Cherry Cherry Boom Boom

The Fame, 15 Years Later.

I can not remember the first time I came across Lady Gaga or heard her mega-hit single, “Just Dance.” Like a lot of music at that time, it seemed to have slipped into my ears, either through the iTunes Top 10 List or YouTube or something else entirely, and stayed there. Either way, my life was not particularly changed or swayed by that one song alone. I just thought a dance song with a chorus about dancing was pretty fun.

And then I heard “Poker Face.” That’s a moment I remember with the same rose-colored intensity as my first night away at college or my first kiss. I was thirteen-going-on-fourteen at the time. This new thing called high school—of which I had completed only a few weeks of at that point—felt big and scary. Everyone seemed to be acting differently, classes were all about learning, learning, learning, and my Aeropostale khakis—in accordance with Wylie ISD’s mandated dress-code—felt like they were simultaneously too big and too small. I fast-developed a ritual of beelining from the bus stop to home and finding refuge in my family’s “entertainment center” (converted from our garage). MTV still played music videos during those late-afternoon hours. So I’d turn on our “big screen,” heat up so-so leftovers, watch videos, and complete some homework here and there. I hated it all. So, so, so much.

This is the adolescent sludge that “Poker Face” cut through. Picture straw-thin me sitting on a lumpy beanbag, struggling to find X and myself, and hearing “MUM-MUM-MUM-MAH!” It felt like a rod of lightning shot through me. I first watched the Ray Kay-directed visual (who I knew from Beyoncé’s “Freakum Dress” video, thank you very much) half-heartedly, curious if this singer who hid 60% of her face with bangs and oversized sunglasses had another great song in her. The video is 100% devoid of plot and centers around various super aestheticized shots filmed at a mansion’s pool: background actors strip their clothes, Gaga lies on an underwear-clad Adonis, there’s a pair of what can only be described as video-screen sunglasses. The clip made my eyes go wide. I felt equal parts shock, horror, and intrigue course through me. 

Therein lies the magic of Lady Gaga’s unrivaled debut, which came with the release of The Fame, a two-time Grammy-winning album that recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. She masterfully pushed the edge of pop culture into something more bizarre, experimental, and hedonistic when, remarkably, gatekeepers still held remarkable sway over the industry and culture was miles away from the polyamorous and hedonistic East European-rave Gaga was apositing. I can see now that the bonafide sleaze of those first two Gaga singles resonated with me (even if I was virginal in every way possible) because they contrasted so greatly from my drab surroundings and existence. My life felt like a drag and so did the larger world— there were two wars and an in-progress recession and a lot of fretting by the adults in my life. The world needed a ditty about hoodwinking an inadequate lover sung with the gusto of a Broadway number. I knew from that moment on, in a way, that this slice of the world and tongue-in-cheek self-expression felt more right than the toybox land of suburban cars and Wal-Marts and purity rings I was trapped in.  

Such is the power of great pop music. I listened to The Fame again recently, laughing at how far my technology has come from a first-generation iPod Touch, low-res music illegally downloaded on LimeWire, and frayed wired headphones. The songs still hold up. The production, admittedly, does feel overly emblematic of a specific time and place. In my opinion, though, that is only because the album’s synthesizer-heavy electro-pop production spawned so many shameless imitations through its success (Ke$ha, LMFAO, David Guetta, etc.) There is something quite linear and artificial about the sound that reminds me of MySpace profiles and flip phones.

But what makes The Fame so damned special to me, even all these years later, is the songwriting. A song like “Boys, Boys, Boys,” which feels like some Grease-style anthem about loving dick, is chockfull of far-out imagery-laden lyrics like, “You taste just like glitter mixed with rock and roll” and “Don’t forget my lipstick I left it in your ashtray.” A song I particularly loved back then (and still do) was the song “Eh, Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say),” which operated on such a simple, dare I even say dumb, rhyming scheme that feigns vapidity while casually calling it quits with someone and never delivering a reason that holds water. Then there’s “Paparazzi,” that turns an unbending obsession into poeticism, with a gut-wrenching line like, “Promise I’ll be kind, but I won’t stop until that boy is mine.” Oof! I lived for the operatic dramatics of it all. 

There was, of course, a lot of dramatic style to go along with it. Gaga in a coat made of Kermits. Gaga in a pyrotechnic bra. Gaga wearing a Hello Kitty-style bow made of hair. Even more than the outlandish looks themselves, I loved her unflinching demeanor and blasé attitude when wearing the outfits. An interviewer would ask her about the couture look, and she’d blink, as if she’d just thrown on a run-of-the-mill pair of jeans and a t-shirt not worthy of comment. 

I, like many other Gaga fans, yearn for the days when the musician had unabashed avant-garde pop ambitions and used fame as a muse. Those days are long gone. But, at least we have The Fame, an album that feels so centered in a specific time and place (like a lot of great art) that it feels impossible to imagine someone, even Gaga herself, recreating again. Either way, it made a little queer Black boy in Texas believe that he too could be famous.

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