Lady Gaga – Dance in the Dark
And yet, for some reason, it appears she’s gone for the song that has her and Beyonce yelling at each other as the single instead. Funny, that…
[Website]
[5.67]
Matt Cibula: “I am on the verge of being embraced by a bunch of internet music critics; what can I do immediately to kill my momentum?”
[3]
Ramzy Alwakeel: A choppy, iron-pumping electro production bears much the same relationship to the song’s germinal material as GaGa’s striking marketing does to her capabilities as a songwriter. The waveform is high octane, but the lyrics have no more wit nor manners than “Lucky” by Britney Spears, while the harmonic work here has all the sophistication of recent Snow Patrol.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: Starts out mixing doo-wop Morse code with porn-moaning metal machine music, turns briefly into Grace Jones covering the Normal, then into upbeat downbeat dance-pop that, on a Gaga scale at least, feels kind of generic. Some generic, huh? Then stick a “Vogue”-type rap in there somewhere, and stuff about being a dressed-up vamp tonight. All in week’s work, and her week beats your year.
[7]
Kat Stevens: The compressed saxophone hook is absolutely rotten and the chord progression is even duller than “Just Dance”, barely registering on the batshit-o-meter. Then Gaga whips out a spoken word middle eight with ‘find your freedom in the music, find your Jesus, find your Kubrick/you will never fall apart Diana, you’re still in our hearts’ and the big red arrow swings firmly back into the WTF zone. Is she actually taking the piss?
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Gaga’s voice is chopped and mangled in highly unpleasant ways, which sadly detracts from her most intriguing production yet. The “Vogue” rap is delightfully off the chart in terms of nuttiness, but for all the wide-eyed, coded sincerity, this is like being comforted by a robot with a broken speech synth.
[6]
Alex Ostroff: The Fame Monster seems to be where GaGa’s hooks finally catch up with the rest of her persona, adding more influences to her bag of tricks. “Bad Romance” updated “Poker Face” with baby talk and Hitchcock references, while “Alejandro” cribs Eurotrash, Croatian melodrama and Ace of Base. “Dance in the Dark” aims higher than both. The track is lusher than most of her earlier singles, and finally ditches the JustPokerDirtyBoysDance synth patch that made The Fame sound particularly same-y. Lyrics that, for the first time ever, approach emotionally resonant are just an added bonus: “Baby loves to dance in the dark / cause when he’s looking she falls apart.”
[7]
Ian Mathers: The unabashedly sincere, temporarily Madonna aping “Dance in the Dark” is either the best or worst sign for Lady Gaga’s possible longevity yet. It lacks the daffy, witty insouciance of Gaga’s best material (“Pokerface” “Paparazzi” — even “Bad Romance”, which this song helps me realize I underestimated) and that “Vogue” section is a shame — if there’s any modern pop star who doesn’t need to pay homage to her predecessors, it’s Gaga. But even though “Dance in the Dark” has less of her ‘voice’ than Gaga’s other singles to date, it’s still a pretty great song, the stuttering crashes of the production segueing surprisingly well into a warm 80s throwback of a chorus. To the extent that the song succeeds it’s down to Lady Gaga the craftswoman rather than Lady Gaga the personality, and she pulls it off.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Stuttered vocal sample, machine gun sample, Kraftwerk-esque synth line anchor, stupid lyrics about silicon, saline, and her boyfriend thinking she’s a lez — the first seventy minutes shove their smutty pleasures hard enough to compensate for an underwhelming chorus. So what. This record is sensationalist from start to finish, seeking no referents in everyday life or how human beings talk to each other. It’s a drag queen version of life, actually, which, if you peek beneath the silicon and saline, says loads about how human beings should talk to each other.
[8]
Anthony Miccio: Why does she even release songs before videos?
[4]
“Alejandro” cribs Eurotrash, Croatian melodrama and Ace of Base.
So did “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” on The Fame. Well, maybe not the Croatian part, but that was her first blatant Ace of Base homage. And in part due to the fact that Ace of Base sound nothing at all like Blondie (see “Boys Boys Boys” and “Summerboy”) or Lisa Lisa (see “Brown Eyes”), I’m still not sure why some people think The Fame sounded “samey.”
Though actually, I think I might hear as much of the faux-Spanish “Chiquitita” side of Abba in “Alejandro” as Ace of Base. (She even says “Fernando” in it, to provide a clue! There’s also a dash of “La Isla Bonita,” plus the public domain playground chant “ollie ollie income-free.”)
Otherwise, fwiw, I’m definitely liking the new Fame Monster tracks (and will probably change The Fame to Fame Monster (Deluxe Edition) on my year-end top ten list to accomodate them), but I wouldn’t say I like them more than what’s on The Fame. (Also don’t remotely see how “Pokerface,” say, sounds like “Paparazzi” except in the sense that they’re clearly by the same artist. And so on. Though then again, my wife swears “Pokerface” sounds exactly the same as “Bad Romance” to her, and my reply is usually “how can that be?? they rip off two entirely different Boney M songs!!, so what do I know? Also, as Metal Mike Saunders has pointed out, Gaga really belts and booms out “Bad Romance,” disco-diva style.)
I’ll concede that The Fame was samier, not same-y. Every track on The Fame Monster sounds pretty distinct from one another both stylistically and thematically to my ear. While Eh Eh and Brown Eyes and Summerboy and Paparrazi are fairly distinct as well, the bulk of the album is this: Just Dance, Love Game, Poker Face, I Like It Rough, Starstruck, Beautiful Dirty Rich, The Fame, Money Honey, Boys Boys Boys which between them use maybe two different templates.
Which isn’t to say that they haven’t all grown on me and that I don’t enjoy them all to varying degrees (many more than Dance in the Dark), but the combination leads to a far less varied album than Bad Romance vs. Monster vs. Speechless vs. Alejandro vs. Telephone. Perhaps it’s just that The Fame had too much RedOne for my liking?
Also, The Fame had essentially two kinds of songs: 1) I quite like boys and sex, often in combination. 2) I quite like Fame and Money. And I suppose thematic coherence vs. repetition is a silly argument to have, but it seems like the new EP has more and different things going on under the surface, compared to the monomania of the album.
Right now, I’d say that the sincerity of the newer tracks (outside of “Bad Romance,” maybe her best song period) doesn’t generally stand up to the wackiness of the older material. I’m not sure how much I care about Lady Gaga being “emotional”; I understand why people hear the new ones that way, but it makes her seem less herself, somehow. So I wish the new songs were zanier, less this-could-be-anybody. But maybe their weirdness will reveal itself with time (as, admittedly, happened to me with some older ones that inititally struck me as generic.)
Or maybe I should re-phrase that: Emotional resonance is obviously a plus (and I find parts of “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” etc. quite moving actually), but I doubt I’d consistently want it from her at the expense of, say, crazy stomping wacked-out nonsense syllables.
I think the “Bad Romance”/”Pokerface” similarities happen when she goes to “Ooh la la ga ga” part, during which I often unconsciously think of “puh puh puh poker face / puh puh poker face” instead. Then in the next verse instead of doing “Bad Romance” you just go straight into the monotoney “Pokerface” verse and switch back (or forth) to “Bad Romance” for the chorus.
Yeah, fair, but the wacked out nonsense syllables are there, mostly! They’re just now window dressing rather than the point. Or maybe the point IS the window dressing. Telephone, Bad Romance, Alejandro and Monster are all pretty bonkers in their own right. And Teeth is just plain weird.
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