If we can define good pop albums the way Howard Hawks famously defined good movies- that’s three great scenes and no bad scenes- then Lady GaGa’s The Fame Monster is certainly a good pop album. At least three songs are great, the rest aren’t bad, and at only 34 minutes long it never threatens to wear out its welcome. It’s shamelessly sleek, glossy and digital, but with enough heart, humor and horror that it is far from soulless. The only significant problem I can hear is that its tracks are in slightly the wrong order.
It starts with the current mega-hit “Bad Romance,” a move that might have made more sense if not for the last track, “Teeth.” One of the album’s fun n’ catchy fillers, “Teeth” throbs with four-on-the-floor stomp and neo-burlesque brass as Lady GaGa entices the men in the house to show their proverbial fangs. It sounds like a slow-burning fuse that’s supposed to psyche us up for a big-ass pop explosion, and for some reason it’s anti-climactically placed at the very end of the record.
So after my tenth spin through The Fame Monster, I shuffled “Teeth” to the top of the order and it worked much better. Besides, a song as show-stopping as “Bad Romance” deserves at least one opening act. The profusion of succulent hooks, the Amazonian-cyborg lust and the near-operatic drama would have been enough to cement this song’s status as an instant classic, yet Lady GaGa goes the extra inches when she delivers one of the most deliciously reprehensible lyrics that will ever infect the Billboard Top 40 (”Want you in my room/ while your baby is sick.”) (UPDATE: Looks like I mangled this lyric. See comments below). If “Bad Romance” has any warts, they’re the moments when she insists on reminding us in plain English that she’s “a freak bitch, baby.” Well duh- she made that crystal clear with that sick baby lyric. I’m nit-picking, though. Criticizing Lady GaGa for her lack of subtlety is kind of like complaining that Andy Warhol didn’t use enough earth tones.
“Alejandro” comes next, and its tropically-tinged melodies are hard to resist, even as they unabashedly rob Ace Of Base to pay ABBA. The third track (or fourth on my playlist), “Monster,” is the closest thing the album has to a dud. It’s perfectly listenable and hummable 21st Century bubblegum, but the chorus hook is a bland disappointment after such a catchy verse. Also, coming from the freak bitch who drenched herself in blood live on MTV, I expect lyrics a little juicier than “that boy is a monster/ he ate my heart and he ate my brain.”
Then we come to the album’s centerpiece, “Speechless,” a lighter-waving power ballad where Lady GaGa takes off her costume and reveals that there is in fact a heart on her sleeve (although even that heart still comes with a sprinkle of Ziggy Stardust). Dropping such an earnest song in the middle of such a shiny album could have easily backfired- and perhaps it feels a bit calculated and out of place- but the song’s a hit. It’s especially refreshing in the wake of “Monster,” where the vocally gifted GaGa mysteriously and gratuitously used Auto-Tune. (Are pop stars now legally obligated to use Auto-Tune in at least one song per album now?) On “Speechless,” she really shows off her powerful pipes without resorting to Aguileran melismatic overkill. Prediction: by the end of 2010, karaoke bars across the planet will be sick to death of this track.
“Dance In The Dark” brings the party roaring back to the dance floor, although some folks might miss a step and scratch their heads when our Lady name-drops JonBenet Ramsey during the “Vogue”-style rap in the bridge. The second-to-last track, “So Happy I Could Die,” offers a pleasantly chill comedown, which is why it stays at #7 in my custom-made sequence.
I end my version of The Fame Monster with “Telephone,” the dynamite discotheque duet with Beyonce. I’d think an entertainer with Lady GaGa’s sense of showmanship would want to leave her audience breathless and spent, and “Telephone” is exactly the kind of fierce motherfucker that could do that. In fact, I feel pity for any song that has to follow “Telephone” on a club DJ’s set list. As the sixth track on the proper album, it upstages everything that comes after it.
I suppose criticizing the sequencing of a Top 40 pop album is a tad overbearing. After all, Howard Hawks apparently never specified how the great scenes should be distributed among the not-bad scenes. The bottom line is that The Fame Monster is pretty good, and should be a tough act to follow- not just for Lady Gaga herself, but for her pop-star peers.