She Calmly Smokes A Cigarette While Her Pyrotechnic Bra Activates

Which evocative title was taken from the Wikipedia summation of the video for the first track on this LP. No, we’re not doing Saxon again today.

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After a wonderfully hearty and wholesome weekend in the Lake District yomping up hills, subsisting off a meagre diet of sunshine, cheese, crackers, cider, sweat and chips*, I woke up this morning barely able to walk downstairs and strangely in the mood for sumptuous, silly, high-concept pop. I found myself reaching for Lady Gaga The Fame Monster.

Flash forward three hours and I had to close the blinds so as not to alarm the neighbours with my elaborate high energy routine to ‘Telephone’, my calf muscles having been suitably warmed up by that point. The cat was unimpressed, but she has always been more of a classic rock feline.

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I really have a thing for Lady Gaga’s first two LPs, smart, articulate, culturally literate pop music, laced with some true party bangers that I have, on occasion, lurched around to in public, decorum be damned. The Fame Monster, released as a separate LP over here in Blighty is a good one and I am a bit of a sucker for the rather gothic picture of our Stefani bleeding black eyeliner on the flipside.

Music? Interestingly The Fame Monster drew from all sorts of cheesy Europop and techno, rather than the more hip-hop influenced sounds that had become the de rigueur identikit palette for any big lady popster of the time. It works too, despite my very variable tolerance for it.

Straight off the bat ‘Bad Romance’ is almost Jim Steinman-esque in its sheer wrongness** and scale. Veering from syllabic nonsense, pretty pop and suggestively Balkan stomping^ it obeys only its own internal, outside world be damned; there’s a lot to admire in that.

I have less time for the holiday disco schtick of ‘Alejandro’, Madonna nailed it perfectly back when the world was still young, but it is still perfectly done and I did find myself humming it in the post office the other day, which is the whole point of pop. ‘Monster’ is a darkly lustful oddity, if a little over-reliant on Autotune for comfort, all about, well, you know, that sort of downstairs stuff, ‘We might have fucked, not really sure, don’t quite recall’. Ouch.

Then we go almost full Queen with ‘Speechless’ which I really do like. I can’t help feeling it would be a kick to hear Freddie Mercury singing such an unambivalent lyric about a man and I wonder if he would have done so if he’d lived. It’s a goody and I like it when Lady G gets to flex her vocal muscles a little more.

The Fame Monster‘s backside gets off to a poor start with ‘Dance In The Dark’ which aims for Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ and hits Earth at sub-Roxette level. I rather like ‘So Happy I Could Die’ for all the wonderfully daft teenage drama of the title and its smooth stylings. Ditto ‘Teeth’ which is a great little track with a fun stomping backbeat that is equal parts Cossack and western^^.

All of which clears the way for ‘Telephone’^*, which is an all-time utterly irresistible funster for me. I read an appallingly convoluted and dare I say pretentious explanation by Lady G about how the song is about her workaholic, restlessly creative nature – I choose to believe that’s all retro-fitted bollocks*^. Sorry but the song is out there now and belongs to all of us who choose to interpret it absolutely literally. Totes genius track, no argument, I really can’t stay still to it.

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The Fame Monster is an occasionally excellent, occasionally flawed and always interesting little LP. Sadly much as I admire her she has only touched these heights again once or twice since for me and I find her performative relationship with fame and the megastar wattage she lends to good causes more interesting than her music most days now**^.

And now, if you will excuse me I am off to calmly smoke a cigarette while my pyrotechnic bra activates.

1080 Down.

PS: Why do I keep thinking about Biff Byford wearing a pyrotechnically enhanced brassiere? maybe it is best not to delve.

*not all in the same dish; that would dilute the apple-y goodness.

**I concede it really would have benefitted from a few explosions, revving bikes and just maybe a cathedral bell tolling in a graveyard at midnight; but name me a song that wouldn’t.

^one of my top 7 types of stomping, that.

^^one of my top 7 types of stomping backbeat, that.

^*I refuse to call it ‘Telephone (Featuring Beyoncé), one of my top 7 gripes, that.

*^one of my top 7 types of bollocks, that.

**^I really cannot think of a young artist who has actively striven for and done more for LGBTQ+ inclusion and wellbeing than she has. Not many younger mainstream artists were as willing to embrace these causes back then, she normalised it in the pop world, it is one of the top 7 things I like most about Lady Gaga.