Grumbling About Lady Gaga To ‘The Guardian’ Is The Hot New Trend
We may have compiled our comprehensive list of Lady Gaga feuds a bit too early. Not even a week after we posted our Gaga beef round-up, Grace Jones shared some harsh words for the pop star to U.K.’s The Guardian. And now singer/songwriter/harpist Joanna Newsom is joining the anti-Gaga club, telling go-to Gaga-trashing newspaper The Guardian that the “Alejandro” singer’s sexuality lacks “scuzziness” and that she may as well be called “Arty Spice.” Them’s fighting words!
Joanna tells The Guardian in a recent interview that her problem may not be Gaga herself, but all the people out there who like her. Hey, now she’s trash-talking us! Joanna says:
“I’m mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there’s a high level of intelligence in the songwriting. Her approach to image is really interesting, but you listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks. Smart outlets for musical journalism give her all this credit, like she’s the new Madonna …” She breaks off and laughs. “Although I’m coming from a perspective of also thinking Madonna is not great at all. I’m like, fair enough: she is the new Madonna, but Madonna’s a dumb-ass!”
Whoa, whoa, whoa—now she’s insulting Madonna? Way to multi-task your complaints against today’s pop stars, Joanna! We wish we could see her juggle in a Miley Cyrus diss somewhere. The singer continues her rant:
“There’s not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. She just happens to wear slightly weirder outfits than Britney Spears. But they’re not that weird – they’re mostly just skimpy. She’s fully marketing her body/sexuality; she’s just doing it while wearing, like, a ‘fierce’ telephone hair-hat. Her sexuality has no scuzziness, no frank raunchiness, in the way that, say, Peaches, or even Grace Jones, have – she’s Arty Spice! And, meanwhile, she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she’s Brecht or something. She just makes me miss Cyndi Lauper.”
It appears Joanna regets namecalling Madonna, and (sort of) retracts her statement. “I shouldn’t have called Madonna a dumb-ass,” Joanna writes in a later email to the paper. “Her music and she have just gotten so boring to me, this last decade. I think maybe she doesn’t hold her money very gracefully, the way some people can’t hold their drink. But one thing she is surely not is dumb.”
Who just got a bucketload of residuals from having her music and legacy honored on one of the most beloved, successful shows on TV right now? Joanna Newsom Madonna, that’s who. (Coincidentally, Lady Gaga, once again, will follow in Madonna’s footsteps.) Madonna can handle her money any way she wants to, since she’ll never be lacking much of it.
Do you agree with Newsom’s points about Gaga and Madonna? Or do you have your own harsh words to share about Newsom’s critiques? Don’t worry about hurting her feelings, since she doesn’t read blogs anymore.
