The Fame Monster

GA GA OOH LA LA! So just the three BRITS for Lady Gaga? Should’ve cleaned up with ‘Best International Male’ as well! Haha!

So it’s official – Lady Gaga joins my list of great artists. We’ve been sharing a car whilst I drive out to the wilds of Berkshire every day doing some contract work and I can’t even contemplate sharing with anyone else. It may be that ‘The Fame Monster’, a strange 8 track sort-of album, is just damn good car music but I can’t seem to get enough of it on those long motorway hauls.

After her fabulous debut, ‘The Fame’ I was waiting for the burn out on the second album, but if anything, ‘The Fame Monster’ is better, more assured and more hook laden than a fisherman’s rucksack. I’m not really one for dance music but somehow I seem to be addicted to Lady Gaga and here’s why: She’s not what she seems. Behind the kooky, cutting edge fashion conscious image is an old fashioned musician. Here’s why.

She has paid her dues. At the dawn of time musicians would write a few songs and then take them on the road and play to the people. Sometimes this went on for years before some A&R bod took notice and signed them to a record label. It was a slog but was an accepted pre-requisite to fame and fortune. These days all this slogging around seedy halls selling your wares is now bypassed by selling your image (not your talent) direct to the record producers. All you need is ambition. Lady G appears at first sight to fit this modern ideal but actually she has been around for years writing songs for others (Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears etc) as part of her apprenticeship.

She sings. This might sound obvious as she has a half decent voice and makes the most of it but consider this: her most recent single, ‘Telephone’ features her along side mega-property Beyoncé and it is very revealing. Put side by side in the same song, it becomes clear that Ms Knowles is very firmly based in the tough modern R&B mould where vocal lines are part sung part rapped but Lady G doesn’t follow. She sings her lines and in doing so sounds like a throwback to a different age – she just can’t help it.

She sings The Blues. More than anything she is an old fashioned blues singer and has more in common with Janis Joplin than Madonna or Britney Spears. Have a listen to her heart-felt ballad ‘Speechless’ written about her father or ‘Again Again’ or even her acoustic variations of her own songs. Her songs are often blues-tinged but she wraps them up in the modern dance idiom to appeal to today’s audience. However, you can’t help feeling that she would make one helluva blues singer.

She writes structured songs. In these days of studio creation, traditional song writing skills are taking a bit of a battering but Lady G is a song-crafter. She writes with an appreciation of the rules of song structure and then breaks them to great effect. Again ‘Telephone’ is a great example of how to stretch a bridge passage to breaking point.

So when it comes to Lady Gaga – don’t believe the hype. She’s just and old fashioned girl with an old fashioned mind…and an old fashioned millionaire (allegedly).

BRIT Nominations 2010

It was bound to happen sometime and this year it has. The judges for the annual British Record Industry Trust (BRIT) awards 2010 have found themselves between a rock and a hard place over the singing phenomenon that is Susan Boyle. Subo has clearly been pointedly ignored and does not feature in the nominations which were posted recently.


Whilst their fellow judges at the rival Mercury Music Awards have always steered a somewhat self-consciously elitist course and voted for acts that are, in their opinion, esoteric rather than populist, the same cannot be said for the BRIT’s who have tended to root for the popular (read ‘good at making money’). So here is the BRIT dilemma: whilst it would like to champion genuine talent in the hope that it will repay them over time, they cannot ignore the fact that Subo has shifted shedloads of ‘units’ and the public loves her. The difficulty is that she is a product of a Simon Cowell TV talent show which somehow diminishes her worth within the music industry.

Oh dear! You can’t help feeling sorry for them, can you? Apparently the official reason why she was left off the nomination list was that she was merely a singer doing cover versions of others’ material and that winners of a BRIT award should show a more rounded musical talent (you mean like the Arctic Monkeys? Haha!) This is all very well and works for most of the BRIT history, except last year when Welsh chanteuse, Duffy, picked up a couple of gongs. I have the greatest respect for Duffy but she does fall rather uncomfortably into the ‘merely a singer’ category. Hmm.

Nevertheless, this year’s ceremony should be packed with interest as we have a veritable plethora of artists nominated in up to three separate awards, those being Lady Gaga, Florence and the Machine, Pixie Lott, Lily Allen and JLS (who are also a product of the ‘X’ Factor – help!). JLS are up against Doves, Kasabian, Muse and Friendly Fires in the Best Band category so there is a good excuse to ensure they don’t win anything. Personally I hope Lady Gaga and Florence sweep the board as they have both, in their own way, livened up a pop world which is in grave danger of taking itself too seriously of late.

Last and probably least, Robbie Williams is in line for the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’ award and I’m sure that the irony will not be lost on him as he has been comprehensively outperformed by his erstwhile bandmates, Take That, for at least the last two years. Perhaps Subo should get it?