Category: music

“I have a confession to make. I like Lady Gaga.” That’s what my friend _____ told me today. I had been hearing a bit about her from here and there and had made some Bowie parallels from the critical comments. I wanted to see if she really was the next Bowie and had watched a few of her videos for the first time the night before my friend made their confession.

One thing that I did know about her is that she has a constantly changing “look.” I had seen her when “Poker Face” came out, and then I saw a poster for “Fame Monster” and didn’t realize she was the same person. The videos reinforced this idea, she totally changes several time during the space of a 4 minute song. Hmm, so she has mutable looks, that’s a parallel with Bowie I suppose. The thing is, I didn’t see any personality differences, or even real narratives like Bowie was wont to do.

The thing that really struck me watching those videos (Telephone, Bad Romance, Just Dance, Poker Face) was how little sex appeal she has. She’s the only attractive woman I have ever seen that can wear a bikini like a uniform. She seems to only ever wear extraordinarily form fitting clothes, or next to nothing. She is a good looking woman, and she has quite the figure, but she doesn’t come close to, say, a Karen O (who is far plainer by any criteria) in sex appeal. This is going to sound strange, but Lady Gaga resembles what I would imagine a gay guy would come up with if he wanted to make a “sexy” woman. All of the obvious things are there, but something essential is missing.

If we assume that this is an intentional thing, then there might indeed be some parallels with Bowie, it’s all very “meta.” What does it mean to be a pop female singer? Is she sexy by dint of the uniform that she wears, sings, or dances? Is Lady gaga a character? Does it matter what character she is, if she looks like that must she wear scanty clothing? Bowie explored some of the ideas behind fame, characters in rock, and image as well. Hell, “Fame Monster” sounds like an album he could have made in ’74 or ’75.

I can’t say that I like her music, but I understand why some people would. If she is indeed trying to explore some of this stuff, she has picked the most vapid, least meaningful genre to do it in. Maybe that’s part of the act. I wasn’t really cognisant of what Bowie was up to back in the early 70’s, for all I know the same criticisms were leveled against him. People are giving the label of performance artist to Lady Gaga, I’m willing to wait and see what she has planned before crowning her as the next Bowie. But I won’t write her off either…

I know, I’m late to the party, especially considering that I work at the Apple store, but I have just discovered genius playlists on iTunes. They’re pretty amazing, I’ve been really impressed with how they work. I kept putting off activating the genius feature because my music library is so huge these days (170.5 gigs and growing). It took forever for it to go through everything, I eventually let it run when I went to bed and it was ready in the morning.

It came up with 12 different mixes from my library, punk, indie rock, alternative pop/rock, new wave, classic rock, alt singer/songwriter, classic R&B, mainstream rock, jazz, folk, and classical. I have serious issues with the names of a couple of the mixes. I loathe the moniker “alternative” when applied to rock music but I understand that it is a commonly used category. They have a much different definition of “New Wave” than I do and Blink 182 and Pearl Jam are poor choices for “punk” music IMO especially considering how much actual punk music I have.

If I ignore the naming conventions I really enjoy the mixes themselves. I think that this works better with really large collections, I probably could have put together mixes just as good but it would have taken me forever. As it is, I can start any of these mixes and really enjoy it.

It also does a good job of making a mix based off of a single song. I’ve saved a jazz mix on my itunes library and I fooled around with it on my iPod to good effect.

Of course whenever you have an automated system to pick out music there will be errors. I’ve had a couple of howlers so far. No, I really did burst out in laughter when these things came up. That jazz mix I mentioned is a great collection of mostly hard bop and scat singing. Inexplicably, it also put in “I will Follow Him” by little Peggy March. A quality pop tune, but it has no relation to jazz at all. The best one so far made my roommate knock on my door to see if I was alright. I was listening to the “punk” mix when a Celia Cruz song came on. My reaction was so loud that he worried about me.

Anyway, I’m having a blast and I highly recommend giving genius a try in iTunes.