I think there are very few songs that people wouldn’t expect me to like, apart from something by The Black Eyed Peas (is this becoming a recurring theme?), however, I think anything that’s been in the charts in the past 10 years is a pretty safe bet. The music of the 2000s has been thoroughly disappointing, to be honest. At least, most mainstream music has. Not disappointing in the sense that I had expectations for it in the first place, but rather disappointing in that some of it shows real potential, but more often than not fails to live up to that potential and just leaves me feeling like something’s missing from a song, and I think that my choice for today exemplifies this perfectly.
This could very well be a good song. Lady Gaga has that real New York avant-garde attitude: she does her own thing and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. It’s just good luck (and great marketing) that’s made her the superstar she is. She is a talented songwriter, but I think that she chose the wrong genre. Not commercially, you understand, because electro-pop really sells, but musically. Bad Romance is a hell of a song. It’s got a good dynamic, a great hook and a killer chorus. It’s just unfortunate that it ended up as another trashy pop song. If Lady Gaga had been around 30-odd years ago, I’m sure I would have loved her. As it is now, she confuses me. I know she’s got bucketloads of talent, I know she can write a great song, but I just can’t get behind her choice of genre.
Imagine if you will that it’s 1977 in New York City. Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are the biggest names in the underground scene. Some youngster called Thurston Moore is learning what he can do with a guitar. You’re drunk in the basement of CBGB, and you hear a song called Bad Romance. It’s like somebody let Patti Smith sing with The Stooges. This is what Lady Gaga could have done: bring some of that New York rawness into her music, but unfortunately she didn’t. She didn’t, and I think her music (but maybe not her bank account) suffers because of it. She’s subscribed to the unfortunate overproduction and lacklustre instrumentation that plagues modern music. If she played this song with Sonic Youth the results could be amazing. But something tells me she won’t, more’s the pity.
Most people don’t see this connection, I think, at least not on the internet. After hours of scouring YouTube, I couldn’t find one decent cover of this song. There are plenty of metal versions, emo versions, indie versions, acoustic versions, but nothing even approaching artsy proto-punk. Is that so much to ask? Is it so difficult for someone to shift a potential-filled pop song into a genre more up my alley? It seems it is, so I guess it’s up to me now. Somebody bring me a bottle of whiskey and a copy of Horses (strictly research, you understand) and I’ll get right on it.
All joking aside, Bad Romance is one of the better songs to come out of the 2000s’ regrettable obsession with infusing pseudo-house-music backing tracks with four-chord pop songs and flashy R’n’B production values. Although, I could be wrong. I mean, given her early years doing Black Sabbath covers in Lower East Side burlesque clubs, Lady Gaga could have ended up in some second-rate, back-room riot grrrl monstrosity, trying so hard to sound like Sleater-Kinney, or worse, Courtney Love. Maybe she made the right decision, who am I to say? I’m not even famous. Or fabulously wealthy.
Anyway, back to the point of this: you may not expect me to like this song, and if I’m honest, I don’t really like it all that much. I just like what it could be; I like how it sounds in my head, the way I’d like to hear it. I like its melody and its chorus, and the lyrics aren’t bad either. I just think that it was written 30 years too late, and shoehorned into a musical style that doesn’t suit it, and doesn’t really do it any favours. To be honest, it annoys me a little. Not the song per se, but the fact that it could be so much more. Then again, we shouldn’t dwell too much on possibilities. It’s probably better for her that she recorded it the way she did, but it’s unfortunate because we could have had another darling of the Greenwich art-rock scene. Then again, maybe there are enough of those…
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