LADY GAGA'S LATEST TRICK: BEING BORING

Lady Gaga's new video for the song "Alejandro" is the first boring video she's made since "Just Dance," and at least with that one she had excuses: she was new and probably not yet in control of her image or her budget. The imagery here is just too blatantly, clumsily hijacked—is she just straight-up making fun of Madonna at this point? It seems that way, with all the cheap Catholicism, black-and-white stroboscopic dancing, platinum hair and armies of muscle boys dressed like they're in an avant-garde theatre troupe from Barcelona circa 1988. Oh, and the machine gun bra. Subtle. Plus, the song is...just okay. It's catchy, but it's basically an Ace of Base cover of "La Isla Bonita." I think Gaga's only interesting as long as she's combining pop of the past with high/avant-garde art. "Bad Romance" was interesting because a) the song was better, and b) it combined "Express Yourself" with Cremaster. Plus this one is missing all the crazy occult symbolism (unless Catholicism counts as a cult). I think this was her first video in a while not to be directed by Jonas Åkerlund. That was probably a mistake.

MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS ABOUT LADY GAGA

The new Lady Gaga video, "Telephone," appeared today. As with her last four clips, it's an elaborate spectacle framing a song that's decent at best. I like Gaga's videos and many of her costumes, and her live performances - the bloody MTV Awards one in particular - are excellent. But her music continues to be utterly dependent on the visuals. It's a total package of which the purely sonic component is still the weakest part. "Bad Romance," "Paparazzi" and "Love Game" are good songs; "Poker Face" is half a good song (the imitation-Peaches portions sink the rest); I can't remember what "Just Dance" sounded like and don't feel like looking it up on YouTube to remind myself. And right now, less than a half hour after watching the "Telephone" video for the first and so far only time, I can't remember the song. This is partly because unlike any previous Gaga video, the song is not allowed to play from beginning to end; it's chopped up and bracketed by several dialogue and action sequences, some of which (the women's-prison segments) work very well, some of which (everything with Beyoncé) don't work very well at all.

Honestly, Beyoncé's presence is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for me. I don't like her music at all - her ballads are histrionic and bland, and her attempts to be uptempo and "hard"/"street" are unconvincing, when they're not just plain boneheaded ("Diva") - and her visual style is nowhere near as interesting as Gaga's. And perhaps most importantly of all, she's not weird or shocking, ever, which makes me wonder why she's in this video/on this song. What she does and what Gaga does are almost totally opposed. And crucially, Gaga looks like the future, while Beyoncé looks like the past. Which makes me wonder if the idea of the collaboration was Gaga's...

Oh, well; at least Beyoncé isn't just doing her usual thing here. Instead, she's dressed/made up like a RealDoll and singing/reciting dialogue in a hyper-stylized voice...basically, playing Nicki Minaj. Who has in turn been playing Lil' Kim (specifically, the Lil' Kim of the "How Many Licks" video) for a couple of years now. So she's found a new, twice-removed way to be uninteresting. An achievement of some small sort, I guess.

As far as Gaga's part of this production, it's a step down from "Bad Romance" and "Paparazzi" despite being a dramatically higher-budget operation - and yeah, you can see it all on the screen. Director Jonas Åkerlund has abandoned the labored grittiness of his videos for The Prodigy and Metallica and gone full LaChappelle here - I'm surprised the thing wasn't shot in Technicolor. The first third or so, which takes place in a high-glam women's prison and features a hermaphrodite joke in its opening minute that actually made me laugh out loud, is the best part of the whole near-ten-minute thing. The costumes are great, mixing the aesthetics of porn, gang culture, and Broadway in a way that really works. Gaga's thinner than she's been in previous clips, and she's wearing even less clothing, at one point dancing in a studded bra and thong with her hair half-bleached and curled with Diet Coke cans (the most subtle product placement in a film bursting with it) and looking like a demonic Amy Winehouse.

When she leaves prison and hooks up with Beyoncé, driving away in Uma Thurman's "Pussy Wagon" from the Kill Bill movies, my heart sank a little.

Previously, Gaga's stolen everything that caught her eye - costumes from old Samantha Fox videos and The Night Porter, imagery and a general vibe from Matthew Barney, Alien and The Warriors, Japanese kegadol (girls in bandages) fetishism...not to mention all the occult symbolism...but she's always made it her own. Gaga-world has always been its own thing until now, with references to Earth that were recognizable, but not blatant and pandering. The presence of the "Pussy Wagon" is clumsy, lowering the whole video to the level of rappers reciting dialogue from Scarface.

The video pretty much goes off a cliff from there - Beyoncé goes to a diner, poisons Tyrese (things perk up again when Gaga is seen in the kitchen, poisoning everyone's food as a recipe appears onscreen), and then the two women dance and sing in a diner full of corpses before driving off in the "Pussy Wagon." The End.

The mini-movie-ness of "Telephone" (which, lyrically, has nothing to do with any of this, though both Gaga and Beyoncé are seen using telephones at several points during the clip) points out what's been becoming more and more obvious with each succeeding Gaga clip - she's not writing songs, she's writing musical numbers. Without the visuals, they're no more interesting than it would be to listen to a Busby Berkeley number on TV in another room. I may well watch this video another time or two, though I doubt it - it's just not as good as her last two or three have been. But would I listen to the song by itself? Absolutely not. As I said above, even right now I can't remember what it sounded like. That seems like bad news for her label, which almost certainly had to lay out some money for a production this elaborate, no matter how many product placements they shoehorned in.

MAN, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER

I think 2009 was the year I finally stopped caring about critical consensus. It was definitely the year I felt most distant from my “peers.” I clicked on Pitchfork dutifully every morning M-F, and at least four days a week was confronted with reviews of albums that meant less than nothing to me musically or sociologically. The same thing happened when I stumbled across a Slate piece or some random daily paper article trying to make me think and care about Beyonce or Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga (whose videos are frequently pretty awesome, but whose music has yet to be even half as good as the visuals that surround it). I was as disconnected from what the loudest critical voices were discussing with each other as I have ever been.

There was a time when I would have seen this as my fault, when I would have been upset with myself for not keeping up, when I would have felt like it was my responsibility as a critic to know what Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors (not to mention all the mainstream pop and country and hip-hop acts) sounded like. But this year, that didn’t happen. I finally internalized cultural atomization and the existential futility of generalist/broad-stroke music criticism.

When you try to go large-scale, you end up lost in a fog of platitudes and generalizations that offer no insight and may in fact impede real understanding of individual works of art. Art doesn’t fit into sweeping narratives. Each album or song must be taken on its own merits, instead of trying to contextualize it within a genre or, worse yet, hammer it into some imagined soundtrack to an equally ill-considered version of history.

The rewards of being a music critic are so low at this point – you don’t even get the free CDs anymore half the time – that trying to be an omniscient cultural arbiter only makes the striver look foolish and hubristic. Critics can’t make bands, and they can’t break them. It’s all just diary-keeping now. (If we're being honest, it always was.) Solipsism is the future – the ever-increasing use of the first person singular in reviews and even features is proof of this, and that’s a major psychological breakthrough every critic needs to make, soon. I’m comfortable with my tastes (metal, jazz and Latin music), but more importantly I’m at peace with my own insignificance. I know I’m having no measurable impact on the shape of pop culture. Technical death metal is never gonna top the charts, jazz is gonna keep selling jazz numbers, and Paulina Rubio is never gonna be as big as Shakira. And I don’t care. I’m just out here enjoying the music, and occasionally sharing my thoughts with whoever happens along. I hope my fellow critics will embrace their own insignificance in 2010. It’ll probably make their writing better.