LarryC's World

A year ago, I hadn’t heard of Lady Gaga. Well, maybe I had heard of her peripherally, but I had no idea who (or what) she was. Well today, you can’t avoid her. This past week was the big CES (consumer electronics show) in Vegas. This is one of, if not the largest trade show in Vegas. And, with the demise of ComDex, it is also the premiere trade show for all things technology related. The big tech companies all show up, except for Apple, which is too good to be seen at a trade show they don’t produce and manage. Anyway, while I was watching Cnet’s (Cnet is a tech oriented news channel/publisher/web site, now owned by CBS) coverage of CES online, a major portion of the coverage was devoted to the fact that Lady Gaga was appearing at CES. As it turns out, she wasn’t performing, just pushing a brand of headphones manufactured by Monster Cable.

But, the mere fact that her appearance was treated as a major news item on a tech oriented web show, made me think it was about time to find out what this was all about. Truthfully, I had a vague idea of who Lady Gaga is, but most of my opinion of her came from those snarky celebrity sites that really hate all celebs. I knew she was a singer/performance artist, known for her outrageous and skimpy outfits. Well, to learn more, I turned to the medium that all good computer nerds would use for researching music and performances, Youtube!

There are literally thousands of Youtube videos posted of and about Lady Gaga. They range from the official music videos released by her record company, to TV performances, to live shows captured on cell phone cameras to parodies and mashups of various people lipsynching to her music. There were even a bunch of snarky vids questioning her gender. I never did find the end of the list. After searching on her name, I scrolled through at least 20 pages of results (with 20+ entries per page, many of them lists) and there were still plenty of pages I never got to. I watched quite a few videos of various quality. I saw the Barbara Walters ‘Most Fascinating people of 2009′ interview (and Bill O’Reilly’s usual uninformed criticism of Barbara’s choices), the Music videos, and lots of performance video.

So, after my exhaustive(?) research, do I have an opinion? Yes, I do, and surprisingly, I find that I like Lady Gaga. I was half expecting a Britney Spears type lip-syncher who used her costumes to mask her lack of voice or talent. Well, I was wrong. Much to my surprise, I found that she is a hard working talented song writer, and performer. Her music has a very engaging pop sound that quickly had me tapping my foot and enjoying. And, far from having no talent, she has a decent voice, writes her own songs and has written songs for (among others), Ms Spears and The Pussycat Dolls. In one interview I watched from British TV, the interviewer asked her how it felt to have her music recorded by performers who were less talented than she was (ouch!) Gaga (as her friends call her, I learned) was quite diplomatic in her reply.

It took a while, but I found one video from Youtube that I think is a very effective showcase of her talent. In this video she begins with an acoustic interlude where she plays the piano and sings by herself and then launches into her full electronic dance and singing performance. Her costume is not the wildest one I saw but is a part of the whole performance. So from ‘The Ellen Show’, this is Lady Gaga performing ‘Poker Face’:

If you haven’t listened to Lady Gaga, I suggest you give her a try. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised. By the way, if you are as disconnected from the world as I am, you may not know that there was some controversy about the lyrics of Poker Face. I had no idea of course, but Gaga explains here on this interview that aired on BBC (warning: strong language):