very much about what they had to say in the first place.
Laying down that kind of bread, couldn’t Bahr have pushed his weight around even a little bit and negotiated a way to still keep Kim Kardashian off Twitter?
F*king epic remake of “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé by a bunch of bored soldiers in a base in Afghanistan. Clearly they are as bored there as I am here. I’m glad I know that all the money I got reamed for this year out of my hard-earned pay for writing about Lady Gaga went to Lady Gaga YouTube remakes in the desert.
h+ magazine just published a significantly re-written, revised and expanded version of my essay “Lady Gaga and the Dead-Planet Grotesque,” updated for the “Telephone” video.
If David Bowie’s chameleonic posturing prefigured the hypertext web, Gaga may be the first version of a human being we have seen capable of thriving in the era of the social web. She is shiny, clickable, and malleable in the face of endless attention fragmentation. She is an adaptive strategy. Without any solid or “real” self, her identity becomes whatever it needs to be, immune to the toxic shock of the incoming century, fully geared up to party in the ruins. Is it any wonder that she’s provoked the response she has, both adulation and hatred? She’s the first non-boring thing to happen in pop music for almost fifteen years.
Consider Lady Gaga in prison in the beginning of her new video. That’s all of us, “held captive” in the modern condition — but Gaga is the Magician, able to transform any situation to her will. Five minutes in and she’s reassembled her outfit from chains and cigarettes and is wrapping herself around the girls in the prison yard. The other people in prison are already listening to her songs on her branded Lady Gaga headphone… she set the context before she even arrived. Though she may be in prison, she already rules the world. This is what adaptation to the 21st century looks like. The brand “Gaga” can be reassembled from anything, even in a vacuum, even from trash, just as we must learn to do with our own masks of self…
Like so many of us these days, Megan Williams, 10, was just dancing around with a dressing gown cord while listening to Lady Gaga. Tragedy struck when Megan looped the cord around her neck:
The cord, which was tied to a bunk bed, tightened as she danced around and strangled her to death. The alarm was raised when her 15-year old brother ran downstairs to their mother Lisa saying: ‘Megan’s hanged herself.’ Mrs Williams tried to revive her daughter using tips she had seen on television but the schoolgirl died later in hospital.
A coroner later said the accident graphically illustrated the dangers of children playing around with cords. Cords and Lady Gaga, that is. Your move, Vigilant Citizen!
The new decade’s barely 8 days old, but I’m already sensing a developing continuing theme. Consider this: a zeitgeisty popstar whose authenticity is a subject of endless debate assumes a role in a company whose hallmark products no longer exist!
Lady Gaga’s success continues this week, with the announcement that the singer has been made a creative director of Polaroid. Despite the fact that the traditional analogue Polaroid cameras were discontinued last year, the company continues to sell a range of digital products and sees Lady Gaga as the ideal spokesperson for a “speciality line.”
“I am so proud to announce my new partnership with Polaroid as the creative director and inventor of speciality projects,” said the pop star. “The Haus of Gaga has been developing prototypes in the vein of fashion/technology/photography innovation, blending the iconic history of Polaroid and instant film with the digital era. Lifestyle, music, art, fashion: I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer, and as my father puts it, finally have a real job.”
It is not clear what role the 23-year-old singer will play at the 73-year-old imaging company, but Polaroid confirmed “new products by Lady Gaga will hit retail shelves starting in late 2010.”
Well, The Guardian might not know what role she’ll be playing, but readers of Dangerous Minds certainly have a good idea—it rhymes with “moccult!”
Having just watched it, I am compelled to comment about the new Lady Gaga video. It is, by the way, incredible. This is my love letter to Ms. Gaga.
Over the last couple of months Lady Gaga has come to embody—for me and, I imagine, for her fans—a kind of posthuman life strategy. She presents a response to the horrors of the 21st century that reeks, strangely, of absolute sanity—to very archly embrace the most grotesque excesses of the materialist culture that is destroying the planet. At once clinging to a very human New York hoodrat identity and also becoming indistinguishable from the inhuman culture machine that promotes her, she is the perfect evolutionary advance, designed to outlive the cockroaches themselves.
Ezra Pound once said: “And round about there is a rabble?—of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.” And so she has.
Lady Gaga is the Devil card of the Tarot: the lie that there is nothing but matter—though the card is inverted, tongue-in-cheek. She is a successful gray alien hybrid, stripped of all human emotion or compassion, a thing made to flourish in this grim, mechanical age. She is the newest model android from the MTV fembot assembly line. She is the latest and greatest Terminator. She is Skynet. She is self-aware.
Lady Gaga is everything that terrifies us about the Coming Race: Absolute destructive materialism and complete lack of identity past a 140-letter Twitter quip. Female sexuality inverted into male sexuality and weaponized. Did they build her in an underground laboratory, like the one featured in this video? They must have, for what other perverse, mutated perfection of the human form could be better equipped to succeed in this most horrible of world climates?
While the rest of the world spirals into economic degradation, environmental pestilence and complete systems failure of ALL of the old world models, Lady Gaga reigns above the flames. Pay attention to the lesson: Lady Gaga is the ONLY person prospering in this cultural climate. Therefore she has done something RIGHT. She is the necessary evolutionary adaptation to our times and THIS is why people are disturbed by her: This is what we must all become.
More Illuminati nuttiness today, courtesy Vigilant Citizen, and YouTube’s FarhanK501. In the case of Ms. Gaga, Vigilant Citizen exposes the pop star as a possible extension of Project Monarch (i.e. mind-controlling) sneakiness. Well, of course she is, what else could all that “butterfly” imagery be about?! And have you noticed all her “eye-covering?” That’s eye-of-Horus stuff, right there, if you ask me. Still not convinced? Play “count the pyramids” in the following commercial for German television. What’s “Ms. Germanotta” selling? I have no idea, but, hmm, I’m now suddenly recalling my life as a Green Beret.
Regarding the still oddly-unburied Michael Jackson, FarhanK501 echoes what sister La Toya‘s been claiming all along: MJ was murdered. Not for his money, though. No, dodging “Satanic rituals,” but still reluctant to “say too much” to Ed Bradley, Jackson, it seems, was about to blow the lid off the Illuminati conspiracy itself…or at least Aspartame.
But what’s going on here, really—why tether MJ to the Illuminati?
Well, the reasons are probably as sad as they are simple. Heroes die, and for often all-too-worldly reasons: loneliness, self-loathing, drug-dependency. And that’s the last thing we want from our heroes: some suggestion that they’re mortal, of this world, one of us. So let’s all erase what we’ve learned about the dangers of propofol, shall we, and remember Jackson’s higher purpose here: ripping the veil off a centuries-old, artificial-sweetener-promoting conspiracy.
