http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/7466152/Lady-GaGas-Telephone-video.html

Lady GaGa's Telephone video

The outrageous video for Lady Gaga's latest release 'Telephone' has become an instant phenomenon.

By Neil McCormick
Published: 5:05PM GMT 17 Mar 2010

When was the last time a pop video became a global talking point? Lady GaGa’s all-singing, all-dancing, lesbian-prison-sex and mass-murder promo for Telephone has stirred up the kind of pop sensation not seen for a decade or more. It has featured on television news bulletins and the front pages of newspapers, as well as predictably tearing through the internet, breaking records on YouTube, trending on Twitter and inspiring frame-by-frame analysis and vigorous pro and anti blog commentary.

Most debate has focused on whether the video could be considered a work of pop art or just salacious sensationalism threatening the moral fabric of society. Lady GaGa herself claims it is a “commentary on the kind of country that we are”.

In which case, as GaGa and Beyoncé ride off into the sunset following a series of semi-naked dance routines, random outfit changes, B-movie locations, clunking product placement and a near-incoherent plot centring on infidelity and mass poisoning, one might be forced to conclude that America is a nation straining under its own decadence, producing a jaded, thrill-seeking, attention-deficit generation who can communicate only through irony. It is certainly not the state-of-the-nation message that President Obama would like to be sending out.

Can a video really tell us about the times we live in? If anything, GaGa’s video seems to refer back to the excesses of the Eighties, the supposed golden age of the music video, when bigger was better, and decadence and transgression were the standard currency of pop.

In a move boldly contrary to the credit-crunch spirit of the modern music business (where the average pop video budget has fallen to under £10,000), GaGa’s big production is on its way to becoming one of the most watched videos of all time, clocking up 17 million views in its first four days, and that’s not counting its massive television audience. In doing so, it has propelled her song to the top of charts around the world on downloads alone, even though the single was not officially released until this week.

This, after all, is how videos began: as a promotional tool. The Beatles were among the pioneers of the genre, when they realised they could send clips to US television shows rather than cross the Atlantic in person. In 1965, they shot 10 black-and-white promos in one day at Twickenham film studios. But it was with their avante-garde, backwards film for Strawberry Fields Forever in 1967 that something new was born, something more than just an advertising tool, effectively a visual extension of the song itself.

The pop video as a ubiquitous music marketing tool didn’t really get going until the development of new video cameras in the late Seventies. Among the pioneers was one of Lady GaGa’s antecedents in the transgressive pin-up stakes, Debbie Harry. Yet the sex and violence of Blondie seems innocent by modern standards, and video’s most celebrated early exponents tended to play it for laughs, with the comedy antics of Madness singled out for praise.

MTV was launched in 1981 to exploit the new medium. Then came Michael Jackson and Madonna, visually intuitive pop stars for whom video was the sharp point of their attack on global consciousness. More than any artist before or since, video defined them.

Jackson was a showman who emphasised spectacle, and with Thriller and Bad he consciously pushed video towards the big-budget extravagance of cinema.

With roots in the New York underground, for Madonna there was always a more conceptual artistic thrust, with an attention-grabbing bent towards the provocative and controversial, emphasising sex and transgression. These are essentially the twin templates of the music video, spectacle and provocation. Sound familiar?

The success of Jackson’s big-budget approach led to ridiculous escalation, with videos rapidly became more expensive than the recordings they were promoting. The key video of the decade is probably Duran Duran’s Rio, in which the boys from Birmingham gad about the Caribbean in boats with glamorous models. Videos were increasingly treated as the main event, a warping of the natural order that GaGa’s Telephone certainly recalls.

The height of budgetary folly was reached on Jackson’s black-and-white sci-fi Scream, a 1995 duet with his sister Janet that cost $7 million and failed to deliver a number-one single. Yet state-of-the-art effects tend to date in ways that emotion never will. Sinead O’Connor achieved worldwide stardom in 1989 with the minimalist video for Nothing Compares 2 U, in which the special effects were limited to her own tears.

Arguably, the Nineties was the real golden age of video, when there were still budgets to play with but the most ambitious musicians no longer used them as an excuse to have a holiday with supermodels in exotic locales. Leftfield artists such as Björk and Radiohead created original videos that could (and sometimes have) been exhibited in galleries. The Verve’s single-shot Bittersweet Symphony, REM’s sombre, subtitled Everybody Hurts, the foetal intimacy of Massive Attack’s Teardrop – these are videos where the ego of the artist has been completely subsumed in the work, and the visual and musical achieve total integration.

Yet, with videos being created to promote every single release, there is an almost inevitable homogeneity. Pop’s visual language became ever more tightly focused on dancing and sex, illustrated by the way Britney Spears became a global star doing a sexy-schoolgirl routine for Baby One More Time.

The relentless parade of bling and booty in hip hop videos (with honourable exceptions) has been particularly dispiriting, amounting to a kind of consumerist, sexist soft porn. If there have been few serious objections to this descent to the bottom of the barrel, it is probably due to a law of diminishing returns. We have got so used to videos; we barely even notice them any more.

GaGa’s Telephone, at least, arrests this decline by demanding attention. She may deal in the clichés of the form, but she also subverts them by pushing them right to the boundaries of acceptability, underpinning them with knowing pop-art references that force you to consider the implications.

In the past decade, as music industry profits have shrunk, a greater premium has come to be placed on inventiveness, to generally positive effect. It has been the era of the no-budget video, in which any hopeful with a concept and a camera can upload their offerings to the world. The viral nature of the net magnifies the possible impact of an original idea. Evoking the humorous spirit of Madness, Californian rock band OK Go’s one-shot dance routine on treadmills for Here It Goes Again has clocked up more than 50 million YouTube views.

If necessity has been the mother of video invention, Lady GaGa threatens to turn back the clock to an era when nothing succeeded like excess. I don’t expect it to start a new video budget arms race, however, partly because there isn’t another pop star today who could pull this kind of thing off.

With the musicality and showmanship of Michael Jackson and the powerful sexuality and provocative instincts of Madonna, Lady GaGa might just turn out to be the ultimate video queen.