lady gaga 'fame-era' singles poll

"eh eh" is actually my 2nd or 3rd favorite of these -- i remember seeing the video on a gaga block on fuse and being like "shit, why couldn't this have been a US single"

lovegame

then

bad romance
paparazzi
poker face
just dance

i've actually come around to a couple of the earlier songs (in bar settings) but it's still "bad romance", though i love "alejandro" too. only one i don't really f/w is "love game" and i have no idea what an "eh eh (what can i say?)" is

"speechless" is still my favorite song of hers i think, though

telephone > bad romance >> paparazzi >>> alejandro > poker face >>>>>>>>>>>>>> just dance >>> eh eh >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> love game

eh eh is gr8

"Bad Romance"
"Telephone"
"Alejandro"
"Paparazzi"
"Just dance"
"Love Game"
"Eh Eh (What Can I Say)"
"Poker Face"

Paparazzi was the first Gaga song I liked straight away. I have retconned a love of Poker face. Still don't like Just dance.

(Basically agree with Lex almost entirely)

heard "bad romance" on the radio the other day & tho it's not my favorite single of hers it feels like the most important one to me in the context of her discography so far

anyway, personal favorite is "alejandro" -- after that it's "just dance" which i loved immediately & still do

i like "bad romance"/"telephone"/"paparazzi" equally pretty much

yeah i don't really fuck w/ "lovegame" either -- the bridge on that one is probably worse than the one on "poker face"

:( @ all the lovegame hate

bad romance it is for me

Paparazzi = Bad Romance > Poker Face > Telephone > Alejandro > Lovegame = Eh Eh > Just Dance

i had one of those life changing moments with bad romance when it just hit me in one big cascading flood!

"bad romance" does feel like the most important one, yes

the song quietly rivalling "telephone" for my personal fav is "monster". "we might've fucked, not really sure, don't recall" lol. i like how her labelling him a monster both diminishes him (the male voice interjections are on some dumb lumbering frankenstein shit) and elevates him ("he ate my heart and then he ate my brain", he still has total power over her).

ditto to surm

hearing "Bad Romance" on the radio is always a slight buzzkill for me w/o the extra stuff in the video version (harpsichord and extra vocals on intro, claps on the outro, etc.)

I think I want to bump paparazzi up to a tie with lovegame for me. I really love Paparazzi too.

:( @ all the lovegame hate

"disco stick" still makes me cringe completely soz :(

(same's true for "bluffin with my muffin" on "poker face" but the rest of "poker face" is insanely catchy)

yeah lex monster is like my favorite gaga song. the male part goes "i love that girl, she's hot as hell"

so great

that song is important i think bcuz it countered (tho likely not consciously) the criticism of early gaga detractors (myself included) that her songs were too ordinary to hold up to her image

speaking of "bad romance"

xxp or no no "wanna talk to her, she's hot as hell"

yeah "disco stick" is ridic but that's 1/2 the reason I love it, I think

"disco stick" is at least slightly batshit -- "bluffin w/ my muffin" is just terrible writing

don't really like any of these; paparazzi is probably the one i can sit through the longest without turning off though

"bad romance" also just SOUNDS like the song of a decade. culturally defining.

yeah - bw/mm is p horrible

i can never get into "Paparazzi," just a dreary melody and sad plopping drums, trying so hard to be dramatic or grand and ending up so banal

Automatically voted Bad Romance without even thinking about it, but probably should have been Paparazzi.

"speechless" obviously has a huge & great hook but i can't really give into the whole eltonness of it -- it's a bit too humorless, i think she kinda gets lost in it

x-posts to SD Really? idk I think it's pretty epic - I get really into singing it if it comes on in the car. I feel it, man. OK JK (sort of) but I do really love it.

speechless is SLIGHTLY too pigeonholed, but speechless is really a piece of work, and her voice on it is just o_O

i think the gaga line that makes me cringe MOST might be the princess diana reference in "dance in the dark" (in a song that i otherwise think is one of her strongest) - not so much because it's embarrassing wordplay or whatever but it's just such a weird, jarring misstep

"I left my head and my heart on the dance floor"

I only listened to the Fame Monster EP (8 songs) and love all of it. How enthusiastically should I go for the rest?

speechless is SLIGHTLY too pigeonholed, but speechless is really a piece of work, and her voice on it is just o_O

― i like lucy (surm), Thursday, February 10, 2011 4:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i pretty much agree w/ this but still fall slightly on the other side of the line

i've said it b4 but it's worth repeating . . . .

her voice on this part in speechless

And I know that it's complicated
but I'm a loser in love so baby
Raise a glass to mend all the broken hearts
of all my wrecked up friends

when the drums kind of drop out at the end

there are no words!

i find "speechless" genuinely moving in a kind of raddled sunset boulevard kind of way? it's an obvious trick but the james dean glossy eyes/johnnie walker eyes switch from verse 1 to verse 2 does work. also, i think some of her best live performances were of "speechless" - the piano in a glass box and then on fire, the surrealist piano on giraffe legs etc.

o wait it isn't even in the poll lol

it wasn't a single. in some ways i appreciate that she didn't pull a GGGB and mine the fame monster endlessly for singles, but...she really could have.

considering that there were 7-8 singles off a project that in many senses is considered one album, i don't know if the restraint your praising is actually there

i kinda consider the fame monster as a separate entity to the fame, despite the repackaging - it feels conceptually distinct enough, basically.

yeah but...i'm sure there'd be more than 3 singles if it was a completely distinct album and not an 8 song addendum to a preceding album

agree with some dude on "paparazzi"'s limpness

i would probably rank them

bad romance
telephone
poker face (after i went months hating on it lol)
alejandro
just dance
paparazzi
lovegame

i'm not actually sure how "eh eh" even goes

in fact it's almost exactly like GGGB in the sense that there were 4-5 singles off the initial album release, and then 3-4 more from the new songs added to the deluxe edition. (xpost)

had no idea the lyric in the first verse on alejandro that i could never make out was "she hides true love en su bolsillo" until i did it at karaoke

yeah but...i'm sure there'd be more than 3 singles if it was a completely distinct album and not an 8 song addendum to a preceding album

i'd call it a sequel, or "evil twin", or something, rather than an addendum. and it's more of an EP really (though the entire thing does show how meaningless these distinctions can be)

yeah but in terms of marketing and public perception and singles campaigns, the only difference between Fame Monster and Good Girl Gone Bad Reloaded is that one had 5 more new non-singles and one didn't, which doesn't make a huge difference in the bonus track-crazy world we live in.

Paparazzi: the sad-sack melody & delivery is the point and it is a point well-made.

but Bad Romance and Alejandro are right about equal with it

ok i'll rank these

Paparazzi
Alejandro
(gap)
Telephone
Poker Face
Bad Romance
Eh Eh (What Can I Say)
Just Dance
LoveGame

nah i totally expected this

yeah me too

lol lovegame

this is p much what i expected but idg what makes bad romance special. always feels overcooked.

i like the dancers in the leather jackets in the love game video more than all her music combined.

overcooked is what i like about "Bad Romance." when she falls short of over the top it feels a little flimsy for me.

its like u pick everything terrible abt music to like sometimes

yeah i should really focus on the important stuff like leather jackets

well sure if u wanna strawman me, i said the guys *in* the leather jackets i mean jeez man wtf

as i've said in the past, what makes bad romance special is the strength and emotion of gaga's melodic composition and vocal delivery as set against such a cold, hard beat. the disparity there mimics human experience quite well, and offers up a true representation of what it is like to reflect on love gone awry.

btw id like to clarify that yes my priorites are p much

1. cute boys
2. music

and if there was a board called ilcb i would post there as much as ilxor does here

ha

i sometimes have trouble deciding which is more important to me, too. love, on the one hand, is tough to argue with. but cute boys don't necessarily equate with love, and cute fades, and boys bail on you sometimes. my keyboard, though, and the records that i love -- that is permanent. i like that.

i think you just wrote gaga's next album.

until your computer crashes and you lost all the music you spent months making, but yes

stop. you know that happened to me recently. i now have 3 copies of everything i record in the house.

i know that's why i said it!

:D <3

i think you just wrote gaga's next album.

― tellysavalas (some dude), Thursday, February 17, 2011 5:11 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw i'm taking this as a compliment

And well you should!

it's not. sorry for the serious words. i just reacted that way cuz i tend to be a very positive person when it comes to music and i really would like to see christina doing better. it's just, i feel she's made the wrong decisions.

― i like lucy (surm), Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:08 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That is ok surm. I understand what you are saying about Christina. I always thought she was going to be 2nd as far as blond pop singers of 00's.

Plus, "Bad Romance" winning is not a surprise as it is probably the only time Lady Gaga took all of her influences (Bowie, Madonna, maybe even Michael Jackson) and cooked up a pop anthem almost as equal to what they produced.

Paparazzi, really? Is that just because it's so different from the other tracks?

That chorus & bridge to "Paparzzi" is killer to me. Also, the synths weren't so prominent and annoying like earlier singles.

papaRAzzi

that note still kills me, the way she goes up to her head voice

thing that kinda bums me out about so many lady gaga tracks is the killer choruses matched with these weak monotonous verses. in so many of her songs it seems like the verses are just sort of her hanging around a couple of notes until finally she breaks into some brilliant hook of a chorus. the approach should be more compelling imo

i'm not by any means a huge madonna fan, but that is one area where madonna has her beat, i'm thinking.

Bad Romance has, like, three great hooks in one song and even the verses are also quite catchy by themseoves. Either one of the hooks could be a chorus to a pretty memorable pop song and this song has three of them in one song! While not unprecedented, it's pretty rarified air. No shock at the win or the margin of victory IMHO.

really shows how much momentum she got going around late spring '09 that the 4 singles released after that all got more votes than the 4 singles released before that

"telephone" is just the best thing she's ever done. STOP CALLING STOP CALLING I DON'T WANNA THINK ANY MORE

b's verse is a monster, the outraged counterpoint to gaga retreating into the music/the dancefloor

THE WAY YOU BLOWIN' UP MY PHONE WON'T MAKE ME LEAVE NO FASTER
PUT MY COAT ON FASTER
LEAVE MY GIRLS NO FASTER
I SHOULDA LEFT MY PHONE AT HOME CUZ THIS IS A DISASTER
CALLIN' LIKE A COLLECTOR
SORRY I CANNOT ANSWER

Technically that is a bridge, not a verse

Along with Hung Up and Hanging on the Telephone, this suggests that songs about people not answering the phone are, as a rule, brilliant.

"telephone" is just the best thing she's ever done.

Can actually get behind this.

Yeah "Telephone" is basically the only Gaga tune i'm likely actually to drop at a party.

"Telephone" is a useless mess imo, sounds like 2 stars desperate to work w/ each other settling for the first boring Rodney Jerkins idea they could agree on

Putting The Fame on for the first time in ages. It has to be one of the most front-loaded albums I own - there were six singles (counting international/promotional) and they're the first six tracks on the album! The upshot is that for that stretch, it's a shockingly consistent pop record. Yeah, "disco stick" is dumb (love the "hand on your - UNH!" bridge though) and "Beautiful Dirty Rich" isn't great, but still. As soon as you get past that point it's a lot more hit-and-miss. "Money Honey" is seriously short on ideas, and I just heard "Starstruck" and can't tell you how it goes. "Boys Boys Boys" is HUGE though!

Can't help but feel this album really got overshadowed by Fame Monster being so good, and by people really linking the first one narratively to the first couple singles before she really started winning tastemakers over. The lyrical themes aren't mind-blowing across the board but it's hooky, dance-able pop, in general feeling like there was a lot more effort-per-song than Born This Way - which just really needed another six months of percolation (and editing) IMO.

btw would have probably voted "Eh Eh" just because I am one of the song's few champions on ILX (or anywhere in the world?)

And wow... "Brown Eyes" is kind of crazy. Lost in the back of the album but it's the clearest indication of her allegiance to old-school art-pop, I mean the backing vocals are dead-on late-period Beatles filtered through "Karma Police." Is this a sound often deployed on pop records these days or something definitely Gaga?

I'm with you on "Eh Eh."

"telephone" is cool but idk it sorta feels like gaga doing a beyonce song

specifically a Beyonce song from Dangerously in Love ugh

i think it's cool that gaga worked with jerkins but it's kind of a forgettable moment in her discography (and i like it a lot more than stuff off her last album)

xxxpost re: "Eh, Eh" - I'm just such a sucker for the chorus and the way she says "Cherry cherry boom boom" - - - I know, intellectually, that it's a shoutout to her producer but I didn't know that when I first heard it and I've never been able to shake it as actually carrying content and doing emotional work for the song - - "cherry, cherry" as something light and summery and "boom-boom" as being that thing going up in smoke, but in a kind of cartoonish lighthearted way, appropriate to the song, which is about letting go of a relationship that was nice and has had no particular drama go down, but it's just time to move on.

I dunno, I dig it. I think I cited this somewhere in the big 2009 tracks poll when we were arguing about Taylor Swift and I was trying to make the case that somehow Gaga's songs felt like relationships I'd lived through or could basically understand, closer to ABBA's world than so many songs which seem to be about pretend people gleaned from watching too much TV. Not to say "Eh, Eh" is a major work - just that it rings true in dealing with a minor slice of life.

"Telephone" is HUGE though, I honestly did not realize there was anybody who didn't like that song!

It's boring

if you clipped B's part out of "Telephone" i would never think to compare it to any Beyonce song

^^^^

What on earth on Dangerously in Love does it even remotely sound like????

TS: "Telephone" vs "Paparazzi"

"Telephone"

What on earth on Dangerously in Love does it even remotely sound like????

ha – shorthand for singles-plus-filler

not that it much matters particularly but none of gaga's songs age well at all imo, i already find it difficult to talk about her in retrospect

we'll be wondering wtf that was all about in ten years time, probably on this same thread

"Telephone" is HUGE though, I honestly did not realize there was anybody who didn't like that song!

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, October 14, 2012 3:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

srsly. "Bad Romance" is her only single that compares. Also I would never guess it was Darkchild if I didn't otherwise know.