Lady GaGa's "The Fame Monster" Has Leaked – How Is It?

Let me preface this by saying that I’m Lady GaGa‘s straightest fan, and I wish her nothing but the most complimentary bottles of red wine and the most glamorous inhalants eBay can buy.  But even we ridest and dyest of fans have our, “ugh ok Lady GaGa” moments.  The whole “I’m bisexual too!” thing was taxing.  I was pretty eh on the sparkler bra gag as well.  It felt like it had been done before, and I don’t care whether it Has Been Done or merely Should Have Been Done, Lady GaGa’s appeal is that she Does Otherwise Than That.

The new Fame Monster, leaked over the weekend a week in advance of its release (download it via here or here, the “DepositFiles” host site works, after you wait for the ad to time out: look I am all supportive of artists and their intellectual rights especially if those artists are Lady GaGa, but seriously one of this woman’s three-ring costumes could feed f*cking Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan does not even have that low a standard of living), is larded with the fresh GaGa, but you get scoops of the trite GaGa as well.  The bad and the good, after the jump.  

Some of the new tracks – there are eight, plus deluxe rereleases of all the songs from The Fame – are bad.  ”Teeth” is worse than anything on the original CD.  ”Summerboy” is rooted in the right place, taking cues from Anita Hill’s “Ring My Bell,” The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like,” and other ponytail-twirl come-ons and kiss-offs.  It’s a self-aware song in that it knows it’s cloying (it’s called “Summerboy” for Christ’s sake.  One word!), but unfortunately my ears do not care that the song has lineage and perspective and irony because all they understand is sounds, and whether or not those sounds are annoying and unpleasant.  This one is!

More troublesome, maybe, is that virtually every song here is packaged to sound “influenced” by a different genre.  ”Dance in the Dark” is ’80s – not even any specific subgenre of ’80s music, just “’80s.”  It’s Benatar over the Eurythmics (the synth line almost plagiarizes “Sweet Dreams for a few beats and then veers).  ”Disco Heaven” is uh?  (Answer key: disco).  ”Alejandro” is maybe the most absurd ditty here.  ”Latin ballad” is the template, and GaGa actually begins the song with a goofy monologue about forbidden love, delivered in a cutup romance novel Spanish accident.  It sort of highlights the problem with The Fame Monster: someone (perhaps GaGa herself) clearly went to great lengths to hit the listener as hard and repeatedly as possible with the THIS ALBUM IS ECLECTIC IN TERMS OF STYLES AND TASTES mallet.  Disco on one song and world music on another.  She likes all the music everywhere!  She sees and assimilates quality music from Brazil to 1960!

Thing is, no one is like that.  I want to listen to critically agreed-upon newschool sad-rock.  Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, the Hold Steady, their time is now and I live in Brooklyn for Vice‘s sake!  But look, I do not prefer this music, in my cochleas and music brain.  And I think, for her part, Lady GaGa doesn’t gives a sh*t about the genre of stripped-down, piano-based, walking-through-a-parking-lot-with-your-head-down music because she’s big screen, so why did she bother with a song like “Brown Eyes”?  It’s one of several tracks that feel either apathetic or cheesy without any payoff.

The converse of that, however, is this: while some genres get a perfunctory once-over, Lady GaGa clearly adores certain other species of pop music, and when she’s at home in these, her songs are as good as they ever are.  Disco is one and apparently Motown funk is another: “Disco Heaven” and “Retro, Dance, Freak” are, respectively, the most likely and most unlikely successes on the album.

Weird, of course, is another of her favorite hats.  The first single, “Bad Romance” was well chosen, and it may be the best song here: campy, nonsensical, melodramatic, and punctuated by gibberish noises, it shows how well a touch of self-parody can grease your self-expression when your own caricature is also your purest aspiration.  Would “Poker Face” have become the pop event it was if not for the utterly ridiculous sexy-locomotive MAH MAH MAH MAH part, with everyone from Walken to Weezy riffing on it?  I submit no, and while it’s unlikely anything new on this set will be in our ’00s time capsule with “Poker Face,” Lady GaGa does give the remixers and bass sculptors something to work with.  ”Telephone,” done with Beyonce, is the finest of this sort of vintage GaGa space-clubby chart here (bonus: it’s about cell phones and the problems they cause in our lives!  (brain cancer and sex)).

And finally there’s “Monster,” which has something to do with eating hearts and eating brains.  Would Lady GaGa eat person meat?  I have often wondered this.  I think if it came with a certificate that said it wasn’t like a child or something, she might.  She is much weird, often in ways you can’t fake.  Which is great, obviously.  My biggest worry was that on this album she’d go more straight top 40 and edge away from her inner weird.  (Literally, this is the biggest worry in my life.)  She does and she doesn’t.  But singing songs is neither the weirdest nor the best thing Lady GaGa does, so let’s just wrap this up with her star assignment of the year, the “Bad Romance” video, which got a check plus-plus-plus gold star 5/5 on the A.P. Weird exam.