Phoning It In

I normally don't do this, but I have to comment on this video.



While Jonas Akerlund is an amazing director ( he was the man that was attacked for the "Smack My Bitch Up video for Prodigy and the man that brought us the cult classic Spun ) I'm really disappointed that this is his latest vehicle for visual consumption. He's more suited to bring us a controversial story rather than the latest Top 40 dribblings of a gimmicky singer that can't function unless they have outlandish costuming and auto-tuning.

And while some will bring up the point that some claim Akerlund's previous work is more about style than substance, I would argue that his take on a phrase which means to do something with intensity and his vision of meth addicts is more about how society views them rather than leaving substantive storytelling on the shelf.

That being shown, it seems that Akerlund has abandoned this line of approach in order to get his foot back in the door and embrace pop princesses as a way to flex his directorial muscle.

The video itself gives voice to the very real theory that the reason people actually buy into the pop music genre is that they can't separate the visuals from the song itself. When one separates the audio from the visual, this really isn't that different from any pre-packaged, dancehall ready track stamped out by T-Pain, Kanye, or Britney Spears. It's a genre of music that is easily reproduced and uses pseudo-clever marketing to pump the end result into people's minds in order for it to be successful. The end result is the dumbing-down of our culture.

And while I will offer the caveat that proving Lady GaGa doesn't have a dick lends of air of comedic value to the video, it's really all downhill from there.

There really isn't anything within the extended song that hasn't been done by GaGa before, save the accompanying vocals of Beyonce, another staple of the "pretty women singing canned tunes" genre. So it's not surprising that the producers of the song and the video would go to such lengths to ensure that this style of music get a boost by having a short-film directed by a cutting edge director.

Maybe that's why Akerlund opted to take on this project, as a way of showing that Lady GaGa is nothing more than a proto-typical singer than can't survive within the musical realm without hats that look like phones and sunglasses made of smoldering cigarettes, a mere set prop and not really a true artist. If that be the case, then he should be lauded for his directorial honesty.

I need to address this one aspect of the film - the blatant and unblushing aping of Tarantino. I'm not entirely sure how he would view the overreaching use of "The Pussy Wagon" and the obvious parody of two characters from Pulp Fiction, but considering that Quentin has always loved for people to talk about him, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't be too pissed. As for me, this shows two things - Akerlund knows who has created something original and how to use it to bring a wider audience to his film that is trying to make more out of a cookie-cutter song than it would normally garner.

Ultimately, the short film for "Telephone" is successful on two levels: detractors of GaGa are put in their place by knowing that she actually has digitized genitalia and not a dick and directors sometimes have to take on projects that aren't suitable to their talents in order to stay afloat.