Pop quiz! Have you read anything positive about Lady Gaga online lately? Chances are you haven't. And it's not necessarily because nothing good is happening. It seems some websites finally cracked the Little Monster code. I believe some finally realized they get more page views from over-protective fans when they bash their idol.
Yes, the conversation about the pop star seems to be one-sided lately. ARTPOP? More like ARTFLOP. She's not good anymore. People got tired of her antics. Gaga is over. Those are the headlines that you will most likely see on any given day because it has become cool to bash Lady Gaga.
Yes, Lady Gaga's latest album, ARTPOP, didn't sell like hotcakes or like her previous one. But few mention the album being named one of the top 10 albums of 2013 by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry with 2.3 million copies sold worldwide. And while according to the report's of Gaga's demise the general public doesn't care anymore, the venues she's already visited have been sold out and her Little Monsters are still dressed to impress to showing their hardcore love to their idol.
Few are reporting about RIAA's announcement that this week Lady Gaga became the first female artist in Gold & Platinum Program history to earn a Digital Diamond Award, in recognition of "Bad Romance" surpassing the 10 million threshold in sales and streams. Still, with the addition of newtour dates around the world, because of selling out original dates in five minutes it seems this may be Gaga's busiest year so far. Oh yeah, she's also slated to release a jazz album with Tony Bennett later this year tiltled Cheek to Cheek, and a second act to ARTPOP similar to what she did with her first album The Fame. Lady Gaga was also turned into different works of art last year in an exhibition by artist Robert Wilson at The Louvre in Paris, and will be the first artist to sing in outer space in 2015.
But to be fair, not everyone has been bashing Gaga. Fuse TVwrote at length about Gaga this week saying "despite ARTPOP's poor reception, her puke-soaked SXSW set and an avalanche of negative press recalling her former glory, Gaga is still on top of her game." Of Gaga, pop culture site Refinery29 said "In five minutes with this woman you get much closer to something approaching a human being than with the large majority of the personality-challenged mannequins that pass as pop stars in 2014, whose primary job as best I can tell is to look and appear - to use a word popular among the Beyhive - "flawless."
Me? It doesn't take much effort to see that I'm still a fan. And while I can find Gaga's art-talk and overall preachiness exhausting it doesn't take way from the fact that I still think she's more talented than most of the generic pop stars out there. I particularly love when it's just her and the piano and her over-the-top music videos, like her latest one for her single "G.U.Y."
Who knows, maybe Gaga really is the mastermind over all this "Gaga is over" talk. It just takes looking back to her iconic music video for Paparazzi, released in 2009, to see a representation of most of the things that have now happened in her career including her time in a wheelchair due to a broken hip.
