I resisted the pull for as long as I reasonably could. I’d heard the name, in whispers and shouts, but dismissed her as another pop tartlet whose 15 minutes of fame would be up shortly.
Only she kept getting more famous. Creeping further into my consciousness. Gaining purchase in my mind.
It turns out Lady Gaga might be a genius.
I once heard her dismissed offhandedly as someone who appears to believe she’s the only one who ever heard of Madonna. I laughed. It is, after all, a statement built on a kernel of truth. But that’s overly reductive. Of course she’s taking from Madonna. I think that she is trying to be that for this generation.
I like glamour in my pop stars. I like imagination. I like seeing revelry purely in the name of decadence. No matter what one thinks of her, no one can argue that Gaga does not have these qualities.
I don’t think a pop star has entered my consciousness since the late ’90s, when I was working at that big box retailer and absorbing everything because I had to do so. Since then, I have essentially divorced myself from the broad music culture; if you are a mainstream musician who has hit it big in the past half-decade or so and I know you beyond a cursory knowledge of your name, you are almost certainly really fucking famous.
Lady Gaga is really fucking famous.
All that said, I’d still not heard much of her music. I had heard more of Eric Cartman covering her than I had of her performing her own songs. One day, though, I was in the deli awaiting my lunch, and the radio playing overhead commanded that I listen.
That was the first time I truly heard “Poker Face”. And I was on my way to being converted.
I still don’t love all of her music. It’s just frankly not to my taste. I am not one of her “Little Monsters“. (Yet.) But I love what she represents.
There’s a lot to say about her. Amanda Fucking Palmer wrote a great post about Gaga after seeing her show in early July in Boston. I don’t agree with Palmer completely, but the issue is complex, and her opinion is well worth reading. You know, if you are so inclined.
Mostly, for me, it comes down to this: I look forward to what comes next.
I have to preface this: I don’t believe that anything should really be a guilty pleasure; I don’t believe we should feel guilt over pleasure.
I don’t know. Maybe it would make more sense if I were Catholic?
Anyway.
I always hated NSYNC. I hated their cookie cutter boy band style, I hated the fact that all the girls loved them, I hated the stupid contrived way the group name was formed from the letters of the members’ names. Most of all, though, I hated the music.
I was (and, I suppose, am) a pretentious bastard when it comes to music. At the time NSYNC were big, I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Prime years for a secretly jealous rockist teenage boy to knock on a boy band, and I didn’t yet understand irony.
As such things tend to go, their career started to wind down. Their appearances on Total Request Live were less frequent, their fans less fervent, their whole existence less offensive merely by dint of decreased ubiquity. It became harder and harder to muster the same hate. And then, one day, the hate was gone.
Because of “Gone”.
I heard this song and finally understood. Unlike many, probably most, of their peers, NSYNC had a decent amount of talent. Which is to say, frankly, that NSYNC had Justin Timberlake.
He was the cute one, the star of the band, from the very start. He was also criminally underused. “Gone” showed exactly how.
The song is his almost in its entirety. The rest of the band is there for the chorus and harmony. It is essentially the first Justin Timberlake song I heard.
In a related story, I am an unironic, unapologetic, and proud owner of both of Mr. Timberlake’s solo records. I think they are both excellent pop albums, something that I am literally incapable of believing my seventeen-year-old self could say. But my seventeen-year-old self had never heard this song and had that moment of clarity.
I suspect that “Gone”, by leading me in the direction it did, had a much more significant effect on my musical taste than I have ever realized. I certainly don’t remember having previously allowed for an unabashed appreciation of a great pop song, regardless of quote-unquote artistic merit. I don’t remember myself as the type of person who would eagerly await, say, Lady Gaga’s next move in the sheer hope that her spectacle, her status as the biggest star of the time, and her artistic acumen could in fact lead her to transcend pop and become an icon in the way of, say, Michael Jackson or Madonna.
My younger self would have scoffed at the very notion. My younger self would have knocked such an ambition, because really, who are Michael Jackson and Madonna?
Potentially crazy? Absolutely. Probably criminal? I’d believe it. But that I would have denied their power… that was a terrible, nigh unforgivable mistake.
That is one among many things for which my teenage self can never be forgiven. I’m just glad I was able to listen when NSYNC’s call came for me to wake up, that I was able to start getting better.