Lady Gaga argued she is not a sell-out and has “fuck all to do with Katy Perry” in her “its all about me” SXSW keynote address.
Gaga “jumped the shark” the previous night in Austin when she was puked on as part of her act. She calls that “artpop”.
However the big reveal in the Lady Gaga personality is her ugly competitive streak and paranoia about artists doing better than her like Katy Perry. “I don’t know what fuck all I have to do with Katy Perry. My music is so completely different,” she said at her SXSW keynote.
Gaga’s real problem is that she diverted fans away from her music with her multiple stunts a long time ago and they didn’t come back. Yeah, the egg, the meat dress, we’ve seen it all before and now its the vomit. What it really is, is a calculated “shock” tactic. We get it Gaga, you are an artiste! When she made people look away from her music, her music stopped selling, and for that she only has herself to blame.
Bad management maybe? Well she fired them so problem fixed! Well not quite. ‘Artpop’ was a global failure. “We’ve sold over 2.5 million copies of ARTPOP all over the world — I’m sorry I didn’t sell a million records the first week. I have before,” she argued to the audience in her SXSW spotlight. “I’ve sold 27 million albums. I’m very proud of what we did. I sold as much as everybody else sells”.
But not as many as Katy Perry! Nowhere near as many as Katy Perry, in fact. Gaga’s ‘Artpop’ is sitting at around 618,000 sales in the USA, Perry’s ‘Prism’ is over 1.1 million.
Gaga also insists she has not sold out to a corporation despite performing in front of and for Doritos in Austin this week. “Whoever is writing or saying all of those things, you don’t know fuck about the state of the music industry,” she said. “I think it’s also about how the artist chooses to engage in these sorts of relationships. What’s the type of relationship, what’s the philosophy behind the collaboration, do you have things in common, do you not?”
Again, that’s not quite right. On one hand she argues that she has sold 27 million albums and on the other she plays the “poor artist” card and tries to justify accepting the Doritos handout.
“Don’t sell out to this business. Sell in,” she said. Then take your own advice Gaga. Listen to what you are saying.
“Without sponsorships, without these companies coming together to help us, we won’t have any more artists in Austin. We won’t have any festivals, because record labels don’t have any fucking money”, she said. Ummm, but she has money. Lots of it too! Especially if the stories about the pay-outs her “charity” the Born This Way Foundation has been making.
Then she threw in a well-placed plug for a real fan. “The CEO of Frito-Lay came in with all her kids and was like, ‘That was so brilliant!’ and she was crying.” Hang on, run that by me again ….”The CEO of Frito-Lay”?
I like Britney Spears. She’s commercial, she’s fake, she mimes and doesn’t lie about it … she is honest. Maybe a few other “artiepop” stars should follow her lead and stop pretending they are something they are not.
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