Lady Gaga – Telephone Featuring Beyoncé
I know about a billion people are going to blog about the Lady Gaga Vs Beyoncé video, but I just have to blog about it, this video has a place in my heart. It’s not that I am a huge Lady Gaga or Beyoncé fan, in fact, I am not really a huge fan of this song, but the video is fucking amazing and for so many reasons.
Let’s start with the fact that Jonas Åkerlund directed it. He is one of the craziest music video directors of all time. Just search for him on YouTube and see what insane shit you find. I have been waiting for the Director’s Label Åkerlund DVD since the moment I heard about the Palm Picures series. Now I am almost glad they haven’t released it yet so Telephone can be on it.
More importantly, I am a big Exploitation geek. Exploitation Cinema for the point of this conversation is characterized by cheap very specific genre pictures made in primarily the 1960’s and 70’s that “exploited” things such as sex, violence, race, popular trends etc. Some of the more popular genre’s are Blaxploitation, Grindhouse Horror, Spaghetti Westerns, and Sexploitation films. But the genre’s get much more specific with things like biker movies, drug trip films, and one of my favorites, Women In Prison.
There are an insane number of Women In Prison films starting with 99 Women in 1969 and continuing through out the 70’s. The highlights of the genre are the Jack Hill films starring Pam Grier – The Big Doll House & The Big Bird Cage. (Jack Hill also directed the Greir films Cofee & Foxy Brown. Quentin Tarantino took the name for his film Jackie Brown from Jack Hill and Foxy Brown.) And this Lady Gaga video is purely Women In Prison. All it’s missing a shower scene and an escape scene. All the aesthetic elements are there. On top of that it borrows from other exploitation films. The key theme of revenge is very important to many of the female led action exploitation films of the ’70’s and the wardrobe while very Gaga, has clear influences from biker films, cheesy sci-fi films and Jack Hill’s legendary Switchblade Sisters.
Clearly you noticed the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill. This video is an homage to Quentin Tarantino’s homages. It takes elements of these exploitation films that Tarantino loves to steal from and recontextualizes them so it looks like Akerlund is stealing from QT. I mentioned that QT loves Jack Hill so much that he named a movie after him, but he also distributed Switchblade Sisters as part of his failed distribution company, Rolling Thunder Pictures. The references to some of my favorite movies, directors and genre’s makes this video in my mind an instant classic even if I could care less about the song. It’s just that good.
I do need to wrap this up quickly because I am ranting but there are two other small things in the video I should mention. One is the line that I am sure will be talked about on all the blogs – “I told you she doesn’t have a dick.” Lady Gaga quite literally shows her critics her womanhood by taking off her pants and revealing once and for all that she doesn’t have a dick. (Unless of course they used CGI…) Finally confronting these stupid rumors in a video like this takes some balls, which clearly she doesn’t have.
And lastly, my boys from Semi Precious Weapons make a cameo playing exquisite corpses. At least Cole and Justin do. I didn’t notice Dan or Steve. I am continuously proud of those guys. You know you have made it when you have been killed off in a major pop video.
Anyway, sorry for the rant but it is 3am and I have been getting ready to leave town for three weeks all day today. I think might be losing my mind a little bit. I am headed to SXSW and then to Winter Music in Miami where almost exactly 2 years ago I photographed a barely known pop singer’s birthday party. Oh right, that was Lady Gaga.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY[/youtube]
Comments (11)
celebrity girlfriend you’ve been needing?
That could work….
Look, I get it, she’s referencing, paying homage, blah blah. Would it kill ANYONE in celebritywood to be ORIGINAL?! (vomit)
You can say what you want about Lady Gaga, but I don’t think you can complain too much about her being unoriginal. And check out Akerlund… that dude is a pretty original innovative motherfucker.
I don’t think she’s original at all (wow. mirror tiled, over-sized shoulder pads. what originality). She copies Leigh Bowery’s style all the time. It’s just most people don’t know what she’s stealing from b/c it’s pretty obscure. She tries so hard to be “unique” it hurts. If she was more subtle in her originality people might like her. The only comparison I can think of is Peaches – she makes dirty electro music (dirty content & dirty beats), can be sexually ambiguous, and appeals to the gay scene. Except Peaches is a badass. Gaga’s trying more of the glam approach (with her fashion, clown make up, and beak of a shnoz) which is why she’s more mainstream (or maybe she fucked more industry people). She sold out.
I just cant wait for this Gaga creature to just fade away.
I am certainly not going to spend any time of my life defending Lady Gaga, but as far as shitty pop music goes ill take her over a lot of people…
This post is awesome, I’m linking it all over the place. And I thought I saw Justin in that death at the diner scene. I wrote a post yesterday morning with screen shots of all the brand references in the video, which I also thought was a pretty amusing part of the whole thing.
I’ll take her over Celine Dion and Kenny G
there is an escape scene… beyoncé the baller lesbian lover bails her out and then they kill a diner’s worth of people so that they can flee the country. x
Its an escape scene, but not an escape from prison scene which was my point in the context of traditional WIP movies.
I truly adore Lady Gaga with her odd dresses but she really let herself down now going out in see through undergarments.