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Artist: Lady Gaga

Album: The Fame Monster

Reviewer: Ben Patashnik

NME, 2009

Writing Disorders: Ambiguity Sickness

Most Emo Phrase: “As someone who believes hardcore punk to be mankind’s highest artform, Lady GaGa is the antithesis of my fucking soul”

Hi, Ben. Since today Pitchfork is featuring albums that have names approaching 200-characters in length, I figured I’d venture overseas instead. Thankfully I found your bit on Lady Gaga. Goodness gracious, you don’t pull any punches on this scourge of the land I’ve been hearing about…this “popular music.”

“Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? About 99 per cent of pop is drudging twuntery assembled by blank-eyed robots who are unjustly rewarded with mountains of cash, while all my favourite bands languish and die in places like Tacoma, Washington.

Kind of like how 99% of hardcore is a carbon copy of Black Flag? Not that I listen to nearly enough hardcore to make that statement confidently, but since we’re flinging hyperbole around, I have about as much a chance of being right as you do.

Bitching about pop musicians and the evil music industry is getting old. It’s easy to say that Adam Lambert, Rihanna, or the New Kids on the Block curdle civilization’s milk, or that Sony and EMI are hell-bent on destroying “good” music and force-feeding the masses a lump of soma with every flick of the FM switch. But people buy music they like, just like they always have. And no matter how many hardcore-lovers write purple prose labeling those millions of free consumers as idiots, music is still going to be driven by taste. If music was porn, then pop would be straight-up screwing and hardcore punk cartoon sex. It’s about taste and pleasure. Just as most people don’t get off watching Tinkerbell getting molested by Peter Pan, most people don’t find particular solace in muddled diatribes against Margaret Thatcher set to a 220 beat.

Furthermore, Ben, at a time when radio is about as obsolete as the MacDonald’s McDLT, the pop-is-murder argument no longer has much of a leg to stand on in this free listening environment called the internet. This generation of Pandora, Grooveshark, and MOG still sends heroes up the pop charts. They do it because they like the music.

…By the way, I had to look up “twuntery.” Here’s what I got:

“Extreme exhibitions of silliness, stupdity, child-like behaviour, tomfoolery, shenanigans, capers, joking-around, monkey business, larking about, toungue-in-cheek leg-pulling and/or high-jinks”

Wow, throw a Mohawk on that and call it hardcore.

Jokes aside, you write like a drama queen, Ben.

“Bad Romance” would be hateful if it didn’t have a chorus so wonderfully big it dwarfs the industry of a million angry dudes with guitars.”

I think it depends on which angry dudes with guitars you’re talking about. If you mean hardcore dudes, then I don’t think it takes much more than a hummable melody to dwarf them. But more to the point, what do you mean by “hateful?” Do you mean that you personally would hate this song without the chorus or that the song itself is hateful without the chorus? Was “Rah-Rah-Ah-Ah-Ah” the opening line in “Mein Kampf” or something?

Bring on the picky-eater BS:

“Those new songs are fine, even though “Dance in the Dark” and “Monster” are slightly too disposable”

So…they retain too much of a ground-turkey smell to be recycled or are too narrow to be fashioned into coin containers? Do you mean that those songs don’t have as much replay value as the others do in your humble opinion? You might try slightly writing that in the future.

I’m sure you have to go catch that sell-out crowd of 10 at the hardcore show, Ben, so I’m going to end this on my favorite bit of self-serving nonsense you managed to pull out of the ether:

“In the same way as Radiohead battle computers and learn new instruments to hew their sculptures while Fuck Buttons and HEALTH discover new sonic languages, she uses pop, its producers and masks and all its artifice, as her tool of self-expression.”

So a musician uses something to do with music to make music? Wow, deep man.