there was a time when i would be delivering my assessment of lady gaga before you'd heard of her. let's just say that i've lost a little batspeed.

the first thing to say is that she is a new york art student. the style of the videos is nostalgic about a jeff koons aesthetic: it's pomo revival. but the visuals are of high quality; better than koons, e.g.: very bold; interesting palette; absorbingly profuse; bombarding you with images; also very comical, or at least i hope so. it's a perfect intersection of pop music, fashion, and the visual high arts. of course the music video is a better medium all the time, in giant flat screen.

there's something touchingly human about her beneath the cyborg exterior. some of the outfits are obviously clumsy; you plainly see the girl fumbling with the clothes/set. she is no beauty, i believe, which would distinguish her from the obvious analogy: madonna. also not a madonna-level dancer, of course.but she far exceeds even madonna in visual innovations.

but where she is similar to madonna is that her music is truly conventional. there is absolutely nothing distinctive about her singing, or for that matter the vocoder effects etc., it's completely familiar dance-pop; or even based on 80s synth-pop (go listen to lene lovich, say) although often an excellent example. the visuals are so bold and beyond-fashion; the music is so completely conventional. one would say banal, but there are really nice little touches, like the 'rama rama gaga gaga' chorus of the unbearably catchy "bad romance." not only is it banal pop; it's perfect banal pop. but it's not fundamentally any more sophisticated than aly and aj. when she appeared on american idol, millions of people looked and said "whoa. what the fuck?" but they had to be comforted by the fact that the music was no stranger than paula abdul's. if the music corresponded to the visuals, she'd be bjork or whatever.

it's an interesting combination; you appear at once an avant-garde and a mass artist, in different mediums which converge at the same site. the gay audience must be gigantical; it's kind of a whole tradition of gay dance music and its outrageous outfits and its crossover, this time put up by a fashion institute of technology "conceptual" designer. gaga dada.

so partly the musical strictures are imposed by dance music, and in particular gay dance music: necessarily, it starts with completely rigid machine bpm. it's hard to build something creative or new on top of that. and partly there is a democratic or egalitarian love of the banal: the music is the occasion of collective expression, so everyone has to be able to understand and move simultaneously. glam as a whole shows this structure: it's not exactly musically surprising or even, um, good. but the look is transgressive.

listening to the whole of "fame monster," however, is demoralizing. i guess getting drunk and hating yourself and sleeping around and worshiping fame and money is a tried and true formula: "glam" really is the genre. this time it passes through three layers of irony, though.