May 12, 2010
“She’s Arty Spice!”
First, a sixth grader covers Paparazzi, and it’s incredible. (via waxy)
Second, Joanna Newsom’s take on Gaga, I think, is typified by Telephone:
“I may have contradicted myself. My problem isn’t actually with Lady Gaga. But there’s not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. She just happens to wear slightly weirder outfits than Britney Spears. But they’re not that weird– they’re mostly just skimpy. She’s fully marketing her body/sexuality; she’s just doing it while wearing, like, a ‘fierce’ telephone hair-hat. Her sexuality has no scuzziness, no frank raunchiness, in the way that, say, Peaches, or even Grace Jones, have– she’s Arty Spice! And, meanwhile, she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she’s Brecht or something. She just makes me miss Cyndi Lauper. [...] I shouldn’t have called Madonna a dumb-ass. Her music and she have just gotten so boring to me, this last decade. I think maybe she doesn’t hold her money very gracefully, the way some people can’t hold their drink. But one thing she is surely not is dumb.”
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Are you KIDDING me?! That is astounding. My skin is tingling.
As much as I enjoyed his performance, I enjoyed almost as equally the reactions of the girls in the background, particularly the one under the microphone. She starts off as “Bored, Bored, Bored” and then her face morphs into, “Holy shit, this is amazing.”
Agreed.
The one with the black dress in the back row? I think she’s in love.
Joanna Newsom and I have a date in late September. Brecht, how gauche.
“Brecht, how gauche.” I am going to adopt that (if I may) and use in all manner of contexts.
I am practicing saying it with different inflections.
Where’d this straw man suggesting Lady Gaga’s music is intellectual come from?
She makes pop music. It is dumb. It is gloriously and exuberantly dumb music. And we love her for it.
Some chatterers say it because they don’t know any better and because they parrot other chatterers.
I suspect it her connection to Andy Warhol, Michael. Not that that helps any because I am not sure Andy Warhol was an intellectual either (same problem, really).
One of the things I miss most about being 14 was the wonderful tingly feeling of my dampening underpants. Watching the girls watch him almost got it back for me.
Damn, that is very like the fantasies I had in middle school when the talent show came around. I imagined inspiring that female attention in a way that left me instantly signing autographs with my phone number. Of course the only time I made it to the talent show during my brief middle school tenure, I wowed everybody by interlacing my fingers and then jumping through my own arms without breaking the lock. And then back through them. I suppose that could have inspired some sexual tension, but if so, I’m sure it was far too metaphysical to ever produce an invitation. Sort of like: “Escher fucked me–I think.”