Paws Down Lil' Monsters

I love it how little monsters dig themselves a deeper hole every time they try to justify Lady Gaga’s lack of originality.

The past few months I received a few messages from Gaga’s brainless defenders trying to “prove” that same chords in different songs is a common thing (no kidding, Sherlock!). So they tell me to watch the video “Axis of Awesome - Four Chords” on YouTube.

Ha!

These little monsters morons fail to understand that that video only proves how unoriginal most of Lady Gaga’s songs are.

There is a limited number of chords, the order those chords can be played in different songs (their combination) will also be limited. But that does not mean that two songs (or three songs, or 40 songs) that have the same chord progression will sound the same. The Four Chords video by the Axis of Awesome is proof of that:

They play a number of different songs that are based on the same chords. Each video you find on YouTube will have a few different songs (they keep adding and changing their “setlist”).

And guess what?

They do not sound alike. So what is the point those stupid little morons were trying to make again?

The Axis of Awesome play a bunch of pop songs that share the same basic chord structure. But because the melodies in which those songs are sung are completely different, THEY DO NOT SOUND THE SAME:

Take Can You Feel The Love Tonight by Elton John and Torn by Natalie Imbruglia for instance. 

Both songs are featured in the Axis Of Awesome video, played in the same four chords. However, I doubt anyone with half a brain would actually attest that they sound the same. They don’t. The melody their lyrics are sung is different. That makes a huge difference.

You see, that’s why Born This Way sounds like Madonna’s Express Yourself.

Lady Reductive not only copied the chord progression from Express Yourself, but she also copied its singing melody. You have got to be the saddest person to deny that the similarities between those two songs are only in the chord progression:

By the way, you can also sing the rap in Vogue on top of the rap in Born This Way Reductive. They also match. What’s their excuse for that? And what are the excuses for copying the theme and lyrics from Carl Bean’s I Was Born This Way?

Anyway [getting back at the “chords” issue], the same goes with Kylie Minogue’s Hand On Your Heart and Bad Romance: 

Lady Reductive may not have copied the singing melody from that song, but she surely stole the intro in Kylie’s song to sing her lyrics exactly in the same melody. It’s not a matter of same chords in two different songs. It’s the melody of one song being copied in another song.

The funniest thing about the messages I get from those retarded little monsters morons when they want to talk about chord progressions is that they don’t even know what a chord progression is!

They don’t understand that two songs can have the same chord progression, played in different chords and different keys: that’s the case with Express Yourself / BTW.

That’s also the case in all the songs in the Axis of Awesome video.

Those guys took a bunch of songs that share the same basic chord progression. In their original versions, they do not all have the same chords. However, for their medley, they transposed many of those songs from their original keys, so that they would all be in the same four chords.

Little monsters, good luck in convincing yourselves that they all sound the same just because their chord progression is the same.

Do not forget that in their original versions, they also appear in different chords - and not the same four chords as in the AoA video.

Click on MORE to see all the four-chord songs the Axis of Awesome have performed in their medley so far - in different occasions:

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Bad Romance is one of my favorite pop songs of the past few years. That doesn’t mean it is less reductive, or that I cannot assess it appropriately. This song draws heavily from a few mega club hits in Europe from the 90s (as most of Gaga’s work emulates “older” European music), but it also goes a little bit further back. 

Bad Romance is probably the only song the singer has put out so far (in four years) that will most likely (it is not certain yet) become somewhat of a classic - in the future. So I decided to talk about this who-knows-almost-classic song on today’s music lesson (make sure to check and comment on our previous music lesson entries).

Considering that many people put a lot of effort to make the world believe Lady Gaga is already a music icon or even the new Queen of Pop, the fact that she has not been able to produce a single classic song yet is an indicative of their exaggerated pro-Gaga claims.

It must be embarrassing to know that in four years, with three albums under her name (or two and a half, depending on your opinion on the Fame Monster), Lady Gaga has failed to produce any classic songs. 

She surely has some hits under her name - HITS. But a hit song does not mean a classic song.

In comparison, Madonna (within her first three albums) had put out half a dozen songs that not only became hits, but also classic pop songs:  Holiday, Into the Groove, Material Girl, Like a Virgin, Live to Tell and Papa Don’t Preach, they are not only radio hits, they are also classic songs that will be remembered forever. They represent the sound of an era, they are the epitome of their genre. Each of those songs became a signature for the sound of an era, or at least, for a category of it.    

We can’t say the same about Just Dance, Poker Face, or even Born This Way. They were hits at the time they were released, but they do not represent the music of an era, they do not represent a genre of music of an era, they are not signature sounds of an era.

Bad Romance does not represent the sound of an era either, but it is the closest thing Lady Gaga has of a “classic” - and it wasn’t even a #1 hit in the US (see how the Billboard charts don’t represent anything?).

Do you think Bad Romance is an original song?

Does Bad Romance sound fresh, groundbreaking?

Did Lady Gaga push the music industry forward with Bad Romance or did she simply create a song that sounded like the 1990s? 

I have mentioned before how Bad Romance contains music elements from It feels So Good by Sonique - they share common music elements and sounds that do not mean “plagiarism” in any way, shape or form. I compared them before to show how Lady Gaga did not invent any music genre - unlike what some of her delusional fans say. 

But if you want to get serious about it, there are two songs everybody needs to check before forming an opinion on Bad Romance:

One of them is Boom, Boom Boom, Boom! by the Vengaboys.

Bad Romance draws heavily from this European club hit. Note that the similarities do not stop at the “Oh Oh Ohh”, but mainly in the keyboards. The difference is that, in Bad Romance, they try to emulate the sound of a synthesized modern pipe organ for clubs.

But wait until you hear the next song I would like you to compare Bad Romance to.

This song is Kylie Minogue’s 1989 hit Hand On Your Heart.

The chorus in Bad Romance was completely ripped-off of that Kylie’s song.

You can hear it loud and clear:

The progression in which the chorus in Bad Romance is sung is exactly the progression in Hand On Your Heart. You can sing one song on top of each other. Note that Kylie also sings a lot of “ohh ohh ohhh”. The only thing missing is “caught in a bad romance”.  

I know some of her die-hard fans will deny the similarities to death. So I took the time to find on YouTube two videos that will help me prove to you those similarities.

One one them is the INSTRUMENTAL version of Kylie’s Hand On Your Heart. Without Minogue’s vocals, you can easily sing the chorus for Gaga’s Bad Romance.

The other video overlaps both songs (Hand On Your Heart and Bad Romance), proving, again that the progression on both songs are the same.

The more I study music, the more REDUCTIVE Lady Gaga gets.

Rihanna performed at Radio One’s Hackney Weekend in the UK on Sunday and she decided to use an Egyptian theme - just like Madonna at the Super Bowl.

What do you think?

I love it. 

Rihanna is a good example of someone who clearly has been heavily influenced by Madonna without looking and sounding like a desperate wannabe (Lady Gaga). 

It’s not the first time Rihanna has her act associated with Madonna. The singer from Barbados has already performed Vogue, and is often photographed in Madonna-esque ensembles. But Rihanna has maintained her personality and identity all along. 

L-U-V Madonna  /  L-U-V RiRi.

It’s no secret that one of Lady Gaga’s biggest supporters in the mainstream media is the Rolling Stone magazine.

They always give a positive twist on anything Gaga-related. They even manipulate the results of their online polls and place Lady Gaga as the winner, even when she was not the most voted artist in a certain category:

For those who don’t remember, last year, Rolling Stone magazine published the result of a poll that had Lady Gaga as the current Queen of Pop. Obviously, that sounded very suspicious, as no one who takes the music business seriously would ever consider Lady Gaga the Queen of Pop. Rolling Stone received a lot of criticism for what seemed to be a manipulated poll result. And boy, were we right:

A few days after crowning Lady Gaga as the new Queen of Pop, Rolling Stone magazine retracted itself and cleared things out, stating that “Madonna won this poll in a landslide (…) she received five times as many votes as Lady Gaga, who landed in second place” (read their retraction here).

So why lie, manipulate and alter the result of the poll in the first place?

It is really worrying how people couldn’t care less about it. You have a major “informative” magazine (insert sarcasm here) manipulating and altering the result of their polls, and the magazine doesn’t even suffer backlash. Are people okay with blatant lies?

Now, Rolling Stone is back at it, with a list of the 50 greatest albums by female artists.

And guess who is ahead of Carole King, Bjork, PJ Harvey, Hole, Alanis Morissette, and Madonna’s Like a Prayer? Yeah. You know who she is: Lady fucking Reductive and the album of the decade, Born This Way. 

Born This Way is NOT, in any way, among the 50 greatest albums by female artists in history. This is just another page on the great book on “how Rolling Stone mag insists in trying to make Lady Gaga a music icon”.

I am truly intrigued by one thing:

What are the parameters they used to judge those albums and place them in the order they did?

Number of albums sold? Relevance in the cultural context? Legacy? 

Whatever the aspects they took in consideration, there is no excuse for placing Born This Way ahead of albums like Like a Prayer, Jagged Little Pill, Live Through This, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill for example.

Let’s compare Gaga’s album to another one on the list considering some of those aspects:

Commercially, Like a Prayer has sold over 18 million copies worldwide, while Born This Way has sold 6,3 million copies to date. For that aspect alone, Gaga should be behind on the rank.

Saying that Like a Prayer has been in the market for a longer period of time, so the chances of it having sold more copies are larger might even be valid, but this argument only reinforces another reason why Born This Way should NOT be on the list of 50 Greatest Albums by female artists:

It has been around for a little more than a year. In this very first year of existence, Born This Way has yet to make an impact in the direction the music business is going, it has yet to impress the market by the numbers it sells, it has yet to influence the making of music in the future.

In other words, Born This Way has failed to have any impact in the music industry.

Musically, it was ten years too late. The album’s sound is a trip down memory lane. It did not bring anything new to the table at all.

Born This Way did not leave any mark in the music industry on its own (apart from being the most promoted album in history). There is no classics off of that album - the closest thing to a “classic” is compared to a Madonna song from the album Like a Prayer - Express Yourself. Commercially, it failed miserably in achieving what Lady Gaga and her record label expected, especially considering the massive promotion it received throughout the year 2011.

So why did Rolling Stone put it amongst the Top 50 Greatest Albums by Female Artists? Considering all those aspects about Born This Way, it shouldn’t even be among the top 100 greatest albums by female artists!

What is the legacy of the Born This Way album?

Apart from sounding like something we have all heard before, Born This Way leaves nothing for the next generations. I talked about it before.

Born This Way would not have been placed ahead of the albums I mentioned if Rolling Stone magazine wasn’t biased. That is unfair to all the female musicians that have truly had a deep impact in music. 

Madonna alone could have at least three albums on that list that are far superior to Gaga’s Born This Way in every aspect Rolling Stone magazine could have considered:

Like a Prayer, Ray of Light, Music have all sold more than Born This Way, they have all changed the direction music was going to at the time they were released, they have all left an eternal imprint in the music biz, and they are still being copied 25, 14, 12 years later. That’s legacy. Those Madonna albums are all musically, commercially and culturally superior and more relevant than Born This Way.

What about then 21-year-old Alanis Morissette’s brilliant and pivotal Jagged Little Pill album?

How on Earth can Born This Way be ahead of that album on a rank that lists the 50 Greatest Albums by female artists?

Since when an album filled with rehashed music (Born This Way), that has not impressed the market with its numbers or content, be among the 50 Greatest Female Albums of all time? How can it be ahead of Hole’s Live Through This?

I don’t care if you like Lady Gaga or not, if you like Madonna or not, if you like Courtney Love or not, but one thing is for sure:

I urge you to wake up and e-mail them about this ridiculous list.

Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, they should NOT be listed on that list at all - I don’t even care in what position they are placed.

All I know is that those girls have not put out any album that is significant enough to be among the 50 greatest albums of female artists of all time. 

On the side-note about Gaga’s album, Rolling Stone had nothing to say about it. it says: “It’s already hard to remember a world where we didn’t have Gaga, although we’re pretty sure it was a lot more boring”.

I don’t know about you folks, but I can still remember the time when an album was put among any list of “best albums” because of its music, and not because the singer is trendy at any point in time.

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Nipplegate is still making headlines - so much for someone who is so “irrelevant”.

A lot of celebrities decided to chime in when it comes to a woman showing her nipple on stage. This time, it was Kylie Minogue’s turn.

Kylie Minogue was on  ”Fashion Police” discussing Madonna’s clothes and nipple-flashing. She didn’t like Madonna’s majorette outfit. So she gave her opinion.

Obviously, Minogue was hoping to get the media’s attention. Mission accomplished.

Kylie Minogue is promoting her latest single in the US - market she has tried desperately to conquer for 25 years with no success. 

She has always said nice things about Madonna, but that doesn’t grant her any headlines anymore. So in order to become “news” again, she made a comment that can be interpreted as negative towards Madonna and her outfit: “No. Just no.”

It worked.

Kylie Minogue is on every music and gossip website for “slamming”, or “taking a swipe” at Madonna (that’s how most websites are reporting it). If she hadn’t said anything remotely negative, half those websites would not have mentioned her name. 

We’ve seen it all before: Piers Morgan, Howard Stern, Sharon Osbourne, Deadmau5, the ladies from The View… if someone wants to get some attention for oneself, saying something negative about Madonna always works.

What is really aggravating is that most people would agree that the majorette costume was beautifully made (designed by Oscar nominee Arianne Phillips), and as it was said on Fashion Police, it would look good on Katy Perry or someone younger. So the problem is not really the outfit, nor Madonna, the problem is a 53-year-old woman wearing a majorette outfit. Well done, Kylie! That’s all we need. Another popstar imposing limits to what other people can do or wear based on their age.

Kylie Minogue also had an opinion on Madonna’s nipple-flashing, which is interesting:

“Was [Madonna] caught in the moment, was it premeditated, who knows?” Minogue speculated. “I think it’s got people more perplexed than excited by it” she added.

Well, Kylie, I sorta disagree with you. By the reaction of the people in the crowd, it’s obvious they were really excited about Madonna’s nipple. By the reaction of feminist groups, they were also very excited for having a woman being in control of her body and doing whatever-the-fuck she wants to do with it so publicly.

But, guys, you tell me. Maybe I am being too tough on Kylie Minogue. Maybe she truly was “perplexed” by Madonna’s nipple-flashing and all she did was talk from a personal standpoint:

After all, unlike Kylie, Madonna has both her nipples and breasts. 

If Joan Rivers, 79 years old, can call Madonna “old” on Fashion Police (which is poking fun at herself), Kylie Minogue may have been poking fun at herself too.

Or at least, she should be expecting jokes on her single breast while criticizing someone else’s.

If not, well, too bad, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen get off of my street.

itfeelsreductive:

“Too old for pop”. I could say that about everything in life. Substitute “pop” for any other noun in the dictionary, and no one would care. We live in a society that echoes the idea that people lose their liberty to do whatever they want as they grow older, especially women. But do we really want to perpetuate this idea? 

After a certain age, women cannot wear bikinis - they’re too old for that (no matter how good they look, they HAVE to cover up their bodies). After a certain age, women should cut their hair short - they’re too old for long hair. After a certain age, women have to stop wanting to go out and have fun - they’re too old for that. Women are encouraged to quit their jobs and stay home taking care of their houses, partners and kids. The ones that don’t do that are the freaks.

And no one is freakier than Madonna. According to what the media tells us, she is too old for everything she does: she’s too old for the outfits she wears on stage,  she’s too old to show her body (even though she is in better shape than most 20-year olds), she’s too old to date younger men, the list goes on and on.

The limitations we try to impose onto others based on their age and gender go beyond concrete terms (body, clothes, hair). We try to limit people’s abilities to THINK a certain way too: Madonna is too old for pop music (a music genre), she’s too old to be singing songs about having fun (should she be singing about retirement?), she’s too old to call herself a girl.

Since when pop music, having fun, and calling yourself a “girl” have an age limit? I would think that logic would be important in this matter: 

The older you get, the more experiences you have, and the more you know, the more respected you should be for singing, talking, and writing about your life experiences in general - from the trivial, to the important things in life. But no, instead of recognizing and accepting this notion, we try to impose the opposite: the older you get, the less you are allowed to talk about life. So what about being too young for certain topics? 

If a woman in her 50s is not allowed to call herself a “girl”, or sing about wanting to “have some fun”, or do anything remotely trivial, drama-free and silly because of her age, why do we take a teenager or even a 20-something-year old seriously when they sing about serious stuff, things that only an experienced person should be singing about?

Sometimes, people are TOO YOUNG FOR CERTAIN TOPICS. We condemn women with experience for singing about life in general. But we praise people in their early 20s and teens (people who have no experience in life at all) for singing about “serious” subjects. And worse, we take them seriously. 

Isn’t it ridiculous when a teenager sings about real love? What do teenagers know about real love? They should be singing about homework and having a crush on someone - those are things that belong to that universe - not real love. Lady Gaga singing about immigration? What is her experience with it again? Oh, none! But it’s okay. She gets a free pass because she’s in her 20s - those “young” people can sing about anything, from the frivolous “getting drunk and just dancing”, to the serious stuff - even when they are too young to really understand the issue they are talking about. 

According to the same “age restrictions” the media uses against older women in the arts, Lady Gaga (among other “young” stars) should be dedicating their songs to the things that belong to her universe: clubbing, getting drunk, dancing. Gaga often does it. But she also tries to embrace “serious causes” that are completely out of her league: 

Gay issues, equality, immigration - she has no life experience to talk about it in the tone she does. She can embrace the cause and sing about it, but the tone she uses is rather misleading. She recently said: “We are in a different place right now. 25 years ago, gay people had to hide”. Exactly! She is 26 years old. She has no clue about what life was really like for gay people 25 years ago.

We are glad that she wants to help the gay cause. But why not make it clear that her first person discourse is actually a role-play? Her age and her own speech on how “we are in a different place right now” are the evidence of how little experience she really has had with the issues she claims as her own. Instead of being a transparent supporter of the cause, she plays the role of someone who suffered as much as the people 25 years ago. But the media would never ever suggest she is too young for knowing what it was like 25 years ago with so much property. Even when her own speech makes her whole act contradictory.

Men do too suffer from ageism. But it is nowhere near what women have to go through. Mick Jagger still wears hot pants, and dances like when he was a sex symbol in his 20s. No one says he’s too old for that. Bruce Springsteen still wears tight jeans. No one says he’s too old for that. Prince still wears the same campy outfits. No one says he is too old for that either. John Bon Jovi still sings shirtless on stage. No one says he is too old for that. In fact, people like it that he is still the same as he was in the 80s.

The problem is not solely the media spreading these retrograde views and rules. The real problem is us, the people who echo those ideas in our daily lives:

Now, for whatever reason, little monsters say Madonna is “too old for what she does”. But hey, Gaga will be 30 in four years. By then, she will be too old to wear her Halloween costumes on a daily basis. 

That’s the danger in spreading and sharing ignorance with the world - it always comes back to bite you in the derrière. Continuing with these retrograde ideas now will only affect the perception we will have of your faves in the near future. After all, we will not have a complete cultural awakening in only four years. 

I am not a doctor, so I’m asking for help (look how humble I am!).

Can someone in the medical field educate me on how one gets a black eye when hit in the back of the crown of their head?

And please, I’m talking about real doctors, and NOT make-up artists who think they are able to diagnose a brain injury - in other words, a concussion:

The following image explains exactly what happened to the BTWB (the tour that was supposed to revolutionize the entertainment word) when Madonna came with her fabulous MDNA TOUR:

Thanks Henriie for sending me the image.

Do I need to say anything else?

hubblian asked:

Did you see the video of lady gaga saying “I don’t want to be your fucking queen, I want to be your friend’ Is this hypocrite bitch serious? Don’t she remember the backstage and the crying scene of the monster ball hbo?

Thank you, hubblian. I love the contribution of people like you.

A couple of nights ago, confused and delusional singer Lady Gaga played the victim once again and [indirectly but very obviously] whined about Madonna and her EXPRESS YOURSELF/BTW/SHE’S NOT ME medley (read here).

But the singer contradicted herself and showed us all, once again, that she will change her discourse at any time - as long as it helps her victimize herself, as long as, at the end, you feel sorry for her.

The always whining Lady “poor me” Gaga told her moronic, psychotic audience:

“Thank you for being the powerful amazing generation that you are. I’m so proud to be your popstar and I want you to know, I don’t ever wanna be your queen, so don’t ask me to, don’t call me your queen.”

That is exactly the opposite of what she said in her HBO special, the one they tried to recreate the film aesthetics and stylistic style from Madonna’s Truth Or Dare documentary:

“I just wanna be a queen for them, you know? And sometimes I don’t feel like one”.

So what is it, Lady Gaga? Do you want to be a queen for your fans or not?

Stop being a phony ass cunt. 

It is pathetic how her fans dare to defend her even when such evidence is presented: she is phony, she’s fake, she’s manipulative. You have got to be a complete moron to be on her side. It’s never okay to defend and admire liars and criminals just because you like their music. 

Lady Gaga and her moronic minions are the worst thing that has ever happened to pop music.

If you have stomach to watch four minutes of pure ego-masturbation and manipulation, see this imbecile star contradict herself:

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Just saw this video here, and I thought this blog entry needed an update: