Better [Unreleased] Song: Stache vs. Partynauseous

[Ladle Ghoulash 38,000]

1 hour ago, bxr said:

That‘s what I love about Pop music, interpretations are that much more predicated upon the lived experiences of the listener, or I guess that peculiar balance between each listener’s own personal experiences and cultural/universal contexts … all of that is to say, sometimes, with music, it’s just building narrative association from those needle drop “blink” first impressions …

So, with Stache, for instance, the JPS No Exit (to abbreviate a larger discourse into a comparative synopsis), immediately just presented the ill-fated love triangle plot structure, then the rest of the song felt like it operated within that aspect, so everything unfolded from the dragon-chasing triptych … at that point in the ARTPOP era, especially with Aura and Venus (although tbh I was in and out during the ARTPOP rollout … I was out of the loop during the whole development cataclysm, checked back in during the iTunes festival through the VMA and Applause, then fell out for awhile, and sort of just caught up to speed around SxSwine, G.U.Y., and artRAVE, so I’m not too positive on the prominent thematics during development) it felt like she was exploring some divine feminine / next wave/post-wave feminist motifs, so that echoed the sense of the “stache“ as a beard-adjacent or alt-beard (tying back into the character profiles in Sartre’s No Exit) … where‘s her stache … then the shift to the drug motif—the “stash” stache— continuing that there is no (conventional) drug that she wants or loves, but it does not negate her potential indulgence in narcotics to temporarily satiate or substitute for the primary human object of affection (which, again, to the stache/beard/no exit plot, could be taboo, or unrequited, or just patently unattainable in practical physical reality … hell is other people) … then to the climax of “psychotic music head” … to her point (paraphrasing) “Music f—ks me up like no other” … music is the ultimate love, drug, elixir … and to be honest, the suitors and substances, at that point of obsessive music psychosis, are all just manifestations of her cardinal fidelity to music, the ultimate love supreme 

But … neither here nor there … just observations in the rationale of, even if that’s not how it was written, that’s how it reads within a capacity … I’ll digress here … and leave Applause discourse for another play

 

I honestly think those interpretations, while interesting, aren’t structurally supported by the text (via more cohesive narrative allusion, in the case of the Sartre reference) in a way that feels like I could meaningfully attribute them to what she actually wrote as opposed to what I believe you’ve generously projected onto it. Obviously, the audience has a degree of authorship with any text, but I tend to draw the line when the audience member is doing most of the heavy lifting to support a particular interpretation.

Edited 11 hours ago by Ladle Ghoulash

[DESTROY UR DISEASE 15,691]

22 minutes ago, xxxdreams said:

Damn y'all are out here having Shakespearean debates about Lady Gaga lyrics and I cannot understand anything 

Don't worry, me neither 

[bxr 1,098]

31 minutes ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

I honestly think those interpretations, while interesting, aren’t structurally supported by the text (via more cohesive narrative allusion, in the case of the Sartre reference) in a way that feels like I could meaningfully attribute them to what she actually wrote as opposed to what I believe you’ve generously projected onto it. Obviously, the audience has a degree of authorship with any text, but I tend to draw the line when the audience member is doing most of the heavy lifting to support a particular interpretation.

My perpetual Achilles as a pop music audience member is engaging with all work (within a capacity) from some aspect of cultural biography, so song significance gets interpreted through some integrated lens of logical structure and material association (to your point), symbolic association, cultural context (which in its own right is a blend of the explicit structural. to your point, and the zeitgeist or spirit or “vibes”), and just I think what people infer when they reference poetic or artistic license … that and usually, the more a song lacks apparent logical meaning (in the case of stache, for instance), the more I’ll just draw on conceptual associations to make it make sense for me in a way that at least carries poetic integrity … which, at some point, anything can be poetry, and ARTPOP can be anything … 

 

But, to your point, in context of Stache, in particular, the song itself was, (I think?) just her vocals added on to a pre-existing Zedd track; so, the song itself feels like a mood-board demo, not a proper fleshed out studio produced composition … which, to me, never felt like it was recorded or that the lyrics were written with the intention to meaningfully parallel Sartre’s No Exit in a more clearly articulated metaphorical domain … I’d only read No Exit once in high school, but I from that, I just always took its cultural indication or its creative trope to be the “Hell is other people” thesis, and then just the character personifications. So to your point: “The “No Exit” reference goes precisely nowhere and has nothing to say about the text it’s referencing,” it just felt like, even if it wasn’t fully fleshed out or deftly expressed, the No Exit associations didn’t go entirely nowhere (yeah, nowhere … fast!) or had nothing to say about the play in reference … I just took it as a dolled-up demo that mood-boarded some conceptual associations … but, at the root of the association was the three main characters in Sartre (which, again, I’m not a Sartre scholar at all), and then just pivot to the character personifications of the stache, the stash, and gaga … or love, drugs, gaga

 

In immediate retrospect, maybe my Achilles is just stream of consciousness musing potential narrative associations between whichever concepts or elements are in proximity within a given frame at that point in rhyme … like now, figuring out how Stache structurally supports its own inclusion of Sartre’s No Exit as a opening lyric, on a pop message board … it’s all just a cosmic playground 

[Ladle Ghoulash 38,000]

26 minutes ago, bxr said:

My perpetual Achilles as a pop music audience member is engaging with all work (within a capacity) from some aspect of cultural biography, so song significance gets interpreted through some integrated lens of logical structure and material association (to your point), symbolic association, cultural context (which in its own right is a blend of the explicit structural. to your point, and the zeitgeist or spirit or “vibes”), and just I think what people infer when they reference poetic or artistic license … that and usually, the more a song lacks apparent logical meaning (in the case of stache, for instance), the more I’ll just draw on conceptual associations to make it make sense for me in a way that at least carries poetic integrity … which, at some point, anything can be poetry, and ARTPOP can be anything … 

 

But, to your point, in context of Stache, in particular, the song itself was, (I think?) just her vocals added on to a pre-existing Zedd track; so, the song itself feels like a mood-board demo, not a proper fleshed out studio produced composition … which, to me, never felt like it was recorded or that the lyrics were written with the intention to meaningfully parallel Sartre’s No Exit in a more clearly articulated metaphorical domain … I’d only read No Exit once in high school, but I from that, I just always took its cultural indication or its creative trope to be the “Hell is other people” thesis, and then just the character personifications. So to your point: “The “No Exit” reference goes precisely nowhere and has nothing to say about the text it’s referencing,” it just felt like, even if it wasn’t fully fleshed out or deftly expressed, the No Exit associations didn’t go entirely nowhere (yeah, nowhere … fast!) or had nothing to say about the play in reference … I just took it as a dolled-up demo that mood-boarded some conceptual associations … but, at the root of the association was the three main characters in Sartre (which, again, I’m not a Sartre scholar at all), and then just pivot to the character personifications of the stache, the stash, and gaga … or love, drugs, gaga

 

In immediate retrospect, maybe my Achilles is just stream of consciousness musing potential narrative associations between whichever concepts or elements are in proximity within a given frame at that point in rhyme … like now, figuring out how Stache structurally supports its own inclusion of Sartre’s No Exit as a opening lyric, on a pop message board … it’s all just a cosmic playground 

I agree that it’s a mood board and feels more like the seedling of an idea than a fully realized metaphor which, in all fairness, was my initial critique, but I was using it as an on-ramp to also critique some of the lyrics in Applause (whose lyrics you also cited as a parallel), which I think suffer from the same preference of what I’d call affect or aesthetic over substance. Gaga’s lyricism on Applause falls into the same trap of trying to couch concepts that could either be expressed more cleanly, directly, or simply in references to art/artists that have no shared or assumed objective symbolic value (“One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me” has gotta be a doozy for someone outside of the ARTPOP matrix), while also attempting to flex her intellectual prowess while, somewhat flaccidly, taking down strawman critiques from hypothetical “haters” (“I’ve overheard your theory etc etc”).
 

As for the Scary Monsters read, the vocal delivery, as well as the aesthetic choice of Pierotte for the video,  feels more like both a vocal and rhetorical emulation of Bowie as symbolic reference point for Gaga without tapping lyrically tapping into anything essential about that era of Bowie in particular (feeling more like a simulacrum than a true object). Although, I do think the Scary Monsters parallel overall is an apt meta-analogy on Gaga’s part because I think both eras for each respective artist served as a deconstruction of their personae up until that point in their career as well as retrospectives of their impacts on pop culture, I just don’t think the song itself (Applause) serves that function as well as she’d hoped (but I think the video is much closer to the mark).

Edited 9 hours ago by Ladle Ghoulash

[RAMROD 113,880]

Stache not even a Gaga song? She is only helping Zedd promoting his debut album with that fun remix fan puzzle thing. So that song is fully released since it's in his album.

[DESTROY UR DISEASE 15,691]

7 hours ago, xxxdreams said:

It seems like Partynauseous has a slight lead in the polls but it can change at any time.. 

not anymore  

[xxxdreams 84]

3 minutes ago, DESTROY UR DISEASE said:

not anymore  

BYEEEE the slight lead of Stache.. 

[bxr 1,098]

45 minutes ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

I agree that it’s a mood board and feels more like the seedling of an idea than a fully realized metaphor which, in all fairness, was my initial critique, but I was using it as an on-ramp to also critique some of the lyrics in Applause (whose lyrics you also cited as a parallel), which I think suffer from the same preference of what I’d call affect or aesthetic over substance. Gaga’s lyricism on Applause falls into the same trap of trying to couch concepts that could either be expressed more cleanly, directly, or simply in references to art/artists that have no shared or assumed objective symbolic value (“One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me” has gotta be a doozy for someone outside of the ARTPOP matrix), while also attempting to flex her intellectual prowess while, somewhat flaccidly, taking down strawman critiques from hypothetical “haters” (“I’ve overheard your theory etc etc”).
 

As for the Scary Monsters read, the vocal delivery, as well as the aesthetic choice of Pierotte for the video,  feels more like both a vocal and rhetorical emulation of Bowie as symbolic reference point for Gaga without tapping lyrically tapping into anything essential about that era of Bowie in particular (feeling more like a simulacrum than a true object). Although, I do think the Scary Monsters parallel overall is an apt meta-analogy on Gaga’s part because I think both eras for each respective artist served as a deconstruction of their personae up until that point in their career as well as retrospectives of their impacts on pop culture, I just don’t think the song itself (Applause) serves that function as well as she’d hoped (but I think the video is much closer to the mark).

Ah, indeed. Applause, to be fair, is an entirety unto itself … for all of the reasons Stache includes, but/and then that Applause carries the significance of ARTPOP’s lead single—which, again, the contextual entirety of that discourse … so, since the thread is Stache vs. Partynauseous (PARTYNAUSEOUS?), I don’t want to derail too too much … but, the overarching frame or discursive framework (discourse as multimodal, and more of the Foucault/Stuart Hall realm of living discourse with political significance / cultural figuration) Applause operates from, for me, was more inherently integral or integrated to where the meaning was necessarily (and, quite possibly, to its own detriment) predicated upon peripheral references and associations—the lyrics feel incomplete (to your point, as far as explicit correlation between “this” and ”that” within a singular throughline or narrative plane) without the video, which feels incomplete without the conceptual exposition (in the immediate, for ARTPOP, more broadly, the theoretical / conceptual exposition of cultural works, figures, etc.), so, Applause, to me, it just feels like an unfinished symphony, the video is just gorgeous and even if they don’t fully defend their author’s thesis … there’s merit to the craft of their composition alone (even if it is just the aesthetic standard) … I do see your point, and I can see how the song didn’t capture that completion or clarity in cohesion. Also, I always hear the “kunst” double-entendre with “Koons” so, but, yes Applause does lean heavy into the pretension … but that, again, feels like it plays into the core of ARTPOP … at her core, Gaga was constantly the eye of her own performance / pop art storm … so there was just that razor-thin tension across the board with balancing the satire and reality of her “artistry” … taking it too seriously and not seriously enough … she’s playing to the gong

Oh, also, so I’m not a proper Bowie scholar (re: Scary Monsters), but/and so, just result of personal points of reference, my default Applause character archetype is Sedgwick Swan … the Edie/Andy dichotomy always felt paradigmatic ARTPOP … so I yield to your observations on the second paragraph

Edited 9 hours ago by bxr

[xxxdreams 84]

1 hour ago, bxr said:

so, since the thread is Stache vs. Partynauseous (PARTYNAUSEOUS?), I don’t want to derail too too much

No.. no.. you both can continue. I'm actually thoroughly studying what you guys are saying. It's interesting

                                                            


EDIT: Actually derailing too much is against the rules.. soo.. but we're still talking about relevant songs here so I think it's fine and the topic started from there

Edited 7 hours ago by xxxdreams

[DESTROY UR DISEASE 15,691]

2 minutes ago, xxxdreams said:

No.. no.. you both can continue. I'm actually thoroughly studying what you guys are saying. It's interesting

are you saying that because thanks to their discussion your thread will be getting more pages? 

[xxxdreams 84]

24 minutes ago, DESTROY UR DISEASE said:

are you saying that because thanks to their discussion your thread will be getting more pages? 

No 

[DESTROY UR DISEASE 15,691]

Just now, xxxdreams said:

No 

[xxxdreams 84]

18 minutes ago, DESTROY UR DISEASE said:

..You missed the mark even though I would like a few more Stache voters

''Because I just love the music, not the bling'' 

Edited 6 hours ago by xxxdreams

[Lady Gaga 2009 906]

4 hours ago, bxr said:

My perpetual Achilles as a pop music audience member is engaging with all work (within a capacity) from some aspect of cultural biography, so song significance gets interpreted through some integrated lens of logical structure and material association (to your point), symbolic association, cultural context (which in its own right is a blend of the explicit structural. to your point, and the zeitgeist or spirit or “vibes”), and just I think what people infer when they reference poetic or artistic license … that and usually, the more a song lacks apparent logical meaning (in the case of stache, for instance), the more I’ll just draw on conceptual associations to make it make sense for me in a way that at least carries poetic integrity … which, at some point, anything can be poetry, and ARTPOP can be anything … 

 

But, to your point, in context of Stache, in particular, the song itself was, (I think?) just her vocals added on to a pre-existing Zedd track; so, the song itself feels like a mood-board demo, not a proper fleshed out studio produced composition … which, to me, never felt like it was recorded or that the lyrics were written with the intention to meaningfully parallel Sartre’s No Exit in a more clearly articulated metaphorical domain … I’d only read No Exit once in high school, but I from that, I just always took its cultural indication or its creative trope to be the “Hell is other people” thesis, and then just the character personifications. So to your point: “The “No Exit” reference goes precisely nowhere and has nothing to say about the text it’s referencing,” it just felt like, even if it wasn’t fully fleshed out or deftly expressed, the No Exit associations didn’t go entirely nowhere (yeah, nowhere … fast!) or had nothing to say about the play in reference … I just took it as a dolled-up demo that mood-boarded some conceptual associations … but, at the root of the association was the three main characters in Sartre (which, again, I’m not a Sartre scholar at all), and then just pivot to the character personifications of the stache, the stash, and gaga … or love, drugs, gaga

 

In immediate retrospect, maybe my Achilles is just stream of consciousness musing potential narrative associations between whichever concepts or elements are in proximity within a given frame at that point in rhyme … like now, figuring out how Stache structurally supports its own inclusion of Sartre’s No Exit as a opening lyric, on a pop message board … it’s all just a cosmic playground 

 

4 hours ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

I agree that it’s a mood board and feels more like the seedling of an idea than a fully realized metaphor which, in all fairness, was my initial critique, but I was using it as an on-ramp to also critique some of the lyrics in Applause (whose lyrics you also cited as a parallel), which I think suffer from the same preference of what I’d call affect or aesthetic over substance. Gaga’s lyricism on Applause falls into the same trap of trying to couch concepts that could either be expressed more cleanly, directly, or simply in references to art/artists that have no shared or assumed objective symbolic value (“One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me” has gotta be a doozy for someone outside of the ARTPOP matrix), while also attempting to flex her intellectual prowess while, somewhat flaccidly, taking down strawman critiques from hypothetical “haters” (“I’ve overheard your theory etc etc”).
 

As for the Scary Monsters read, the vocal delivery, as well as the aesthetic choice of Pierotte for the video,  feels more like both a vocal and rhetorical emulation of Bowie as symbolic reference point for Gaga without tapping lyrically tapping into anything essential about that era of Bowie in particular (feeling more like a simulacrum than a true object). Although, I do think the Scary Monsters parallel overall is an apt meta-analogy on Gaga’s part because I think both eras for each respective artist served as a deconstruction of their personae up until that point in their career as well as retrospectives of their impacts on pop culture, I just don’t think the song itself (Applause) serves that function as well as she’d hoped (but I think the video is much closer to the mark).

 

[Ilia Malinin 2,052]

44 minutes ago, Lady Gaga 2009 said:

 

 

me trying to read the philosophical chatter in this thread bc my brain is mush rn