Quote:
Originally posted by JayyBakerr
Oh, you mean Kesha?
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Yeah.
It's the
NY Times, so they have to present both sides of the issue.
Interesting snippets:
Her fingerprints are all over the revised images of Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Beyoncé; and on new artists like Kesha, Janelle Monáe and Nicki Minaj. These performers might not cite Lady Gaga as a direct influence, but the work she’s done since her 2008 debut album, “The Fame” has nudged loose conventional boundaries. The space for women in pop to try out new aesthetic identities hasn’t been this vast in some time.
Its video finds Ms. Perry frolicking in a candy fantasyland, pinup-girl style. But toward the end she’s shown dancing with cupcakes on her breasts, quickly followed by a scene in which she attaches a pair of whipped cream dispensers to her bra and fires away, leveling an army of Gummi Bear rapscallions. What it means is anyone’s guess, but the license to create such absurdist, post-sexual theater feels particularly Gaga-esque.
Kesha, though, has no such obstacle. Like Lady Gaga she expresses herself wholly through her exterior. But if the very abrupt rise of Kesha — whose first album, “Animal” (Kemosabe/RCA), had its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart in January — has proven anything, it’s that performance doesn’t always equate with art. In her most adventurous moments Kesha has looked as if she were dressed for a “Saturday Night Live” parody of Lady Gaga. Her secondhand quirk doesn’t work.
Perhaps the most Lady Gaga-like of all contemporary artists is one who has almost nothing in common with her musically. Unlike Lady Gaga, the rapper Nicki Minaj doesn’t shy away from sweat in her lyrics. She’s not aiming for abstraction or distance.
If Lady Gaga has had direct impact on anyone, it’s been, most surprisingly, Beyoncé, who has spent the majority of her career impervious to influence from her peers. Yet in the last year, in the wake of a pair of collaborations with Lady Gaga — “Telephone” and “Video Phone” — she appears to have come alive. The videos for those songs showed her to be far more humorous than ever before. And her most recent video, “Why Don’t You Love Me,” in which she portrays several versions of a dissatisfied midcentury housewife, is one of her best, and one of her most vivid. It’s as if Lady Gaga swooped in and infected Beyoncé with a bug, a vampiric chain of events.
Gaga praise/shade:
Lady Gaga has taken that movement to its logical end, almost removing the music altogether. She’s an often great singer; that she hides that so well is one of her many tricks. (But she’s not much of a dancer, which for someone so interested in seamless performance is a real weakness, and a rarely discussed one.) And her songs are perfectly blank, mere skeletons to drape herself around.
Don't deny it.