December 20, 2014

Lady Gaga and the Grammy Award winners

Slant Magazine has published their list of the 11 worst albums of the year, and coming in at number 11 is none other than Cheek to Cheek, Lady Gaga's jazz pop duet album with Tony Bennett.


Here is what they had to say about it:
"Lady Gaga fancies herself a renaissance woman, capable of shifting genres as ably as she changes Halloween costumes. And though she claims to have been singing "jazz" all her life, she overzealously belts through the standards on Cheek to Cheek like a precocious teenager performing show tunes at a high school talent show. The difference is that this amateur is backed by a team of admittedly competent, professional musicians and, of course, Tony Bennett, who, though not exactly in peak form here, manages to escape the whole charade almost unscathed. Almost. It's tempting to praise Gaga for wiping off the war paint, but that's like giving a lollipop to a toddler for not shitting in the living room."
 Read the rest of the list for yourself: HERE.

This writer at Slant Magazine is obviously not buying Lady Gaga's claims to have been singing jazz for as long as she says she has (though with her record of lying, who really believes anything she says anymore?) and calls her out for being an amateur.

And he's not the only one. This article from the Guardian says of Gaga's performance: 
"Gaga’s gallop through evergreens such as Anything Goes, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love and Let’s Face the Music and Dance deserves a merit badge for trying. She’s head-over-heels in love with this music clearly; but her rhythmically square, shouty delivery is more generic Broadway than anything convincingly to do with jazz."
Despite that, and despite its lukewarm reviews (3 Stars from Rolling Stone, 3 Stars from Billboard, 2 Stars from Slant Magazine), Cheek to Cheek has been nominated for "Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album" at the 57th annual Grammy Awards.

If she was after a Grammy, working with Bennett might have been a good move; after all, Tony Bennett holds the record for most wins in that category with 11 in total.

And, speaking of The Grammy Awards...


Lady Gaga is about to go on tour with Tony Bennett, but as of yesterday has announced that she's working on new music with two more Grammy Award winners: Nile Rodgers and Diane Warren.

So what does this mean? Is she going to drop the "Jazz" thing and work on pop/rock music instead, as some of her fans seem to think?

What about when she said, "I'm planning to release one jazz album a year. I think I will continue to do that forever"?

With so much going on all at once in the world of Lady Gaga, and her penchant for not really following through with things, what do you think is going to end up happening in the end?


December 8, 2014

The life of a flop star

Does she really have nothing better to do?


According to the Daily Mail, Lady Gaga has been seen to make SIXTEEN different outfit changes in one week. The only question on my mind is: who cares?

No, really. Who cares?


The same woman that said "All of my clothing has iconography buried into it" is now dressing like a shapeless sack of potatoes.

She's changing outfits four, five, six times a day... and for what purpose? To get her picture taken? This is attention-seeking to the highest degree, not a show of "iconography".

Hey, Gaga. When you have a new album out, and a new tour planned, maybe you should be focusing on that instead of playing dress-up all day long, hmm?

(Oh, and LOL at her rep having to come out and make a statement that she's not pregnant. Guess that's what happens when you run out of things to wear and you have to put something on that does your form absolutely no favors.)

And in other news...

                                       http://cdn.necolebitchie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Lady-gaga-and-her-dad.jpg

TMZ reports that Lady Gaga has given her father full financial control over her $24 million Malibu estate. This would allow him to take out loans on the property, as well as lease or even SELL it, as long as it's in Gaga's best interest.

So, what could this mean for Gaga? Is it really that she just trusts her father to make the best decisions for her financially? Or is something else going on behind the scenes?

Does this remind you of anyone else?

What do YOU think is really going on?


November 24, 2014

The broken promises of ARTPOP

In Lady Gaga's own words:

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It all started a mere four months after the release of Born This Way. In September of 2011, Gaga announced that she was already working on her next album, which her management at the time, Troy Carter, hoped would be given away for free.

Now that it's (finally) over, let's look back and see what promises Lady "I'm not a liar" Gaga made and broke during the ARTPOP era beginning right at its inception.

Tons of songs confirmed, recorded, and later dropped... tons of videos planned, recorded, but never released...

And almost NEVER an explanation or an apology for it.

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Now we're officially in the Cheek to Cheek era. But don't think for a second that a new era means a new attitude. Gaga's already spun a couple of lies about Cheek to Cheek that have disappointed her fans, namely:
   

Are we ready for a new era? Is Gaga?

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November 8, 2014

Just call her "Lady Discount"

The artRAVE (and the ARTPOP era) is coming to a close. With only a handful of dates left, you'd think fans would be scrambling to pick up tickets for the chance to see Lady Gaga perform live - especially since she won't be performing as a solo artist again for at least a year or so.


But no. As it turns out, tickets to see Lady Gaga have hit (presumably) an all-time low, with tickets to the artRAVE being sold in the secondary market at a staggering 90% off face value. According to Forbes, there were tickets available for tonight's show in Barcelona for as little as $4.70.

Yes, you read that right: $4.70. To see a full-length concert from one of pop music's biggest former stars.

In a different article, Forbes states that the tickets for Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett's shows are so high in demand that second-hand tickets are available for the average price of $1000 (for the NYE show)... but that's a bit misleading.

If you actually go to Stubhub, you'll see that there are quite a few tickets in the somewhat reasonable ~$200-300 range. Sure, there's a whole page of tickets that are up for a few grand each, but no one is going to pay that. Not when the exact same tickets are available for $200. Scalpers know to falsely inflate the numbers until the very last minute - and if prices are already dropping down from a couple thousand dollars to a couple hundred dollars, it makes you wonder just how in demand the tickets really are.

No matter how you look at it though, you can clearly see that there is a much bigger demand for the Tony+Gaga duo than there is for Gaga on her own.

Kind of makes you wonder who exactly is the one in demand, doesn't it?


October 30, 2014

Why did the "bubble burst"?

According to the Daily Mail, "Lady Gaga has become an oldies act at the age of 28."

     http://thehonestyhour.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Lady-Gaga-ARTPOP-Berlin.png  

They gave the artRAVE 2/5 stars, saying "in concert, you get the best and worst of her, all wrapped up in one perplexing package."

Apparently, she came on a "tiresome 35 minutes late" and let the show run an extra 13 minutes long.

"I'll have to pay a fine, but that's okay. I don't give a shit about money," she said.

And this is where we get our flashback of her buying a $24million mansion and writing brilliant lines like "I am rich as piss" for the album she's touring. Because someone who doesn't care about how much money they have wouldn't possibly brag about it. Or live extravagantly. Right?

Anyway, they go on to say of the concert that "...while the eyes are enjoying [a] feast, the ears are being offered fast food."

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And, "The tracks from the last two albums are largely junk, with the role of the bright orange slice of plastic cheese going to a series of ghastly guitar solos."

Maybe the worst part of the whole thing is her lack of self-awareness. "Gaga herself seems to have no idea how bad these songs are," they say. "She throws away most of the old hits early on, leaving Bad Romance as the only ace in her hand for the finale."

Their last complaint of the show was that she gave "the longest speech heard at a gig since Kanye West’s infamous lecture at The Big Chill in 2011, and only marginally less maddening."

So, besides the visuals, did they actually like anything about the show? Yes - they go on to compliment her rendition of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" at the end, saying that only in jazz does it appear that she really does care about the music.

(Hey, didn't we used to hear that very same rhetoric when she first came out singing pop?)

   http://static.entertainmentwise.com/photos/Image/1308lgaga1.jpg

Anyway, they state that while that while she's sold an estimated 150 million records worldwide, her album sales in Britain look like this:
    >The Fame/The Fame Monster (~3 million) >Born This Way (~1 million) >ARTPOP (~200,000)
And, in a similar fashion, her worldwide album sales look like this:
    >The Fame/The Fame Monster (~15 million) >Born This Way (~6 million) >ARTPOP (~2.5million)

The plummeting album sales are not unique to Britain.

Why did the bubble burst?

"In her first year, Gaga pumped out proper hits, starting with Just Dance and culminating in Bad Romance, but then she and her sidekicks suddenly lost the knack," they say. "The title of Artpop says it all: she considers herself an artist, while the public sees her as a pop star."

Basically, she's not embracing what her audience sees her as, and instead demanding to be something else - whether they accept it or not (and they're not).

Read the review + article for yourself HERE: "Less Lady Gaga than Lady Bla-Bla: The bubble has burst for a very simple reason"

To sum it up: her music since The Fame/Fame Monster is terrible, and the "I'm an artist" mantra that she's trying to beat into our heads is just not working.

Do you agree?

What do YOU think is the biggest reason for her downfall?