Her music is inoffensive if not banal. Her performances and other antics though, are probably significant. That song, "Alejandro," really is just Ace of Base dressed in GaGa. it's almost embarrassing. She's important though, in a way Michael Jackson or Madonna was important. She's kind of a unifying factor; everyone knows her songs. I'd say she's more ubiquitous than Kelly Clarkson or Beyonce. How she managed to do that so quickly, I have no idea. There's something nice about having a universally recognized music figure. Our best pop musicians have also pushed social boundaries. Um, those dancers in that clip for instance. Besides what they were dressed in (yuck), and the rather effeminate choreography, it was men dancing hand in hand with other men on primetime network television. Her comments or implications about her own sexuality and even her gender are completely whacky, are gimmicky and probably largely fabricated. BUT, it gets all of America talking about all sorts of things.
She's a smart woman, and so I'm allowing myself a little bit of hope that she will grow as an artist and provide us with some truly fantastic pop music. She's not there yet, but she might be on the right track. The music video for "Telephone" is absolutely phenomenal. The homage to Tarantino is worth watching if for no other reason than her crazy phone hat and her cigarette glasses. And wow, I was really just linked to Perez Hilton's blog from here. Wasn't expecting that.
