Switched on Pop - Lady Gaga Is A Perfect Illusion

Episode Date: September 22, 2016

Lady Gaga's new single "Perfect Illusion" is the apotheosis of her artistic statement. She is well known for her visual style that too often overshadows her music. But when taken together, it is evident that Lady Gaga is playing all of us because the non-conformity of her outward appearance is reflected back in her compositions. On first listen, her songs may sound like just another catchy pop tune and this is intentional. Gaga lures us close with the sound of pop fame and then hooks us and reels us into into her dungeon of monstrous sounds. FeaturingLady Gaga - Perfect IllusionLady Gaga - Just DanceLady Gaga - Government HookerQueen - Radio GagaLady Gaga - Love GameLady Gage - ScheisseMichael Jackson - ThrillerPhantom Of The Opera - OvertureJohn Carpenter - Halloween Theme (Main Title)Lady Gaga - Bad RomanceLady Gaga - AlejandroAce Of Bass - I Saw The SignLady Gaga - SpeechlessQueen - Don’t Stop Me NowLady Gaga - So Happy I Could DieNatasha Bedingfield - Pocket Full of SunshineLady Gaga - Born This WayMadonna - Express YourselfLady Gaga - TeethLady Gaga - Bloody MaryLady Gaga - Dance In The DarkTony Bennett and Lady Gaga - Anything GoesTony Bennett - I Wish I Were In Love Again Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So we just want to take a short second to tell you what Switched on Pop means to us and to ask for your support. Nate and I are on a personal mission to make the world sound more beautiful. I know, very lofty, but it's really all about spreading the tools of listening that we use as songwriter and musicologists. That's really what Switched on Pop is for us. Yeah, and we've been getting messages from listeners from like all over the world saying that they're identifying new things. Things are showing us things that we've never noticed in our favorite songs. It's been pretty incredible. And we know that for making this show, those kinds of heightened moments of hearing awesome things in music are a lot more fun when you do it with friends.

That's really why Nate and I make the show is so we can hang out and talk about music and share it with everybody. I kind of think of us more as colleagues, Charlie, but that's awkward. Nonetheless, we need you to find five of your friends, real friends, and turn them on to our show. When more people listen to the show, well, first of all, it's more fun for us, but it also actually really helps support the dozens of hours of editing and production that it takes to make each episode. Basically how it works is that the more people that listen to our show, the more support that we get from our really great sponsors. Yeah, and so once again, find five friends. If you have to, take their phone away from them, go to their Apple podcast app or Google Play app and search for Switched on Pop. Sometimes you have to do it.

It can be hard to understand the name Switched on Pop. I often say it to people, and they look at it. me just in a very confused way. Yeah, yeah. And then sometimes they say like, oh, your show, right? Hooked on Pop. And I'm like, no, that's hooked on phonics. But maybe we should have called it that actually.

Maybe that would have been a better title, which is all to say that you might need to help them out. Hit Subscribe for them. That's, it'll be okay. Then you can listen to the show together and talk about the music you love. You can have as much fun as Nate and I have producing it. Friends, music, one together, beautiful thing. All right. On to the show.

Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm music. musicologist Nate Sloane. So Nate, last week we did an episode about the musician's secret bag of tricks, and we pulled out the modulation. Yes. Yes, that trick that we used to change the keys in all so nefarious and mysterious ways. And, of course, lo and behold, the same day that we released our episode, Lady Gaga, dropped her new song,

perfect illusion that contains a mind-blowing modulation. The key change heard around the world. Yeah, what cruel cosmic timing. I think it's perfect cosmic timing because I am so excited to talk about Lady Gaga's new song, perfect illusion. Because for me, it is an apotheosis of her entire artistic vision. Whoa, okay, let's get into it. It's a bold claim. Yeah, it's a big claim.

I know. I have a whole theory about how this all works together. Oh, this is going to be fun. But before we get to that grand theory, we just need to establish a little bit about who is this, mysterious figure. Yes. Right. Okay. So I feel like her image is much discussed. And I think, you know, who is Lady Gaga? She is a pop star. Right. She is a singer from New York named Stephanie. She is now on a hit drama horror show, American horror show. She is a high profile advocate for

LGBT causes. And she leads a whole movement of people she calls her little monsters and I guess probably most well known for her incredible and bizarre fashion, right? Oh yeah, meat dress. Meat dress. Bubble dress. Cigrette sunglasses. Right. She's got it all.

Literally everything mashed together in some crazy postmodern fashion statement. But I feel like much of the discussion around Lady Gaga ends up being about her image. the vision that she puts out into the world and not so much about the music. And what I want to look into is does her music manifest some part of her larger artistic vision? Ah, okay, almost like there's some separation between the persona and the sound. So we're going to investigate if that's actually the case. Well, yeah, and I think, you know, sometimes I probably am even guilty of it that when I first heard Gaga, I probably was like, okay, this is just any other pop song, not very interesting, all right, I'll let it pass.

And I didn't give it maybe the attention that it was due because I'm going to suggest that there's a lot more going on here. Okay, right, because I had the same reaction. You know, and immediately this music doesn't strike me as being particularly, like, innovative or transgressive in the way that her image is. And I think that might have been due to our listening. It was in the background.

Oh, there's a pop chorus. Okay, interesting. Oh, there's something a little strange. Also interesting. Okay, so let's put it into the fore. So if we're going to ask, does her music hold up to her larger artistic statement? I guess we have to have a better idea of what that is. And I don't want to go down a total wormhole here.

But I think when we look at Lady Gaga, we have to look at what really is a persona being acted on a stage of pop media. I really love how she puts it. She says that she constantly lives between reality and fiction. And she says that one of her great artistic gifts is her ability to live. her self and to liberate others by constantly metamorphosizing. I can't say that. How do you metamorphosizing? Yeah, you got it.

It's even in her music, right? She has this song where she says, I could be your anything, I could be your everything, I could be anything. Oh, yeah. And maybe that sounds like it's a song about, you know, relationship. But I actually think that it's part of her larger narrative. So when we look into her, who is she? What is this narrative? Where does it evolve out of it? We have to go just a tiny bit into who she is, where she's coming from. She is, of course, Stephanie, Joanne, Angelina, Germanata. Nice. Okay. Rebranded as Lady Gaga. You know, just just a quick aside here. I can't resist. I did check out her Wikipedia entry. And I was stopped in my track in the first sentence. She was born on March 28, 1986 at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Charlie, I was born on March 26, 1986 in Lennox Hill Hospital in New York City. Kissing Cousins! Oh my goodness! Boom. Whoa. I was that close to the Gaga supernova emerging from the womb. Please don't steal my identity now that I've said my birthday. So you're part of the monster crew?

Yeah, I guess so. I've been touched. You didn't know it. You've been part of it all along. It's just been talking about stealing identity. She actually gets her name. Ooh, good segue, Charlie. From a song by Queen, Radio Gaga.

Oh, yeah. And she adopted Radio Gaga and then changed it to Lady Gaga, which she is also borrowing because the lady part of her name comes from a culture of drag. She's obviously aware of the sources that she's pulling from, right, two really famous drag queens, Lady Bunny and the Lady the Shabli, both use Lady as their title. So she's pulling from this culture of drag. She, of course, was exposed to burlesque and drag early on. She was actually a burlesque dancer, performing in variety shows and parading, exaggerated representations of people and sexuality.

And she also has lots of friends in the queer community. She is a queer activist. And her name is definitely drawing from drag. Yeah, and she's performed in drag as well, actually. I just thought of this. She did this whole character, Joe Calderon. My name is Joe. I'm one of the guys.

Lady Gaga, because she doesn't want me to see, like she can't stand to have one to be real. I love you. But she says Joe. I'm not real. So I think Lady Gaga is quite aware of the references that she's making from drag culture, from popular culture, no doubt. I think that it's a big part of her artistic statement. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it does something kind of essential that drag does,

that the scholar Judith Butler identifies as a core component of the drag performance, that it is essentially a performance of gender, a heightened performance of gender, and one that's kind of funny and pleasurable, but in fact serves to reveal that we are constantly all performing gender, that gender is not some stable, stable, concrete identity, but instead a fluid kind of stylized, repetitious act, essentially theater, performance, something that we create for each other all the time. And Drag kind of

pulls the curtain back on that. And I think that to a degree, Lady Gaga's larger vision here is about questioning all of the theater of everyday life. She's drawing on those themes from drag and then, I think, expanding them into the whole world of popular culture. Right. And We know that she's incredibly knowledgeable about popular culture. She has a background having studied modern art and postmodernism. She wrote a thesis about Damien Hearst, and she references Warhol in her fashion line that she calls House of Gaga. I think that she's very intentional in the image that she creates.

And in her own words, right? There's this constant reality and fiction happening at the same time, and that is the perfect illusion. Okay, okay, bringing it back. I like this. The whole thing is performance art. Right. It's the theater.

The whole world is a stage. Yeah. Sort of denying the very question that we were trying to ask, who is Lady Gaga? The answer is all of the above and none of the above. She is like a prism or something. I think some of these themes are more surface and obvious when we look at her image, but we need to look at her music. Yes. Yes, we do.

So I want to apply this metaphor of the perfect. illusion through the theatrical and see what it does to our listening. All right. And I think you're going to be surprised by how some of those oh, this is just like a neat little pop song

kind of moments that you might have had in the past about Lady Gaga will explode into, oh my gosh, she is playing with my head. It's all a stage. It's all illusion. All the world's the stage. Take me there, Chuck.

Okay, so the first thing that we need to do is listen to perfect illusion. I think you mean perfect illusion. This was produced by Tame and Paulus Kevin Parker, Mark Bronson, and Blood Pop, a incredible trio behind this awesome lady. So, as I said, how can we hear this through the metaphor of the theatrical? And what ways is she pulling on her drag references and her burlesque background to explode and parody our expectations of the popular and popular music?

I don't know, but I desperately need you to. tell me because I hear the song and while I really like it, I don't, I don't hear those, those kind of those transgressive depths that you're describing. So you got to, you got to tune in just a little bit more. I promise you, it's all there. And she's actually hitting us over the head. Because this theme of perfect illusion is going to weave throughout every single element. It is a motif, which is not just the lyric. It is the musical construction of the song. So where do we start with this song? What's the, what do we, what's the first thing we hear? Two things, I think. We hear electric guitars, fuzzy electric guitars.

Yeah. And this kind of hard to identify high wailing piercing synthesizer sound. Yeah, definitely. And they're kind of, how would you describe those sounds? Oh, man, really kind of jagged, edgy, kind of raucous and maybe slightly unpleasant even. Great. I'm going to suggest that we start in Medius Race. Whoa, okay. Chop in some Latin. I like it. We start in the middle of the performance

because we are in the middle of Lady Gaga's career, and I think that this song, after a long hiatus from her sort of persona, is reintroducing us to this perfect illusion, which is her entire persona and is her music. And it starts us off by unsettling us. There is this, as you describe, pretty vicious, strange guitar synthesizer, And it's actually, I would agree, like not the most pleasant sound to start with.

Yeah, it's almost like an alarm bell or something. It kind of sounds like, you know, when you go out the door that says emergency exit only and you're greeted with kind of this shrieking siren, that's almost the sound for me. This is just the first deception because those guitars, they turn into this really fun, pleasant pop chord progression. the exact same progression the guitars are playing, then gets picked up by the rest of the music and turns into the sort of like driving pop song.

Oh, interesting, yeah, and that high alarm sound gets sort of alighted into the general texture. It doesn't really stand out anymore. Yeah, okay. And so first deception. And we know that we're in the middle of her narrative because she even says it, right? She says, trying to get control,

pressure's taken its toll in the middle zone. Trying to get control. Here we are, trying to get back on track. This is the beginning of the song, but it's the middle of the story. Oh, man. Stuck in the middle with you. Okay, so there's the first deception, the first illusion. Where else?

I'm still skeptical. So maybe you miss that. This one may be easy to miss. Well, it becomes more clear as she goes on. The next most evident piece, I think, is the sort of the motif, which goes throughout the entire song. and it has a really cool musical name. Oh, yeah.

Okay, what is this? It's the deceptive cadence. You're required to say that in the voice of like the guy who does the movie trailers. The deceptive cadence. In a world of authentic cadences, this one was deceptive. Okay, so what's happening? We move into the chorus, okay? Yeah.

And the chorus is the same chord progression. as the verse. And it's a good core progression. But it's strange. And I think some people might think, you know, a person sits on, plays the piano. Those are nice chords. All right, let's just do that.

I think that she's constructed something here very deliberate to hide that illusion in every little harmonic, melodic move that she's making. Whoa. Okay. Yeah, let's do it. Deep, all right. So we have to get a little technical for a second on it. we have to listen to this chord progression.

So first we need to note the song is probably an F-sharp minor. Probably, I think, will become more apparent in a second. Yeah. So it's in a minor key. It's sort of a little bit of a downer. The song's about, you know, on the surface anyway, this perfect illusion is like a relationship breaking up. So it makes sense. So we've got a minor.

We have a minor song. Totally. And the chord progression goes through F-sharp minor. Right. C-sharp minor. Indeed. goes up to this D chord. Exactly.

And then the last chord in the progression is an E chord. And there's the rub, to quote Hamlet. Because the E chord moving back to the beginning of the progression to the F sharp minor chord, it might not sound off, right? But it actually might prefer to go somewhere else. And this is the deceptive cadence. Yeah. And so this has to do with issues of relative minor and relative major.

Let me see if I can get this right. You know this stuff really well, but I think I know it. Basically, like, the relative minor key has all the exact same notes of its relative major. So, like, C major and A minor actually have all the same white notes on the piano, but they have a different tonality. One is happy, one is sad. Right. Yeah. Okay.

So it's like every major scale has an evil twin, a bizarre over a bizar-o-superman, sort of. So what she's doing here is she's playing a chord sort of ball. borrowed from the relative major of F-sharp minor. Ah, okay, the good twin, right. And this E-cord wants to resolve to that major place. I mean, if you listen to it, like, she could have written it this way. But it would have failed because there's no illusion. It's like, instead of giving you the chord that you'd expect after the E,

she gives you the F-sharp minor. She just keeps recycling back to the minor, instead of maybe taking us to this happy place. And she keeps hinting at, the super twin. Yeah. Because if you're not convinced by just the analysis of the chord progression, she's doing it in the melody as well.

And every single time that she sings, it was a perfect illusion. She basically outlines the miradou of the A major key. It feels like, oh, you just like played and landed on the A in your voice. So I expect that maybe you'll do the same thing in the chords. But no, deception. The chords fall back into the minor, and then following suit, her melody also falls down the dotie la.

And lands on the minor. Gotcha. So when she's singing, it wasn't love. Or I should say, it wasn't lov. Yes. It wasn't love. That's the minor melody. Yes.

And then when she's singing, it's a perfect illusion, that's the major melody. Exactly. And she keeps waffling back and forth between the two. Right. So there are two things happening here. There's the illusion in the melody. Yes. And there's the illusion in the harmony.

Yes. And they're both deceptive. They're both deceptive. This is part of her perfect illusion. Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm buying what you're selling, Charlie. This is good. This is good.

At this point, it's totally fair to say at the same time, well, you know, I didn't hear that the first go around. It wasn't obvious. Like, give me some more hints, lady guys. Oh, just wait, Lady Gaga is going to basically hold up a giant billboard in front of us and say, hey, this song is about a perfect illusion. If you didn't get the title, if you didn't get the intro, if you didn't get the chorus, this song is about my whole illusion. So now I think I know what you're about to say. Where are we going? It's the modulation.

It's the modulation. Yes. That's where we start at the top of the episode. Yeah. She modulates. Basically, she takes us into a whole other key. but the way that she does it is so strange. And it's what really bore the song into my brain,

even when I didn't think I particularly loved it. I still couldn't shake it, and this modulation had a lot to do with that. We have to start at the beginning of this section. This is the bridge. And I love Lady Gaga because she writes bridges. Yeah, that's very true. You are a connoisseur of the bridge.

The chords are really interesting here. It takes on a really sort of dark tone. She starts using these different. diminished chords. Keep sort of like walking down this minor scale. Yeah, the baseline is just kind of lugubriously descending into, I don't know, some unknown darkness. Which would lead us to believe that perhaps this song is going to all end in darkness, but I

think that what she's doing here is she is setting us up because this is the climax of the song to go back into the theatrical metaphor, right? We're at the end of the second act and what's going to be. to happen. Well, we're going to go into a whole new territory. In her voice, she's saying, where are you? Because I can't see. She's talking over herself while she's singing, introducing this sort of confusion. And she even breaks the fourth wall. Okay. How do you figure? Well, I think that she references the audience in the theater. She says, where were you? Because I can't see, but I feel you watching me. Weird. Yeah. I don't really get that.

So if you doubt that this is at all any reference to a theater, just hold on a second. Okay. Because just before she hits this modulation, she says, I'm over the show. Yeah, at least now I know. Oh, okay. It's as if she's thrown off her costume, she's walked backstage, I'm out of here, this relationship is over, this illusion is over, it's all up. And we go into the reel. We sail upward a whole step.

to a new key to G sharp minor. And we've left behind the trappings, the illusion, the matrix, so to speak. And what's crazy is that the way that she does it is she sets it up in a way that you think that's never going to happen. Because she uses another sort of deceptive cadence that she turns into a modulation. In these descending chord progressions over the bridge, she lands on this big C sharp chord. Right. And that chord just wants to resolve that. nicely back to our home F-sharp minor.

So for the first time in the whole song, she's finally played that chord that is all that tension that wants to release itself into F-sharp minor, but... The true authentic cadence, not the deceptive cadence. Exactly. The one that finally promises to take us to F-sharp minor for real. Nope. Except it doesn't.

No, she blows right past it and takes us up a whole step, and it's really jarring. Right, it happens... She's created so much expectation that we're going to go back to that darkness, all this descending, that big setup of that authentic cadence. And then, no, we blast up and modulate. Yeah. And it's weird. It is.

It's so different than the other modulations we listened to in our last episode. There's no preparation. There's no build. There's no kind of hint that this thing is coming. It's just a very abrupt and kind of shocking and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It's a very weird modulation. That's because she's just constantly unveiling different levels of this illusion. Interesting.

This is like her head. I'm throwing a lot of metaphors out there, but this is like her head coming up out of the water for air, for clarity. Or is it? I don't know anymore, Charlie. I don't know what's real and what's not. Are we just seeing another illusion? We're through the looking glass. I would suggest that it may not be because in this section,

she keeps saying over and over again it's a perfect illusion and she keeps waffling again back and forth between that major melody and that minor melody while the chord progression keeps doing that deceptive cadence. So she's just like she's hammering that in

over and over and over and over. If you haven't gotten yet that this is a perfect illusion that I'm playing with you then here it is. One last time. Okay so even so it's not. Okay so now you're telling me this isn't the real. This isn't the true, the authentic. This is just another level of illusion. No, because where did we start? We started in the middle. And where do we end in this song? At the beginning. Basically, we end at the beginning. Those dark, crazy guitars and synthesizers come in, take over the song, and then out. Right. So the beginning, which is actually the middle.

The beginning is the middle. Is the end. Oh, man. All right, G, G, G, Jacques. You're bled. blown my mind you. Hey, if you think I've just gone way too deep into this, I think we could go right to the source. Lady Gaga says it beautifully herself. She was interviewed by radio.com, and you just got to check out what she says. All right, let's hear it. This song in particular is about, you know, a failed relationship. Perhaps for me also in a particular way, the public views me as this sort of perfect delusion and that it, you know, hinders my ability to have a human connection with them. It's a song not only about being upset that a relationship is over, but a song also about being upset and confused that it's so hard to find a real relationship

and to find a real connection because we're living in a social media storm right now where there's so many augmented, filtered, perfect delusions around us that we can't figure out what's authentic and what isn't. Interesting. And by extension, we are all kind of mini Lady Gaga's because we are all constantly fragmenting and projecting our own kind of multiple personalities and visions of ourselves out into the world. Well, it feels like she is inviting us into her performance. This is why I like sort of the idea of her, I like going back to her experience as a burlesque performer, sort of blurring all the ideas of what is normal and what is not. Are we all participating in this illusion? Have we all created Lady Gaga from all of our preconditioned imagery of what a pop star should look like? And then she just like turns it on its head.

And we can't help but look at it. Right. We're all participants. And at the beginning of this episode, I said that I had a grander theory that that perfect illusion is, as I said, the apotheosis of her entire artistic statement. No, maybe that's a bit large. So this is like a long game here. I think it is a long game. And I don't think that perfect illusion is in any way an exception.

In fact, I think it continues an incredible history in which she has built up this illusion as one of the biggest stars in the world. And when we come back, we're going to dive into one of her greatest songs, bad romance, and see how she can, how she has created and evolved this musical language and get into some sort of big, crazy grand theory. All right. Journey to the center of the Gaga. Let's go. Euporia of Calvin Klein. The new collection elixir. Three new elixir is perfum intense. Solar. Magnetic. Ball. Pulsa in the banner.

Make the quid. And discover your fragrance euphoria. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement. agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down.

That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, so we've established that Lady Gaga sees pop culture as her stage and that she is putting on some grand illusion of her identity. of our identities, of our expectations with popular music, and she's doing this musically. I wanted to know, Nate, have you started to recognize any trends that Lady Gaga uses in her musical aesthetic to amplify this artistic statement? Okay, so you're saying like compositional signatures that appear again and again in throughout Lady Gaga's

catalog? Yes, exactly. So you want me to just lay them out? Yeah, what do you got? Okay, so here's what I got. I think one thing that we hear again and again in Lady Gaga is this emphasis on something that we might call vocallyes. Yeah. That is not sung lyrics, but kind of sung sound, sung syllables.

She definitely does that. Your rah-rahs, your gagas, your oo-oos, and your doodas? Yes. I mean, these appear again and again in all of Lady Gaga's hits. Yeah. Okay, so that's one. I feel like you approve. I approve.

Okay, good. Okay. And then another thing I detected is this is something you, you totally pointed out in perfect illusion, but I think you explained it even better, this speaking voice she uses, this kind of like interlude section or bridge section where instead of singing, she kind of talks, maybe what the Viennese would call shprechtima, or like speak singing, essentially. Yeah. And I mean, I think other artists do that, but Gaga like consistently does it again and again. Yeah, it's definitely in there. Let's have some fun. This beat is sick.

I want to take a ride on your disco stick. Yeah, it's definitely in there. Absolutely. Okay. You want more? Yeah, what else you got? I want to make you proud, Charlie. You can do it.

I believe in you. Okay, something else she likes to do is use other languages in her songs. French? Yep. Spanish. She's done some German as well. In perfect illusion. It almost sounds like she has a...

a Russian accent sometimes when she sings, it wasn't love. Yeah. And then lastly, I'm gonna say that I hear a similar drum pattern in a lot of her music, kind of this driving, often four on the floor, heavy emphasis on the bass and snare, kind of just like powering through all of her choruses from Just Dance to Perfect Illusion. Yeah. Okay, that's what I got.

That's a, that's some good things. I'm hearing a lot of, of sort of methods of vocalization. Yeah, I mean, I think across her catalog, this is the thing that stands out, is her voice. It's kind of the constant, the inescapable, and the most idiosyncratic maybe part of her music.

I think it's a big part of it, but I would like to suggest that there's even more going on musically and sort of compositional techniques that she uses everywhere. And in order to get us there, I want to go back to one of her biggest songs. Yeah. Bad romance. Oh, so good.

Okay. It's off her second album called The Fame Monster. And what year are we talking here? This is 2009. Oh, dang, that's a long time ago. I know. She's been in the pop sphere for quite a while. Yeah, okay, great.

And this is actually my grand theory. It's actually quite simple. It's the fame and it's the monster. Huh. And that I think that in everything that she writes, there's an element of the famous, and an element of the monster. Now, this might have been the artistic statement

of a single album, but I hear it all over the work that she does. I think she's constantly making reference to our expectations of celebrity and the monsters it creates both of the celebrity and of ourselves. And she does this musically, right?

So the fame aspect. She completely embraces pop song formats. She is a master of taking great cliches. of pop songwriting and then crafting them into over the top

almost parodies of pop songs. Okay. On the monster side, she takes those songs and then manipulates them and twists them and plays with our expectations and inserts these insane,

dark sounds, things that they feel like are coming from the universe of thriller, of Phantom of the Opera, of John Carpenter horror movies. The phantasmagorical element.

We introduced this metaphor of the theatrical, and I think that her sound is a tragedy about pop music. It's the fame, and it's the monster. It's all wrapped up. It's the hamlet of pop songs, of pop artists. Oh, my God, Charlie, you're so deep into it. I love it. I feel like if I could see your apartment,

all the walls would be, like, covered in, like, pencil, and you're, like, connecting. all the dots from one album to the other, and you're like, just like scratching your hair and like, I'm so close, I can figure it. I can't deny it. Okay. Bad romance. It's an amazing song.

It is in many ways for me the beginning of the illusion, and we're going to see that she uses so many of the same techniques in this song as we heard in perfect illusion. So let's take a listen. Right from the start of this song, we have a reference. to the Baroque. This harpsie chord. It feels like we are in the world of Halloween. There is the monster right there.

Okay, so the monster begins. The monster begins. And then immediately it goes into this whoa-oh-oh part. And it feels like we're in the fame. We're in this poppy synth, what could be a big, awesome chorus and a dance anthem. We have pop strings, all that kind of stuff. We have, I think, two halves of those vocalizations.

that you were talking about. She starts with a sort of poppy, uh-u-o-oos, ah-ahs, right? That kind of sound. And then, all of a sudden, the monster comes right back, and we have that Gaga vocalization.

Ra, ra-ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ma-ma-ma-ma-ga. Yeah. The rah-ra-ra-gaga. And we're back into the monster. Okay, so fame monster, fame monster. Yeah, I'm with you. And if you think I'm crazy, we can even quote her,

I want your ugly, I want your disease. I want your everything as long as it's free. She's clearly getting into dark territory. And she's doing it not just in her words and in the texture of the music, but also in the chordal progression again. And she continues to use this method of deceptive cadence misleading us as to where we're going to land in the happy major, maybe the fame, or the monstrous minor, the sadness.

Okay, yeah, I'm with you. So check this out. In Bad Romance, she does basically the same modulation. Here, the song is in a minor probably, but maybe in C major. These are the relative and major and minor of each other, right? When she's singing rah, ra, gaga, it's really clear that we're in minor, right? You play this thing out. It's a dark minor piece.

But then when she sings in the chorus, caught in a bad romance, she lands on a C major, which is the relative major of a minor, and does that same crazy thing where the descending melody in her vocal goes, me Ray Doe and lands on a C major. Like, oh, we're in C. Okay, yeah, I'm with you. And then continues to cycle back into the minor, because the next time that she sings it,

rather than landing on a C major, she lands on an A minor. So this chorus gets sung twice, the second time lands on the minor. And once the chorus is all out, she, of course, waffles back into the rah-rah-gag-a part, and we are clearly back into the monster. This fame monster is like recursively working itself through every element of the chorus.

At a metal level, the chorus is probably more of the fame section. But even within it, there are these questions of, is it the fame or is it the monster? And when we're out of it, we're clearly in the monster back in the verse. I'm persuaded. So, Nate, two points definitely form a line, right? Yeah, I assume this is every, every Gagas song ever does all of this. Statistically significant, absolutely. No, of course, that's ridiculous science.

You can't just take two examples and say it's every single. But as I've gone deep into her catalog, I've seen that this fame and this monster come out all over the place, from her vocal to the sonic textures of her pieces. And even in the sort of meta-narrative of some of her projects. Okay. Show me. Let's point. Let's dot the line. Let's point the graph.

I don't know what I'm saying. So vocal-wise, I think she sort of has four vocal techniques that she uses. she has this sort of big diva voice because Lady Gaga has an extraordinary voice. Yeah. She has the talking voice, which sort of feels like it's... Yeah, kind of, kind of intimate, like she's like bringing you into her confidence or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, those both feel like they're in the fame category.

And then on the monster side, she has this Gaga, rah, rah, thing. And then she constantly growls in her music as well. There's like this monster that comes out. Okay, cool. Okay, right? It gets even more interesting, I think, when we look at her... sound. And if you look at the fame aspect

of her sound, this is the part of her sound where I was like the synth pop and the four to the floor kick drums that you hear frequently in her music, I think made me feel like, oh, these are just like basic pop songs. But as I was suggesting before, I think she's actually like a total craftsman of pop cliche and is

borrowing from the canon of popular music very intentionally. Okay. This one I need some persuasion on. So you're have to make a strong case because I do have a hard time hearing these songs as not just sort of cookie cutter pop confections. I actually, just to say, I'm not sure you're supposed to hear it any different than sometimes cookie cutter pop confections. I think this is like raw

sugar. It's on one level just sweet and fun and on another level, well, maybe it's a little bit better for you than the super refined sugar because she's saying something in it. Just bear with me for a second. Like, take a listen to this. This is Alejandro. For me, this is straight. Ace of Bass. She keeps doing this. She's borrowing from this whole language of stuff that she loves and twisting it. Here's her song, Speechless. What do you hear? I hear like kind of epic, classic rock guitar solo. I don't know, something like, like... How about her namesake? Oh, how about Queen? Okay. Exactly. You want to make a supersonic mad out of you.

Totally. It has that crazy guitar and, The piano and the singer-songwriter-song-writiness of Queen. Can I give you another one? Please. So Lady Gaga has a song called So Happy I Could Die. You ever heard of Natasha Bettingfield? Yeah, yeah, I have. Check out Pocketful of Sunshine.

How the hell did you connect those to? Uncanny, though, right? The melody? Yeah. Ridiculous, right? I got one more for you. Okay. One of Gaga's best songs, born this way. This one is so, sounds.

Sounds so familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. Madonna's Express Yourself. Yeah. People did go on the internet and say, Hey, Lady Gaga, this feels like a rip-off. Well, I think it's one thing to go and take other people's music and sort of just claim it as your own. And I'm not suggesting that that's what's happening here.

I mean, I think writing pop music is such a tricky thing when everyone's using the same couple of chords, using similar melodies and instrumentation. Sure. And selling, you know, confectious super relatable lyrics that are about everything, nothing, and everything in between. Nonetheless, I think Lady Gaga is doing something really interesting here in the fame category. Because we've been establishing that she's got this fame monster statement, part of this sort of this illusion of what is fame, what is the monster, what is reality, what is fiction. Yeah.

And I think that her borrowing from the language of pop music, like in burlesque where you parody something by exaggerating it. I think that that's what she's doing here. She's taking all of our preconceptions of what pop music should sound like and then putting it through a bubble gun machine. So the fact that some of her music may sound kind of dull or derivative

is not unintentional. In fact, that's kind of the point. It's supposed to sound familiar. It's supposed to sound comforting. It's supposed to sound like the pop music we know and love. Yeah, and I wouldn't necessarily say dull or derivative. of as necessarily the way that we hear it,

I think we can hear it in lots of different ways for some people. It might be effervescent joy, fun, but I do think that this is a distillation of popular... No, I hear what you're saying. So maybe I'd rephrase it because I also... I mean, I love bad romance. Maybe I'm being unduly harsh.

Yeah. Maybe it's more that I think often criticism of Gaga will say, okay, the kind of wonderful perversion and transgression that she enacts in her image, in her flouting of norms and rules and boundaries does not come across in the music in the same way, which even if we love and enjoy it, is maybe kind of more predictable

and by the book in a way that her fashion certainly is not. In my response would be that people simply aren't hearing the monster. They just aren't listening very deeply at all because the monster is in there as well. Let me present a couple of examples. Let the monster out of the cage, Charlie. So I suggested that perhaps she's borrowing elements of Phantom of the Opera.

Okay. I want to pull that one together first. Here is the opening to her song, Government Hooker. Check out those giant chorusy, organi, craziness over her operatic vocals. And then boom, pop song. Yeah, that was awesome.

That was amazing. That was totally messed up and I love it. That's just the beginning of the monster. Okay, keep going. I think some of the organi sounds that you're hearing in that the stuff, the chorus, the synthetic voices, that theatric dark sound is something that we actually is carried throughout a ton of her music. It's the guitars in perfect illusion. It's the synthesizers

in bad romance. There's a jagged edge there, a dark, the dark monster. It's the death organ. Yeah, or that that crunchy kind of distorted static almost in born this way. Yes, which even on it, which on its surface is such a positive, like, beautiful acceptance anthem, but then has this crazy like, almost just like, you know, walkie-talkie static in the background. Okay, so the monster is always lurking. I hear you. Then she just has a bunch of pieces that directly reference.

monsters. She's got a track called Teeth. This is almost like a burlesque song, isn't it? Whoa, the baby sample in the background. It's creepy, right? It is kind of, it is a little twisted. I like it. It continues.

She has a song called Bloody Mary. Great, man. Oh my God. This is like the soundtrack to a haunted house. Right? That operatic voice again? Or a hall of mirrors, maybe. This is a terrifying song. And then just one more, she's got Dance in the Dark. Opens up with terrifying guitars.

And I love that line. Silicon poison inject me. Is this pop fun or is this like some toxic bubble gum? Industrial Gaga. And it's everywhere. And that line delivered in the speaking voice, right? In the intimate speaking voice. Sort of pulling from both the fame and the monster.

And so these are just a couple of examples of songs that are sort of more directly dark and monstrous. But in them, you're also going to find elements of the fame, of the catchy chorus. And it's all over the place. And it's maybe crazy to think this big. But I even see it in the arc of her projects, right? So she's kind of left the Gaga persona for a while that we know of going to the red carpets with these crazy dresses and doing over-the-top media things for some more traditional media. And on one hand, on the fame side, she did a jazz album with Tony Bennett called Cheek to Cheek in which she sings beautiful jazz songs.

And though we're not such great romances, we know that we're bound to answer when we propose. Anything goes! Really nothing monstrous in this whole thing. Yeah. While airing on network television, American Horror Story. It isn't our precious virus that makes you. It isn't who you kill or who you screw. It's the heartbreaks.

Bigger than better. There's the monster. She's got the fame project and the monster project happening both at the same time. Oh, okay, okay. Good stuff, Charlie. You know, just as a quick aside, I secretly know that Tony Bennett predicted his collaboration with Gaga years before. How so?

Listen to this excerpt from his recording of I wish I were in love again. No more strange. Yes, I'm all sane, but I would rather be Gaga. That's great. Oh, man. So it was destined. Yeah. And to talk about destiny and presaging things, this has been Lady Gaga's trajectory from the beginning.

She has built up this image of the fame, the monster that comes out of it. She has made us question what is popular, what is real between the author, the character, the music, the image. It's all constantly in question. And I have this great story actually brought to us by our producer, Pergo. Pergo Lizzie, who was actually on one of her very first tours. Hey, Charlie, hey Nate.

Hey, everyone. This is Pergo, consulting producer for Switched-on Pop, as well as numerous other music podcast and reality television projects. So Charlie, we were talking about Gaga the other day, and you had mentioned your theory of how the fame and the monster shows up in pretty much everything she does. I think I can back this theory up a little bit, and I'd argue that she's been doing this from the very beginning.

In 2009, I was tour managing an opener on her club tour. It was mostly House of Blues-type places all over the country. Just dance and poker face had just started blowing up, and she could have done much bigger places, but the timing was a little off. So it was a pop tour, and they sold out every night of the tour. But they blew the whole budget on gear and costumes. It was like bright lights everywhere, tightly choreographed dancing,

and stunts like she rode on stage on a Vespa. But the most interesting thing about it for me was this one section in the middle where they'd bring out a piano, Spotlight on Gaga, at center stage. And at that point, after all the big showy stuff, I think she wanted everyone to see who she was musically. Gaga comes from a background where she used to play with no backing track. She's a real singer, a real songwriter.

It's not boy band written by committee pop. This is an artist with a voice and the chops to back it up. She showed us the monster with the dancing and the costumes and the over-the-top showmanship and everything, but she showed us the fame when she sits down at the piano solo and plays us her songs. The thing is, the monster is there in the quiet moments too. She had something to prove that she has the talent to back up the fame

and maybe the monster's there to make sure we can't look away. What I love about this story is that she's constantly revealing hints at who the real Stephanie is as a way of getting us to egg on and question, wait, then who is Lady Gaga? And it's hard to know what is real and what is not.

Are those solo performances the real Lady Gaga? Or are they not the real Lady Gaga? Or is the whole thing, Lady Gaga? Right. And that's what's so cool about this song to me now is that you can see in the larger arc that you've kind of traced of her career, that perfect delusion should be kind of pulling back the curtain. This is who I really am.

This modulation is going to take us to the land of reality up to G-sharp where everything is real and clear. But, of course, that's not the case. It's just another perfect illusion. It doesn't, there is no, there is no gaga. There's no, there's no true gaga. It is just this, this endless illusion. I love this.

And she's done it right from the start. So in any case, she's got this big album coming out. It feels like we're just in the middle of this narrative of one of the biggest pop stars in history who is making us question what popular music and popular culture even is. It's a grand illusion. I'm so excited to keep writing that wave of the illusion. This episode, a Switched on Pop, was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And edited by me, Nate's Slate. And thank you to Pergo-Purgo-Purgo Lizzie for your awesome story about Lady Gaga and your help producing this episode.

And as always, big thanks and shout out to Luke Harris, who makes beautiful artwork for Switched-on-Pop. And I also have to say thank you to our listeners who wrote in with feedback on modulations and all your ideas for a playlist that you'll find on our website, switchedonpop.com. If you have more ideas, you can tweet at us at Switched On Pop. You can find more episodes of Switched On Pop at our website, Switchedon Pop.com, or any more. you get your podcasts, especially on iTunes where it would be really helpful if you left our show or review. And it's also a great place to check out other shows on the Panoply Network, of which we are a very proud member.

And tune in in two weeks as we explore the music that surrounds us constantly that you've probably heard more than any other song and yet have rarely thought about. Until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.