Bloody Mary

Of course today poor production from a hitmaking artist is unheard of. Production is its own artform now, an end in itself. To be used for good or for evil. I’ll just use Lady Gaga as an example of how to use the latest, greatest, cutting-edge-est production values without getting drowned in it. Because she really knows what she’s going for. Born This Way is impeccable all through and through. I thin she said she “licked and made love to every note” or something, which is an icky way of putting it but about on target. Bloody Mary has to be my favorite BTW track. Gaga sprang to fame for making club songs, and she’s still clinging to her comfort zone of chest-thumping beats and mega-choruses. I like it more when she allows new elements to enter the picture, like the cabaret inflections here. She’s going in the right direction, and hopefully will carry on an evolution that allows her to ditch the tired comparisons to Madonna, and walk on some fresh musical ground. I’d say what Gaga is missing in her career so far is a partner. She’s got the voice and she’s got the tunes, but her lyrics are frankly idiotic. Words aren’t her forte, and that’s where a collaborator should come in. She needs to find her Bernie.

Get Off of My Cloud

 ”I never dug it as a record. The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow-up. We were in L.A. and it was time for another single. But how do you follow-up “Satisfaction”? Actually, what I wanted was to do it slow like a Lee Dorsey thing. We rocked it up. I thought it was one of Andrew Loog Oldham’s worst productions.”

Sez Keef. Yeah. The Stones were probably England’s worst-produced hitmakers in 1966. Keith might have complained about making singles at great speed and under a lot of pressure, but it suited them just fine. When the punks spat at them for being relics a decade later, they sucked it up, took a deep breath and came back with Some Girls, one of their most classic LPs. The Stones weren’t going to let anyone show them up – they were the original punks. They were the ones who cared about the energy of their playing more than production values, cared more about expressing their youthful discontent more than being liked or looking pretty. Generations of three-guitar garage bands have looked up to Get Off My Cloud, with its horrible production and pissed-of spirit. Maybe the poor sound blurs the playing, but it’s the driving aggressiveness that matters. It’s a shame though, how the vocal mixed down into incomprehensibility, for as usual under the noise lie some clever lyrics. If this were coming from somebody who gets high regard for their wordsmithery, scholars would have lauded Jagger’s sharp use of quotation and dialogue to subtly subvert his own meaning.  The line “Just ’cause you feel so good, do you have to drive me out of my head?” which is one of the few comprehensively enunciated lines and thus the most famous, appears to be the singer’s complaint about the annoyances in his life, but is in fact spoken by a man on the telephone who calls to complain about all the noise. Thus the writer is aggravated by the intrusion into his privacy, yet also acknowledges his own capacity to intrude on others, giving the iconic line to a presumed adversary, and so taking the entire songs out of the realm of selfish angst into a more universal diatribe against the inevitable grinding headache that intrudes on everyone’s cloud. That’s what critics would say if Mick Jagger ever got a dime’s worth of credit for his writing abilities.