Forbes Avenue » Lady GaGa

Good Morning Forbes

negrostotle — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:00:39 +0000

You know that under armor is holding on for dear life. (via Bigoo.ws)

5 people who failed their way to fame and fortune.

How to make your own Lady GaGa costume for Halloween

When America fails to realize what “funny” is…David Letterman is topping Conan O’Brien in the ratings.

Steve Phillips, now officially fired by ESPN.

Good Morning Forbes

negrostotle — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:00:04 +0000

Common is bringing back Kanye West and No I.D. for his next album. I think I can speak for everyone when I say…Thank Goodness. (I love the Neptunes…but Neptunes and Common together? not so much)

A first look at the cast of the new A-Team movie.

YMCA…as performed by the members of mortal kombat.

Mike Blower. You will never see a sports prediction better than this.

David Letterman got caught dipping his pen in the company ink and someone at CBS tried to extort $2 million from him over it. TMZ has the video of his on-air confession.

Kanye West and Lady Gaga’s “Fame Kills” tour has been canceled before it ever started.

How crazy is the Raiders organization? They’re now calling Rich Gannon a terrorist. Seriously.

Good Morning Forbes

Ellen Gets Down and Dirty with SYTYCD Finalists … Sort of

libchic24 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:10:36 +0000

Ellen DeGeneres loves to dance; she dances on every episode of her show. But after her recent appearance as a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance (Fox), I guess she decided to take it to the next level. Ellen kicked off season seven of her show yesterday with a choreographed dance featuring her and the top 10 from the last season of SYTYCD. She did a pretty good job for a 51 year old talk show host; could you imagine Oprah trying to pull this one off:

Guests on yesterday’s show included David Beckham (with the added bonus of many pictures of him in underwear ads), and Lady Gaga. Ellen finishes off premiere week with Kate Beckinsale, Pitbull, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Antonio Banderas, Katherine Heigl, Nick Cannon, and Sharon Osbourne. So You Think You Can Dance season six premieres tonight at 8pm/7c on Fox.

Lady GaGa & Michael Bolton make sweet music together.

negrostotle — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:00:52 +0000

First off…yes, Lady Gaga is wearing a dress made out of Kermit the Frog puppets…and I’m not even sure if this is the strangest thing she’s ever done.

If you were to ask me to make the most unlikely pairing in music history, I’m still not sure that I would have been able to come up with Lady GaGa and Michael Bolton…and yet, here we are…listening to their song.

I honestly don’t know what to say. The name of the single is “Murder my Heart”. It reminds of that Lionel Ritchie song that featured Akon. You know, the one where the aging former pop star went out and grabbed the hot young pop star so that they could try and maintain culture relevance? Yes, I think that was actually the title of the song.

Lost in Translation: What Exactly Did We Learn from the Greats

tigger500 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:26:11 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of popular music in the weeks since Michael Jackson died, trying to wrap my head around why we are where we are and how we got here.

We have all watched the news and read the articles about how much of a huge impact Mike had on an entire generation of artists. It has been repeated ad nauseum.

And yet, while I see it, it feels like something is missing.

Michael Jackson, Thriller era

I can hear Off The Wall repeated over and over in Ne-Yo’s three albums, but though the song structures are very very similar (damn near ripped off wholesale), the feeling I get when listening is just different.

I can listen to Lloyd, Chris Brown, Mario, J. Holiday and hear elements of Mike’s phrasing, but none of his nuance or preternatural ability to wring pure emotion and joy out of a lyric.

And it’s not just Mike.

Early Britney videos ripped off whole sections of Janet’s choreography and video persona, but never managed to convey that pure sense of joy in discovering one’s sensual self and youthful determination to challenge popular assumptions that Janet had. And Britney’s recent makeover into Madonna hasn’t yielded any sense that she’s holding a mirror up to her audience and daring them to see the best and worst of themselves in her music the way Madonna did.

This all begs the question:

What exactly did my generation and the millennial generation hear when they were listening to Mike and Janet and Madonna, and to a much lesser extent, Prince?

My sense is that younger generations think the power these artists wield lies, not in their artistry, what their music was designed to convey or what their personas were designed to portray, but in the trappings. In the spectacle that was built up around their art. In a sense, to an entire generation Mike is nothing but the Moonwalk, Janet is nothing but a slut with some dude’s hands on her breasts, and Madonna is a vain provacateur.

This has never felt right.

In our quest as critics to decipher how Mike, Janet and Madonna rose to heights that no one else had before, I think we failed to adequately assess and appreciate the strength of the music. The art. Even, to a lesser extent, the artistry of their videos.

Madonna performing Like A Virgin

This irony of this fact is greatest, I think, with Madonna, who is probably the most interrogated, discussed, and thought provoking artist ever. And yet, you don’t get any sense that these young women, like Gwen Stefani, Lady Gaga, late-era Britney, listened to a single word that Madonna wrote. Or compared what she was singing with what she was doing in the videos.

Madonna was a provocateur, but her music always seemed to be saying something. To be reflecting, to some degree, the values and mores and idiosyncracies of American culture.

But Lady Gaga just seems to enjoy being a visual conundrum, missing the sense of irony that made Madonna’s visual persona, at its best, so beguiling and complex. And Gwen has got Madonna’s propensity to rip off minority cultures down, but it feels truly violent and paternalistic because she does it earnestly, failing to capture Madonna’s (albeit inconsistent) ability to be completely conscious of her whiteness.

Janet Jackson’s early success was tied to her dogged desire to destroy America’s idea of what a young Black female pop artist was supposed to be. It may be hard to imagine, but there wasn’t anything like Janet before Janet. Here was a woman who declared her independence (Control), turned around and made a message /dance record (Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, 1814), discovered that she was hot and invited you to discover it with her (janet.), and then let you see just how painful and sad being a Jackson truly is (The Velvet Rope). Her artistic points of reference were Marvin Gaye and Joni Mitchell.

I don’t think any of these young ladies performing in Janet’s shadow now would even know that.

Because there is none of that audacity, none of that lyrical nuance or conceptual daring in any of the young women who are biting Jan’s style. Ciara came close with her brillliant Like A Boy song and video and Aaliyah would probably have been able to do that had she not died so young, but none of these other young women seem to understand that what made Janet unique was that she always felt like a real person even though she was Janet Jackson.

Rhythm Nation remains a peerless pop oddity; a shining example of one woman’s attempt to make sense of the world she lives in. No other female artist like her has done anything like it, before or since.

That’s sad.

But it is no different from the countless young men who think they will be the next Michael. In a way, that no one gets the soul of Mike is precisely what makes him so singular. Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, J. Holiday, Mario, and the like can ape his phrasing, his vocal tics, even some of his dancing flair, but they only make it abundantly clear that who and what Mike was was intrinsic to him and him alone. He seemed to do what he did for the sheer love of it. These new jacks seem to just want to be like Mike.

That’s clearly an oversimplification, but the point I’m trying to make is that Michael Jackson had his influences and you knew what they were, but you didn’t immediately see it when he performed or sang. He didn’t take Fred Astaire’s dance style wholesale. And his voice, especially post-Off The Wall, seemed to spring fully formed from his imagination and exist outside of any vocal lineage. Even the Moonwalk, which was popularized by street dancers on Soul Train years before, didn’t look like its forebearer.

But you see all of Mike in these young cats, even Usher, who is the closest thing this generation has to a Mike-like, Janet-like, Madonna-like, pop star. None of them is vocally anywhere near Mike and though their dancing is good and well-rehearsed, it feels workmanlike and you find yourself wondering who choreographed it.

You never wondered who did Mike’s choreography. Didn’t occur to you.

Something got lost in translation for us or we weren’t listening or watching closely.

Janet performing Control

None of these artists heard in Billie Jean or Smooth Criminal an artist who wanted to fuck with your assumptions, they just heard catchy songs and loved the cool videos. None of them heard The Knowledge or Rhythm Nation and thought that dance music could also be deep and, in doing so, wouldn’t detract from the urge to dance. And none of them seem to get that Madonna’s blond ambition was about deconstructing the myth of pure white womanhood.

All of this isn’t to say that there isn’t good music in these artists or in my generation. Usher and Aaliyah (at least who she was starting to be) are the closest thing to full-bodied, artistic geniuses in the Mike/Jan/Madonna tradition, but it may be too soon to truly tell. Ne-Yo is worth listening to because when you do, you realize that at least he understands how to write a melody.

And I don’t write this to lionize Mike, Janet, and Madonna, all of whom have more than enough crap in their catalogues. Because, to be fair, they each bought their own hype too (particularly Janet who is ruining what little goodwill her fans have with vapid attempts to be 21 again). But, in their own way, they earned the right to rest on their laurels; they changed the fuckin game.

But the point is: it doesn’t feel like any of these new jacks have learned to take a damn chance. It doesn’t feel like any of these artists I’ve mentioned are really interested in shocking their audience. They don’t seem at all concerned with making a statement, or reflecting their times (other than by riding the latest trend), or commenting at all on what is going on in the world. They confuse outselling their peers with achieving greatness artistically. And we aren’t challenging them as a record buying public or as critics.

But maybe we aren’t supposed to ask for more. Maybe we got our fill with Mike, Janet and Madonna. I don’t know. I don’t think I have.

Have you?

Lady GaGa scares me.

negrostotle — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:54:14 +0000

Alright, lets play a game. Take the craziest person you know. I mean craziest. Like, might get mad and stab you over something that is either trivial or that they are completely wrong about (i.e. Battlefield Earth is the greatest movie ever!).

okay, got a person? good.

Now put that person in the most ridiculous costumes ever. Think Willy Wonka meets the Matrix. Or Rainbow Brite meets 1800’s Puritan garb.

Finished with that one? okay.

Now make that person create a bunch of songs that the rest of the world finds inherently catchy, even if they probably have no idea what any of them are about.

Add all that up, and I know that it would have to make for someone that is pretty scary…but I guarantee it won’t be half as frightening as this.

You can’t teach crazy like that…you’re just born with it.

Probability that Ms. Piggy kills her in her sleep? 100%

h/t to wwtdd.com

Lady GaGa & Michael Bolton make sweet music together.