It still fails to make the song any more than average.

The song is average enough. Take out the harp and it's even duller.

It still fails to make the song any more than average.

We get it, you think it's average ;)

Where is everyone getting their animated telephone sigs from? :( i want one :P ^_^

^^ Just search 'Lady GaGa Telephone gifs' or something similar on google - with a big video like this there are always loads of animated gifs uploaded onto forums etc. :D

^^ Thanks Very Much :D :D

Edited March 14, 201015 yr by Chriss_S

I just laughed at that 'take out the harp, and it's even duller' ... yeah, but it does have a harp in it, which won't be taken out, so what a bizarre point to make?! :lol:

I just laughed at that 'take out the harp, and it's even duller' ... yeah, but it does have a harp in it, which won't be taken out, so what a bizarre point to make?! :lol:

He's saying that the harp is the only interesting part of the song, in his opinion, and without it the song would be duller. Perfectly valid point tbh.

 

 

However, I do love this song! <3

Telephone to #12 in the UK Chart :D :D

#1 next week please! ^_^

Edited March 14, 201015 yr by Chriss_S

1. Prison and Identity (Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Technological Entrapment, etc.)

Harq: My first thoughts on this subject revolve around the breakdown of the prison as an institution. Are prisoners supposed to have identity and personal expression in prison? f*** no. But in GaGa's video, the prisoners are the most vamped-out, gorgeous, fashion-star people present. To me this represents an apogee of heroic-outsider fascination. Plenty of movies and books (and songs and video games and TV shows and and and) lionize loners, outsiders, and anti-heroes, and prisoners might be the most popular specific example. Lady GaGa's continuing story clearly involves this game/dynamic, but it also highlights an interesting correlation with glamour which has also been present in such stories for a long time. James Dean? John Travolta? Johnny Depp? These guys all played multiple rough-and-tumble, lawless outsiders with mascara and top-notch hair-dressers. And if audiences noticed they certainly weren't complaining - beautiful heroes thinly disguised as dirty villains are meeting their ultimate expression in the "Telephone" video, where prisoners flash and pop with distinctive clothes, make-up, and hair like never before.

 

Is this an example of how postmodern information-age super-saturation (see Thought #5) is corroding the walls between inside and outside, faceless prisoner and whole, healthy, legally-defined individual? Or is it an example of warring discourses of prison and punishment/treatment - instead of prisoners dangerous to society repaying a debt or at least being held at bay, we have patients - the incarcerated themselves as victims - who must be diagnosed and healed in order to rejoin society. The "healthy" individual expression to be found in buying clothes and following fashion trends must be instilled, especially over and against more "socially-destructive" (and thus fractured, sick, mistaken) forms of self-assertion.

 

onlywordstoplaywith: So the cliched celebration/idolization of prisoner is certainly present in "Telephone," but also, I think it's important (if not overly obvious) to point out that these are women prisoners, and Gaga is breaking into a scene and taking on the role of what is traditionally masculine. This is not to say that other media hasn't engaged with the female prisoner; yet despite the many examples of female prisoners and violence in both literature and "real" life, the general culture still seems to encounter female violence/prisoner as an extreme aberration, much more unusual and monstrous than her male counterpart.

 

So Gaga is occupying a place that is traditionally marked as male, which only makes the female guard's remark "I told you she doesn't have a dick" even more significant and perhaps ironic.

 

2. Cyborg

onlywordstoplaywith: It seems that the telephone functions as an extension of the human body. Gaga wears the telephone as a helmet at one point, and her hair forms the receiver at another. Telephone technology is not only ubiquitous, but also has become an organic part of the contemporary body. When it's not a part of Gaga's costuming or hair, it's beckoning, interrupting, dictating. And the humans are moved by its ring. At one point Beyoncé starts moving like a malfunctioning robot. They're moved to violence, and/or moved as automata.

 

Harq: As well as trapped by it. When it stutters and freezes, so do the people using it. Though I think we should avoid moralizing many of GaGa's messages. Other than her feminist play, I think that most of her uses of technology, commercialism, fame, and so on aren't meant to be critiques but problematizations, she's calling attention to how these things work and change, and that means celebrating as well as condemning. After all, the telephone is important in her release from prison. And, in contrast to the lyrics of the song, which present it as the tool someone is using to harass Lady GaGa and Beyoncé, in the video it functions as a tool used between friends and comrades.

 

onlywordstoplaywith: That's an excellent point. It's both restricting and freeing (or a creative power).

 

3. Criminal Female

onlywordstoplaywith: Gaga's body dressed in the "Crime Scene Do Not Cross" tape. Gaga + Beyoncé as murderesses. Gaga and Beyoncé laughing, dancing, standing stone-faced as their victims die. Women really kicking the $h!t out of one another in prison. Misbehaving girlfriend. Poisoning waitress.

 

Harq: Poisoning is a crime with a particularly powerful set of connotations. It is one of the most acutely anti-social crimes, up there with arson. It's cowardly and totally vicious, unlike almost all other broadly-defined crimes which are possible to imagine in understandable or even heroic terms. I think it had some really serious metaphorical meanings along these lines in medieval times (though I'm not sure), but in urban situations where large reserves of safe and potable water were important and vulnerable resources, and in the menace associated with the new anonymity offered by towns and cities, this crime made people seriously uncomfortable.

 

I think it may also have been connected with women (or, more accurately, misogynist stereotypes) - a crime which is calculating and conniving, totally independent of the relative physical strength of victim and perpetrator, and intimately associated with food preparation.

 

4. Real + Fake Product Placement

onlywordstoplaywith: The video is peppered with both real (e.g. Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Polaroid, Chanel, Diet Coke, Virgin, Plenty of Fish) and fake products (e.g. Poison TV, Double-Breasted Drive-Thru, CookNKill Recipes). This combination of real and fake allows the video to both enjoy the benefits of product placement, and parody the enterprise in the same swoop. Once again, we're dealing, I think, with a carnivalesque aesthetic, or a type of conceptualist art that parodies by displaying too loudly or too blatantly that which is being mocked. The comfortably familiar form is being used to market poison, and at the same time its used to promote Polaroid. Gaga's having her cake and eating it too.

 

Harq: I hope it's not poisoned!!

 

onlywordstoplaywith: Dude, if it is poisoned, then she's like the black-masked Wesley from Princess Bride, who can drink poison because he's been sipping a little bit every day.

 

Harq: That out has always pissed me off. The Sicilian should have won. Though now that I think of it, that episode reminds me of similar ones in various modern and postmodern fictions (namely A Scanner Darkly and White Noise), where mutually-exclusive, complicated, coherent, and factually-informed explanations and predictions are offered to predict the possible outcomes of this or that problem or question. After long and impressive feats of logic and reasoning, the whole issue is revealed to be a wash or moot. All reasoning is sophistry. Deconstruction - which is to say, the destruction of binary distinctions - renders the most powerful systems of knowing totally impotent. That's what happens in that scene. Wesley deconstructs the Sicilian.

 

5. Tarantino's p*ssy Wagon

Harq: Well the p*ssy Wagon - which Meg tells me is actually the one which appeared in Kill Bill - is only the most blatant reference to Tarantino. A lot of features of the video seem too similar to be coincidence, and the van serves as a kind of "yes, this is done on purpose and even, to an extent, in collaboration" mark. I would say that the most obvious similarities are the dialogue and the joy in violence. It's always a fun trick to try and nail down what's really distinctive about Tarantino dialogue: here it reveals itself as language which seems full of inside jokes and references to which the viewer is not privy and cliched aphorisms and altruisms delivered with clearly purposeful awkwardness. When thinking about Tarantino dialogue I'm tempted to say that the significance of these conventions has to do with bricolage (as do so many style choices of Tarantino and probably Lady GaGa). All this cryptic-but-banal, slick-but-goofy phrasing makes obvious the radical over-saturation of speaking - and by extension meaning itself - in the information and mass-media age. Viewers as well as characters are lost in a sea of discourses produced so fast as to be radically unfinished and almost nonsensical. I made some mention of this in a recent blog post, where I called the zeitgeist hopelessly schizophrenic, but Tarantino and GaGa are moving beyond this depressed and euphemistic understanding of such a bricolage to the more characterstically-optimistic postmodern conception. Instead of a case of insanity ravaging the noosphere and rotting any semblance of meaning or order, the endless flow of words and meanings is a fertile explosion that does nothing to decrease the significance of any individual significance. It is only the modern insecurity - which equates exclusivity and hierarchical organization with worth - that makes the rise of bricolage seem like a loss or corruption. Any less-biased view cannot help but see that there is only more of everything we always loved.

 

Of course, the meaning of gaga is relevant here as well. Like dictionary.com says, gaga means "excessively and foolishly enthusiastic", "ardently fond; infatuated", and "demented; crazy; dotty" - these definitions are charactersitic not only of the bricolage invoked in this specific production, but GaGa's general preoccupation and interest in fame from the perspective both of famous performer and non-famous viewer. I'm getting pretty off-topic here, but let's also consider the word "infamous" as it relates to the events and themes of the "Telephone" video. What do you call a famous monster?

 

onlywordstoplaywith: Amy Bishop!

 

6. Aestheticizing Murder

onlywordstoplaywith: Oh god, I thought the images of people dropping dead into their food were just beautiful. The heightened soundtrack that captured the slurping, choking, coughing, gagging, and sipping of people eating: they was so drippingly vulgar, and yet drew me in nonetheless. An eye rolls back in the head, a dog is handed a morsel of food, partially ruminated pancakes vomit out of a mouth, and then head after head either toppling back or falling forward into the plate. And then, THEN, surrounded by these corpses, the video's dance centerpiece is staged. Beyonce and Gaga and co., decked out in stars and stripes outfits, get down while the camera keeps inserting frames of the newly-dead bodies. Even the dog. It's funny and beautiful, and a little creepy too, but most of all, I kept thinking, This is how Humbert Humbert would have orchestrated a mass murder in an American diner. The elevated aesthetic brushstrokes of Gaga's project turn this into a carnival of carnage and a perverse celebration of America, and yes it's violent, but it's so SO pretty. It makes me want more.

 

Harq: She's definitely a shock jock(ette). Mass murder in a diner, frivolity, and the American Dream is a pretty obscene juxtaposition for some. The combination of death and celebration, though an ancient combo which has appeared in countless iterations, makes me think of the Rite of Spring. Which also had a pretty simple score.

 

7. Commodifying and Commercializing Murder

onlywordstoplaywith: The video is a piece of pop art designed to be sold, with murder as the centerpiece. Murder for sale. Murder draped in the accoutrements of commercial and late-night TV infomercials. Murder as benign and mainstream as Wonder Bread. Murder with cool, blinking, neon graphics and selling-points. Murder in five easy steps. You don't even have to think about it, just buy.

 

8. Dead dog

Harq: The main significance that caught my attention in the shot of the dead dog (it's mixed in with all the other corpse-shots right before and during the big dance number in the diner) is that, while I don't think dead people are all that shocking in modern American mass culture - even in frivolous, joyous, celebratory, or anesthetized moments - dead pets, especially dogs, still are. How many people do you know who don't really bat an eye at death in action or horror movies but respond strongly and verbally to violence inflicted on dogs or cats? I would even suggest that killing a beloved or heroic pet is often a tool directors and other artists use specifically for a big, and visceral, audience reaction. Secret Window and Cape Fear spring immediately to my mind, but I'm sure there are many others. Buffy the Vampire Slayer in characteristic genius fashion, parodies (while simultaneously using to full effect) this trick when Angelus murders Willow's fish.

 

Onlywords also points out to that there is a shot of someone feeding the dog just before the $h!t hits the fan. Pick your line of inquiry in regards to this three seconds of footage: how it breaks down the borders between man and beast at a particularly sensitive time (the ritual of eating, in a restaurant of all places); or, how innocent animals are corrupted (and thus damned and punished - or simply rendered collateral damage - by their human masters).

 

9. Homage to Michael Jackson

Harq: All I noticed were the shoulder pads on Beyoncé's pseudo-military jacket, which are obviously a big MJ signature. Again we have our pick of meanings and significances: Beyonce is a new black monarch of popular music; the rampant appropriation, relocation, and juxtaposition of symbols characteristic of bricolage and postmodernism; or just the simple (and, honestly, probably unintentional) fun of using a military symbol as your locus of homage (which of course is a word that originally meant the swearing of oaths of fealty in feudal societies - oaths that often included a commitment to military service).

 

onlywordstoplaywith: There's also Gaga's little Michael Jackson-esque dance move as she's let out of the prison. OOOOH, and I just remembered! She channels one of Madonna's many images during her dance sequence in the prison. Isn't it interesting that the two artists she embodies or echoes in this prison segment are both the former King and current Queen of pop?! So when Gaga is let out of prison, this may either imply the release of these two figures from some sort of cultural/social shackles as well, or else, this indicates that Gaga is kissing those former royals good bye. Hmmmm. I'm more inclined toward the latter interpretation. That Michael Jackson and Madonna are always trying to express themselves or confess themselves out of the various prisons society has put them in (gender, racial, psychological, etc.), or perceive themselves as being caught in a prison of sorts, whereas Gaga is not a figure trying to escape a prison. She creates her identity and performance, rather than releasing it. And she's not making any f***ing excuses for it.

 

Harq: Also, a black woman set whitey free.

 

10. Americana

onlywordstoplaywith: It goes without saying that the diner is a staple of American culture, and the fact that they chose this space to launch an attack signifies a coordinating attack (terrorism?!) against the mom-and-pop, cherry-pie side of America. Yet, once they have killed the diners, Gaga, Beyoncé, and their posse do a dance dressed in outfits bearing the American flag, hippie garb, and lots of red, white, and blue. As if America is destroyed by America; the revolution is destroyed/followed by the revolution; America turns rabid on itself. It's like a miniature version (or even parody) of the crises of modernity; the inventions and darlings of the modern world destroyed that modern world. OH GOD! The lion-man beast (man-bear pig!?) is slouching toward Bethlehem, ALL OVER AGAIN! But it's really f***ing fun and gorgeous.

 

Harq: This basically applies to any confusing (and thus interesting) moments in the video, but I do think that all this shuffling of imagery, symbols, and so on always reinforces the hyper-pop nature of postmodernism and vice-versa. To a certain extent, you don't have to explain why they drive Tarantino's van or why they're suddenly wearing American flag clothes or crime scene tape. Everything blurs together because there's so much of it and it's whirling so damn fast.

 

onlywordstoplaywith: Exactly!

 

http://onlywordstoplaywith.blogspot.com/20...ations-and.html

The rate of viewers will fall sharply on YouTube now it's been stamped with an 18+ cert.

You have to sign in with a 18+ account to verify your age :rolleyes:.

 

The same happened to Paparazzi before... :( How annoying! However I will be able to next month! :D

The rate of viewers will fall sharply on YouTube now it's been stamped with an 18+ cert.

You have to sign in with a 18+ account to verify your age :rolleyes:.

 

This is so frustrating! I really wanted it to top Bad Romance's 149mil views. :(

Doesn't affect me personally, as I have an 18+ account.

 

Can someone tell me who is the woman we see in prison, shortly before GaGa starts singing? The one with black hair and sunglasses. Is she someone we'll know, 'cause I'm seen her in a few people's signatures :unsure:

Doesn't affect me personally, as I have an 18+ account.

 

Can someone tell me who is the woman we see in prison, shortly before GaGa starts singing? The one with black hair and sunglasses. Is she someone we'll know, 'cause I'm seen her in a few people's signatures :unsure:

She is Lady GaGa's sister. ;)

She is Lady GaGa's sister. ;)

 

At first I thought it was GaGa in a dark wig. She looks like her so much, I mean take away the blonde hair and there's a real likeness!

At first I thought it was GaGa in a dark wig. She looks like her so much, I mean take away the blonde hair and there's a real likeness!

I actually thought it was GaGa when I first watched it... then someone told me. I wouldn't have realised :P.

 

That's Lady GaGa's sister?!?! :o Wow, I just thought it was GaGa herself too this whole time... it really looks like her. And I don't recall hearing about GaGa's sibling(s) pretty much ever. :lol:

Edited March 17, 201015 yr by Music Maniac

Her sister is the reason she made an appearance on Gossip Girl. How suh-weet.

Climbs to number 2 in this weeks midweeks today.

Is there any links I can view the full version (9 mins one) of the video?