“Pop music is commercial art the way Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans were commercial art. I don’t know why everyone is so against pop music. I love a good chorus – sue me. It’s that fucking simple.” - Lady Gaga
Oh Land. I’ve know this artist for roughly five months now and what strikes me frankly about her was this video rather than the also amazing song. This Danish (proud Scandinavian moment again. Sorry. Can't help it.) singer reminds me of blonde bombshell Lykke Li meets minor influences from Bjork. She has this folk and airy electronic sound to her mixed with cutesy light drumbeats, which is just perfect. What’s also refreshing to see like Ellie Goulding is that Oh Land isn’t desperate in creating a character persona for her music. She stays true to herself and rather wants her music to speak be the main force.
Oh Land just has to continue promoting her record and slowly climb the ladder up. Hopefully she’ll not only be this new exciting wave for the next few months, but also have a longevity career in the industry. Markets like New York City will certainly embrace her for a long time, but Middle America may be more reluctant. However, I feel her sound is commercial enough to get her quite far and hopefully she’ll not become a one-album-wonder like KT Tunstall who also reminiscent of Oh Land music quality.
Lady Gaga. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Born This Way. I wanted to write about this song since the very first minute I heard it and just be fucking melodramatic in telling how it has changed my life and has become the soundtrack song of my life. But I waited. I waited till now. Being already played over 400 times on my iTunes+iPod- it explains something. I must say I was quite critical seeing the lyrics at first. With the words being so direct and socially vulgar with race and gender issue- I felt Gaga might have been too ambitious too soon. She’s not like Madonna where there’s already many albums and materials released that can back up her legendary status. However, what has happen with this song? You Google it. Yes, I admit it sounds like Madonna’s late 80’s Express Yourself and Vogue, but listen up fucking lame haters….there’s a big difference between imitating and inspiring. Music is a universal language that is created by the inspiration of one another and this is no difference here. People should give Gaga props for bringing electronic dance music back to Top 40 and big again. She paved a new pop-dance pathway for our generation and we’re going to continue to bring her down by one song, which I must say have saved millions of live? Just be positive that Express Yourself and Born This Way are telling you to embrace your uniqueness and love the uniqueness of others.
On the music production side, Born This Way has a hybrid of Electronic, Pop, East European Industrial and even Gospel accent sounds, which is blended to ear orgasm perfection. Producer Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow was able to capture the 90’s empowering vibe that artist like TLC, Whitney and MJ achieved so immensely. It was all about how you could injected inspiring lyrics to a radio commercial song, make it ready for the clubs and just wants you to go out onto the streets and be who you want to be. I also applaud the fact that this song is actually lighter in tone compared to her previous
hits like Bad Romance, Telephone and Poker Face even if the message is universally groundbreaking.
Now moving on the music video. Lady Gaga…7:20 minutes. Nick Knight direct it. Laurieann Gibson choreographed it. Nicola Formichetti styled it. Little Monsters like us just died. Died because the fierceness, ferociousness and ‘Gaga is one motherfucking legend’ness. I mean, this is visually stunning yet again. I don’t know how this woman does it. To create this concept of giving birth to a new race was just...Gaga please adopt me. At least I know I’m whole-heartedly belonged to this race. I credit Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson as my creative gods, and Gaga certainly proves she’s the goddess here. She somehow knows how to push the commercial art boundary into fine art so effortlessly and has so much sentimental symbolisms. However, being unbiased, I feel this video might be too avant-garde for the normal public right now. It’s not like the Bad Romance video which had the right pop-music video elevation ingredient. This video might have taken the abstract art imagery too far. It’s not wrong, but I feel some people may be put off by it. What Gaga has to do now is to somehow lighten the visual imagery of her next videos and maybe put its mentality more straightforward like Telephone and Paparazzi. Still, I’m so fucking excited for her directorial debut for the Judas music video. I expect nothing less than spectacular.
Her Grammy Awards performance of the song was a like eye-ecstasy for me. I’m still high from it. It was beyond words. Gaga and Gibson somehow played the minimalistic route with the performance concept which was too clever. They let the song speak for itself. The choreography was also a master class. It has this unique-tailored for Gaga only stamp to it, but it’s still modern with the Willow’s Whip My Hair tribute. Gibson choreographs for everyone in the business from Diddy to Katy Perry, but her work with Gaga is always on a new level. It’s like what Brian Friedman does with Britney Spears (8 years ago though). The performance’s music arrangement was also interesting. It had this weird church organ breakdown in the middle, which shows that Gaga can fucking sing! She’s not those lip-synching pop queens I can officially declare. Now there was the Hussein Chalayan Egg Vessel that Gaga made her historic grand entrance. This was just pure wackiness meets the God of genius. Gaga whores for attention, but the attention is for her artistry and not about going to an LA club, get plastered and then receive a DUI.
On a side note, I have to highlight that Gaga released a country-road version of the song to mark the song’s sixth week reign on the Billboard Hot 100 and the new version could instantly be featured on a Clint Eastwood Cowboy movie if he decides to make one in this new era. It has this psychedelic-murder-esque meets light Bruce Springsteen blue-collar sound to it which feels like your epically lost in the Nevada desert. Hopefully, it’ll receive some airplay on country radio.
Born This Way has changed my life and this song defines who I am. I don’t belong to a gender or race group mentioned in the song, but I live through the spirit of the song in embracing my inner-self and who I am as a human being. But what human being that is will remain within myself. I’m too complex as a person. It’s a fucking waste of time for you to question me.
U2. My dad is my most important musical force. He was the one who raised me on all sorts of music. From The Rolling Stones and ZZ Top to Enya and Scissor Sisters – that’s one hell of a musical differential gap. His CD collections (along with his Armani tie gallery) is just…. Fuck, I know why I’m damn materialistic (I’m broke at the moment btw). So going back to the music- why did I choose U2 as the first entry for this section? Simple. When this band’s song comes on the radio, I’m like “Roland Gustaf Svensson!” Yes, he’s my Swedish-expelled from school-once druggie-a woman’s player- so different from me (except for the workaholic part- proud Papa. U2 plays such important to our relationship like no other band because their music provides the right ingredient where we agree on what is fucking good music. I can’t stand his AC/DC records and he can’t stand my desperate love for Gaga who he calls a psychotic bitch.
I love all U2 records and can listen to them all on repeat, but why I chose Beautiful Day is because it has such a fearless feel-good vibe. It’s that sort of song that you can open on anytime of the day and regain that inner strength to live life with positivity. It’s a recurring message in all Bono’s musical creation, but with this song it’s more vibrant, groovy and celebrates mankind love for one another in such a fulfilling context.
On a more personal note again, this video also pays lots of sentimental importance to my life because it’s set in an airport and my relationship with my dad constantly revolves around him travel around the world like a rockstar collecting frequent flyer miles. It’s something we’re so use to it and I bet would continue forever. I promise my dad when I make good money, I’ll fly him to watch U2 and we can be like two druken buddies enjoying music like how it all started at three years old for me.
Black Eyed Peas. Their latest disc The Beginning has really been quiet. They somehow aren’t creating that phenomenal impact like in the past even though the album is seriously good. However, the singles like this one is still doing great on the radio and continuing in proving why they’re the biggest pop group in the world. As for this video, it has all my personal tastes. I don’t know why, but a lot of videos today are having this 'metropolitan-bright neon fluorescent lights' element to it. However, what makes this video stand out is that it has this somber and loneliness quality to it. It gives you this feeling of being alone in a high-rise building in the middle of night where you want to be with someone only, but not with a bunch of people in a club. Still, the breakdown into the fast techno section at the end was also great. BEP are really clever in that with each album they have a certain cohesive concept to it. Even though this one is similar to their The END album, but if looked closely it has this digital-game like sensibility to it and pushes the electronic boundary further in the mainstream music market. But please, they need to give Taboo and apl.de.ap more screen time because we all know Fergie and Will.i.am are always center stage anyways.
Adam Lambert. He’s my favorite Idol alum period. Everything he does musically just fascinates the hell out of me. I remember watching Idol season 8 and witnessing the emergence of a new iconic force. Yes, the world was ready for a ‘fuck you all certain corporate conservative Americans- I want to be who I want to be!’ At least I know I was. I was ready for the campiness, the glam factor and just down right fucking sick vocal production music done in an electronic-pop mentality with hints of Studio 54 Bowie and touches of 80’s Hair Metal. But what was special about this performance on Idol Season 10 Top 13 results show is that it didn’t embody everything I described previously. It just showcased his sincere side and those pipes, which I personally feel is the best in Idol history. Lambert has such emotional conviction when he sings that as a viewer you drift away on a journey for a moment with him and just feel his struggles or his ecstatic state-of-mind. What I also adore about Lambert is that we all know he’s gay, but he doesn’t play the ‘It’s hard to socially live as a gay man’ card, but instead he just lives on life without constant fear and just proves that it doesn’t really matter who you sleep with in bed.
TLC. They have to be one of my favorite girl groups in the 90’s. They were one of the main forces during my musical childhood; growing up on their fantastic videos on MTV and performances on the VMA. Till this day I still think what would have happened to them if Lisa Left-Eye hadn’t pass. Chilli might have pulled a ‘Beyonce-ditch Destiny Child and turn solo’ move, but that didn’t seemed to work out since Chilli and T-Boz were never able to have a career as a duo (Chilli sadly turned to the VH1 reality show route to get the cash), but this song of theirs with just the two of them during their last years as a legendary group I just love. I also adored Waterfalls, Creep, No Scrubs, Unpretty and all their more commercial success songs, but there’s just something so special about this song. The Indian inspired opening, the sentimental lyrics that matched their group’s sad ending to the pop-rock chorus- it all reminds us that they changed music history because they didn’t have the typical R&B sound even if they were colored and usually put into that category. Plus, till this day, all of their records never sound dated and each and one of them has a story to relate to, which becomes part of our life’s musical compilation soundtrack.
The Naked And Famous. I discovered this band on Perez Hilton’s site and there fucking fucking fantastic. They have this smooth electronica trance teenage MGMT sound which I just love listening to late at night at my creative hour. There’s really nothing special about the song. It’s your straight up youthful electronic Brooklyn meets Gossip Girl sound cult movement which we have seen for quite sometime for the last few years. As for the video it’s also really plain. Young adults enjoying life prancing around like being inspired by the hippy age, but shot in fashion blog-esque manner. I don’t really see this band have a future commercially or breaking any chart records. This genre has become too stereotyped and they really need to bring something to the table.
Jennifer Lopez. Holy fuck. This woman is making a grand comeback. Since the first time I listen to this tune months ago (way before this blog started) I predicted this song would catapult Mrs. Anthony back into the musical spotlight and crush the charts….and….what has happened? She just knocked Gaga’s Born This Way off the iTunes chart and her video is close to reach 3 million viewers in less than two days. Yes, becoming a new judge on American Idol does help (and she's fab on it by the way). As for the video it’s nothing THAT special. It’s your typical J.LO video dancing in a club and she looking perfection from all angle, but can you fucking believe she popped out twin babies and still could look this ridiculous? Jennifer Hudson also slimmed down with the pregnancy scenario. Maybe this is the solution to solve woman’s obesity. Plus, she still got those dance moves….Britney why? J.LO is freaking 41 and you’re not even 30!
The only issue I have with Ms. Lopez now like every album is that she shows no growth in her music and visuals. What we saw during her debut album On The Six era and today it’s still all the same ball game. On The Floor is like the exact copy of Waiting for Tonight without the laser jungle visuals. I want to see an evolution and she can still stick to the club vibe, but she needs to elevate it up. Still, with RedOne attached to her latest CD…I’m sure the Jenny From The Block will continue to go to the bank.
