Lady Gaga Mixes Religion and Sex in “Alejandro”: And? So?
June 10, 2010
There once was a time when a music video was meant to promote a song. In the last year, Lady Gaga has been hard at work reversing that equation. By the time she releases videos for her singles, they’ve already saturated radio playlists. When “Alejandro”, the third promoted single from Gaga’s The Fame Monster album, first hit the airwaves a couple months ago, I was less excited by the song itself than I was curious about what the song’s video would be like. Increasingly, her singles have become teasers for forthcoming short films, which are increasingly promoted the way movies are, with trailers and making-of videos popping up via Gaga’s website, her Twitter and Facebook feeds to throw a little lighter fluid on the bonfire of her “little monsters’” ardent devotion. The songs are just soundtrack.
In this case, the soundtrack is essentially the greatest Ace of Base single they haven’t recorded since “The Sign”, although it’s drawn more comparisons to Madonna – apparently because it’s got Spanish names in it and Madonna sometimes sings songs with Spanish names in them too. The video, however – a collaboration with fashion photographer Steven Klein – is unmistakably Madonna: a veritable mash-up of “Vogue” and “Express Yourself”, with a heaping dollop of arty que-erotica (“Justify My Love”), a big, drippy, melty scoop of religious provocation a la “Like a Prayer” and, what the hell, a tiny bit of “Live to Tell”‘s confessional intimacy. It’s all enough to forget about that silly Ace of Base re-write entirely. 
But if the song seems a bit beside the point, the video, after nearly nine minutes, seems disappointingly pointless. It’s not the video’s imagery I object to, although the images’ presumed objectionability appears to be one of the video’s central objectives. The marionetted bodyguard holding a golden gun where his penis ought to be? The leather military uniforms and near-naked goosestepping choreography. The funereal march, the disembodied heart strapped and spiked to a silk pillow? The rubber Joan of Arc hoods and scarlet nuns’ habits? Gaga in ill-fitting flesh colored undies, simulating penetration of a man on an institutional bed? When Gaga previewed some of the video’s imagery on the American Idol stage last month, she was fairly inviting Fox viewers to stage protests and boycotts. (All I could think of was poor Adam Lambert, simulating a little oral sex and giving a band member a kiss on a low-rated awards show after kiddies’ bedtime, while Gaga’s spectacle appeared on a top-rated paragon of family entertainment.)
But “Alejandro” doesn’t feel courageous, or even outrageous, or even terribly interesting. More than anything, it reads as parody – of Madonna, yes, but of Gaga herself. How else to read the way she allows herself to be manhandled by her flock of gay-boy dancers with their ridiculous Catholic monk bowl cuts? The first time I saw it, it just looked hokey. More and more, it comes to resemble a really expensive, really elaborately bit of sketch comedy – only it’s not that funny. In fact it’s a bit dull. And it’s friggin’ long. “Bad Romance” was a masterpiece because it packed a universe of ever-escalating sexual menace and spectacle (and heaven knows how many damn costume changes) into five action-packed minutes. “Telephone” succeeded because it demonstrated a wicked, mordant sense of humor, and it just looked fantastic. There’s no question that “Alejandro” is beautifully photographed. But none of it feels new. And it’s ultimately, strangely… boring. There’s nothing in either the song or the video to justify nine minutes of this stuff. Then again, this could be one of Lady Gaga‘s most subversive innovations: she’s managed to erect (yes, I said “erect) a monument to a character in a really dumb, Ace of Base-like song out of old-guard gay fetish imagery, sadomasochism, and Catholic iconography that people can yawn at, that people will click away from, not because their sensibilities have been offended, but because that article about where the original A-Team stars are now looks way more interesting.
Glee’s Gaga Episode Leaves Me… “Speechless”-less
May 25, 2010
Though the show’s most beloved (for her unapologetic hatefulness) character, Sue Sylvester (played with all the purposefulness and empathy of a power drill by Jane Lynch) was pretty much absent from tonight’s Lady Gaga themed episode of Glee, the show still had a lot of great moments. Unfortunately, none of those great moments were musical. Tonight’s show was useful not only in demonstrating the essential commonality between the artistry of Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand, and KISS – that is, in a word the show beat us over the head with tonight, theatricality - but also in explaining the symbology behind the KISS members’ made up personae. Who knew, right?
It also boasted two of the season’s most dramatic and surprisingly uncartoonish plot developments. Kurt’s father’s confrontation with their potential future stepbrother/son over Fin’s use of the “F” word (not the four letter one) was powerful and moving, and suggested a new layer of complexity in the three characters’ relationships with each other.
Meanwhile, Rachel’s thwarted reunion with her birth mother – rival glee club coach and disappointed former Broadway aspirant Ms. Cochrane (played by real life Broadway star Idina Menzel in a brilliant bit of lookalike-soundalike-no-way-these-two-don’t-share-genes casting) – felt almost underplayed. It was emotionally three-dimensional, as the relief of confession turned not into a happily-ever-after ending, but into a sort of relationship limbo. Moreover, when Rachel (Lea Michele) admitted with some degree of regret that she just didn’t feel a daughterly need for her mother, the show seemed to honor her relationship with her adoptive dads in a way the show, which has never really shown us her adoptive dads (which, as an adoptive dad, infuriates me!), never has before.
Unfortunately, the show’s musical numbers tonight were uniformly duddish, from strictly imitative versions (in both staging and arrangement) of Streisand’s “Funny Girl”, KISS’s “Shout It Out Loud”, and, of course, Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, a performance so synthesized and Autotuned that the show momentarily felt like a trailer for RockStar: Lady Gaga Edition, to a boy-band-on-stools rendition of KISS’s “Beth”, similar to their take on Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” a few weeks back. But at least in that performance, there were, y’know, harmonies and stuff. Here, the Glee boys couldn’t be troubled to throw in even the most rudimentary harmonies, instead singing key lines of the song’s chorus in an emotionally empty unison. It was like Kidz Bop performed by teenagers. Or rather Kidz Bop performed by 28-year-olds playing teenagers.
But the show, sadly, saved the worst for last. Seriously, what were the writers thinking when they had Rachel and Ms. Cochrane (biological mother and daughter, remember) sing a duet on Gaga’s “Poker Face”? Confoundingly, this was the one musical number in tonight’s episode that did anything new with the song. In this case, it was given a cutesy, playful, old-timey vaudeville melodic treatment that rendered the song virtually unrecognizable – quite a feat given its 18-month pop-cultural omnipresence – while preserving the song’s aggressively graphic sexual innuendoes. It wasn’t just disappointing. It was sort of disgusting. Let me clarify: if this were a duet between Rachel and one of her peers – say, Quinn Fabray, her longtime rival for Fin’s affections – the song would have had a fun, kinky, but ultimately harmless, sexual tension. But the Michele/Menzel duet on the song had an unintended (I hope I hope I hope) incestuous undertone. It was just all kinds of wrong.
Compounding my disappointment is the fact that there actually is a Lady Gaga song that could have served the scene well, and though it’s not one of The Lady’s hit singles, it’s no obscurity either. She’s performed it in numerous television appearances, and it even makes a cameo in tonight’s Glee episode – in an early scene, Kurt’s got it playing on his stereo. “Speechless”, from The Fame Monster, is a big Elton John-style ballad (which she performed with Elton John at this year’s Grammys) that she says was inspired by her own relationship with her father. The song is a full-throated, gut-wrenching emotional plea pounded out with big arena-rock power chords, and seems made for a moment like the one Rachel had with Ms. Cochrane at the end of tonight’s show – a moment full of conflicting emotions, a moment that was neither hello nor good-bye but rather “see ya ’round, I guess”. Unfortunately, especially after their gorgeous duet on “I Dreamed a Dream” (i.e. that Susan Boyle song from Les Mis) in last week’s episode, I can only imagine what Lea Michele and Idina Menzel could have done with “Speechless”.
I could say, to the tune of “Speechless”, “I’ll never watch again.” But that would be dishonest. I still love the show. But as tonight’s episode has proven, it can be wildly – wildly - off the mark.
The Band Played… “Poptones.” The Continuing Adventures of Public Image Limited in the American Midwest
May 1, 2010
I’ve been waiting literally 20 years to see the band Public Image Ltd, the jagged-post-punk-dub-arty-dance-pop-with-something-to-say juggernaut led by former Sex Pistol John Lydon. The last time the band played Milwaukee was in the fall of ’89. They were touring behind their album 9 at the time, and had a near brush with the U.S. pop charts with the song “Disappointed”, which, if I were to rank my personal favorite singles of all time, would probably fall somewhere in or near the top 10. (Along with their signature classic from 1986 “Rise”.)
After their next album together (1992′s That What Is Not), PiL sort of disappeared for awhile. Aside from a John Lydon solo album, there have been no new records from the band. But while there still isn’t a new album from the group, it would be incorrect to say that there has been no new music. Lydon has reconvened the band for its first U.S. tour since 1992. Last night, I saw them play at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee and it must be said that even though their set list leaned heavily on songs from the group’s 1979 album Metal Box (or Second Edition) – generally, and rightly, considered the group’s masterpiece, and truly a pivotal album of its era – the music felt very new, and the performances very now. Listening to the band re-animating their back catalog, I was again struck by how rhythmically, atmospherically, and emotionally complex these songs are, and how well they rebuked the joker a few rows behind me who shouted “Pretty Vacant!” (and laughed at his own stupid joke) as the band took the stage.
Not only have songs like “Poptones” and the freaking glorious “Albatross” remained relevant, they’ve actually become more so over time, and when the band closed its set with an increasingly bass-heavy (at Johnny’s chanted urging) take on the song “Religion”, prefaced with a pop quiz (“These are not trick questions!”) on the Pope, the Catholic church, and justice (Milwaukee is one of the epicenters of the current pedophile priest scandals), the outrage and the rebellion were absolutely palpable. (And not just because the ridiculously/wonderfully amplified bass was rumbling our Pabst Blue Ribbon filled bellies.) If there had been a picture of the pope in the room, the bass alone would have vaporized it.
It’s true the band is comprised entirely of graying and/or paunchy fifty-somethings – PiL veterans Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, along with bassist-extraordinaire Scott Firth (whose resume includes work with both Elvis Costello and the Spice Girls). It’s also true that they played a slew of obvious fan favorites, like the opener “This Is Not a Love Song”. But let’s make at least this much clear: This is not an oldies act. This is not a greatest hits show. It’s a 2010 show by a 2010 band with 2010 things to say; and though this is a band that spoke to the high school social outcast 1989 Paul Lorentz, this is a band that kicked the ass of the mortgage-paying-cube-dwelling-slightly-more-socially-appealing-father-of-two 2010 Paul Lorentz.
A quick note about the audience. The apparent median age of the pit audience was 47 and a half. The average weight I’m guessing was about 245. There were more chins than scalps with hair. It was, without exaggeration, the oldest, fattest, baldest pit I’d ever seen. In fact, it was an audience I felt young in, which is an increasingly rare phenomenon, and this gave the proceedings another (however accidental) layer of subversion. The truest punks and rebels of the Milwaukee metro area now look like (and are) grandparents. I myself had a bit of a curmudgeonly moment during the band’s entrancing, alternately meditative and cathartic performance of “U.S.L.S. 1″ when an overly flirtatious douchebag and the Taylor Swift lookalike he was trying to make (the only twentysomethings in the audience?) wouldn’t shut up, and I asked them to take it to the lobby. They didn’t immediately comply, but they were clearly not there to see a band play a show (or maybe they were there to see Maroon 5 – oops, easy mistake), and were not long for the place.
After Lydon firmly admonished those in the pit to keep their beers and their bodies off the stage, Lydon affirmed that Public Image Ltd was at the Pabst Theater to enjoy themselves, and they proceeded to do just that for a couple of hours. Throughout the show, Lydon was equal parts den-mother, coach, guidance counselor, rebel warrior, nation-builder, and incendiary device, and he took on each of these roles with an uncompromised joy and unflinching conviction. Reputation for confrontation notwithstanding, Lydon proved a most gracious frontman for an audience that was often either overly polite or (especially later in the show) just plain pooped.
One of my favorite moments in the show was the band’s take on the 1989 single “Warrior” , in which all of those roles came together in a single song. The chorus of the song says “I’m a warrior. This is my land.” In concert last night, Lydon virtually declared the audience and the band together a new nation-state; but he also touchingly proclaimed the U.S. his adopted country (he’s becoming a citizen), repeatedly mentioned how nice it was to see smiling faces in the audience (and by extension the U.S.), and rejected self-pity and complacence. At the end of the song, he asked “Are you a warrior?” The audience replied with the predictable noises. Lydon chuckled in response (I’m paraphrasing), “Well, yes, kind of relaxed warriors.” It was more sweet than judgmental, but it was clearly both. It was good to see his smiling face too. I hope to see it again soon.
