Lady Gaga

Iggy Azalea’s ‘The New Classic': How Effective Are Pop Album Reissues?

By Shane Barnes on Sep 8, 2014 10:45am

Iggy Azalea, the Australian rapper whose inescapable “Fancy” was officially named the Song of the Summer, announced today that she would be dropping a reissue of The New Classic. The update, which was announced just five months after the original, will include six new tracks, and at least one of them will continue Azalea’s trend of pop collaboration, this time with Ellie Goulding. With “Fancy” still all over the airwaves, and recent second single “Black Widow” sitting comfortably in the No. 6 spot of the Billboard Hot 100, a reissue seems like kind of a curious move. But, maybe not. … Read More

Music

How the Hell Did Lady Gaga Think Her ‘Do What U Want’ Video Was OK?

By Jillian Mapes on Jun 20, 2014 2:00pm

By now you’ve likely seen clips from a certain music video that are floating around online. A female pop star is lying down on an operating table, presumably naked under a white sheet. Her doctor, looking as club-ready as a surgeon gets, reaches under the sheet. She moans at his touch, and he notes that the medicine must be kicking in. Soon she is passed out, at which point a gaggle of women wearing discount-store slutty nurse costumes come into frame. The nurses party around and on top of the unconscious pop star in a most ostentatious manner while the doctor watches. At one point cooked lobsters are waved like puppets amidst her limp limbs, while a tower of shrimp hovers near her exposed breast. Another nurses mounts the singer’s lifeless body and humps her in a cartoon jack-rabbit way, easily a foot separating their genitals. Meanwhile, the singer, seemingly off in a dream, is writhing around in a dress made of tabloid clippings, in a room wallpapered in more press rumors. A photographer is there, shooting her as she poses, eventually in nothing more than loose newspaper pages. At one point she humps the air for little reason at all. … Read More

Media

Catfishing in the Content Farm: Angela Cheng’s War on Lady Gaga Drags Stan Culture Into the Spotlight

By Jillian Mapes on Apr 2, 2014 12:00pm

Late last year, as Lady Gaga was seemingly everywhere except at the top of the Hot 100 chart, a claim surfaced that she had lost her label, Interscope Records, $25 million on ARTPOP and that they would be forced to make layoffs. Sure, the album underperformed in comparison to Gaga’s previous work, but it still enjoyed sales figures that most artists would be delighted with — it debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart and has to date sold some 679,000 copies stateside, on top of millions more around the world. So how could it have lost so much money? The unsubstantiated report came from music industry “insider” Angela Cheng, and appeared on Examiner.com, a content farm that has done what all content farms hope to do: trick corners of the Internet into believing it’s a credible website. … Read More

Music

Is the Christina Aguilera Version of “Do What U Want” Lady Gaga’s Attempt to Distance Herself From R. Kelly?

By Tyler Coates on Jan 2, 2014 3:06pm

The more I listen to pop music, the less I try to parse the songwriting. Not to be a rockist, but it’s difficult for me to find poignancy in a song written by a team of five to six songwriters, even when — as in the case of Lady Gaga’s “Do What U Want” — the themes are blunt and heavy-handed. Not that I paid much attention to any deeper meanings the first few times I heard the song. With the song’s pretty basic title and the collaboration with erotic-crooner R. Kelly, I wrote off the song as a catchy tune about sex, particularly sexual agency, underscored by the repeated line, “You can’t have my mind.” … Read More

Music

Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga: A Tale of Two Pot Smokers

By Judy Berman on Nov 13, 2013 8:45am

Twenty-Year-Old American Woman Smokes Marijuana in Amsterdam. It doesn’t exactly sound like front-page news, but boy is the media going nuts over the fact that Miley Cyrus puffed on a joint during her performance at Sunday’s MTV Europe Music Awards. Here are some of the actual headlines: “What a Dope! Miley Cyrus Puffs Marijuana Onstage at MTV EMAs in Amsterdam”; “Miley Cyrus shocks yet again as she lets it all hang out and smokes ‘joint’ on stage at MTV Europe Music Awards”; “Pothead Miley Cyrus Lights Up Marijuana Joint Onstage.” … Read More

Music

‘ARTPOP': Lady Gaga Reaches the Limits of Control Freak

By Judy Berman on Nov 11, 2013 1:45pm

Do you remember what pop stars were like before Lady Gaga? It seems like a stupid question to ask just five years into her career, but her aesthetic and attitude spread so quickly upon her rise to fame that it’s easy to forget how different she was from most of her predecessors at the turn of the millennium. A meta-pop star whose career has been marked by carefully orchestrated spectacle, she ended an era when women in music were widely characterized as out of control. But in the past few years — and especially with the release of ARTPOP — Lady Gaga’s meticulous image policing has begun to get in the way of her music. … Read More

Music

The Best Instagrams From Lady Gaga’s ArtRave

By Tom Hawking on Nov 11, 2013 11:30am

No, we weren’t at Lady Gaga’s ArtRave thing last night, and neither were you. But hey, lots of smartphone-wielding little monsters were! Thanks to the wonders of the Internet (and, specifically, Instagram), you too can have the vicarious experience of watching Gaga perform songs from her new album, a record built around a radical fusion of art and popular culture that absolutely no one has ever done before, in a Brooklyn warehouse full of Jeff Koons sculptures. She lives for the applause, don’t you know? Anyway, click through and check out some pictures. … Read More

Music

The 10 Albums You Need to Hear in November

By Tom Hawking on Nov 1, 2013 12:30pm

It’s getting toward the end of the year, which in the music industry means two things: big commercial releases and a precipitous drop-off in quality as the “festive” season draws closer. It’s not all bad, though. In amongst the stocking stuffers and superfluous best-ofs, there are still some quality releases, and as we do at the start of every month, we’ve pored over the release schedules to pick out ten of the… Read More