still fall ;)

[piranha]

still my favourite colourway, this gradation from green to yellow to red. one of those things that look great in nature, but which i've never seen captured in clothing.

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for some unfathomable reason i have suddenly become fascinated by lady gaga -- yes, i HAVE lived under a rock for the last few years.

Comments

[firecat]

for some unfathomable reason i have suddenly become fascinated by lady gaga

Oh I'm glad to know I'm not the only person with several decades to my name who is fascinated by lady gaga! What is it about her that fascinates you?

[piranha]

is it unusual to pay attention to her if one is older? i guess her audiences look young, but i am kinda used to that from looking at audiences of anyone who wasn't in a rock group when i started listening to music, *heh*.

i don't actually know the answer to your question. i was originally looking up taylor swift because i heard a song on the radio and asked who she was, and the paramour said "some kind of pop star", and i thought she sounded a little bit country, so i cruised for info (yes, yes i HAVE lived under a rock for the last decade). and i listened to some songs on youtube, and an interview with ellen and underneath that was an interview of ellen with lady gaga, and...

2 hours later i was obviously fascinated with lady gaga. a big part of it is that she's getting away with making freaky cool, and not just a specific kind of "freak out the mundanes" feaky, but "whatever your personal thing is" freaky. maybe it's not surprising that she seems to not have regular fans either, but they strike me more as religious followers. well, if "your freak is ok" were a reigion, i'd be ok with that. i also like that she's not selling sex (for the most part), unlike most pop stars, but ... art, i guess. it's not my kind of art (too postmodern), but it clearly is art, and she puts a lot of research into it.

and that's another part of it; how seriously she researches fashion, and fame. and yet her performances don't feel manipulative; they're staged, sure, like any performance art is staged, but it doesn't seem designed to be pap most easily administered to the masses. she doesn't seem fake to me. which is maybe a weird thing to say, considering she hardly ever shows her naked face anywhere -- but the naked face can hide so much, and letting it all hang out is maybe a lot less fake.

i have no idea whether any of this makes any sense. good question! i'll be thinking about it some more instead of just taking it all in.

[firecat]

I only got interested in her a couple of years ago from hearing a cover of one of her songs on Coverville.

I feel like she gets the balance between irony and sincerity just right somehow. I don't know whether she'll be able to sustain that, because I think it's helped a lot by her being so young and mostly conventionally attractive. So I am kind of fascinated to see how long she can manage it and whether she'll shift into other styles that work as well.

I think she is selling sex. But again, in a way that both sells it and deconstructs it, and with enough humor that it doesn't piss me off.

She sometimes talks about having always been a ham, so when I watch her perform I sometimes see a hammy nine-year-old girl in her shadow, and that makes me happy.

And she doesn't seem fake to me either, and does seem studious, and does seem to have some real talent (in the piano-and-voice performances I've seen that were less orchestrated and choreographed and therefore harder to fake).