26 February 2009
Ha! So busy were you tittering and guffawing at the mild sauce of “’cause I’m bluffin’ / With my muffin” you didn’t notice that in the chorus of ‘Poker Face’ Lady Gaga actually sings “puh-puh-puh-poker face / Fuh-fuh-fuck her face”. Granted, I didn’t notice it either, and it’s not very noticeable in the first place. Still, the bits you could make out were a gleeful celebration of female-gaze female sexuality – a welcome change from the dominant ’00s pop-cultural paradigm of toxic masculinity. Any time our pop charts subvert the mainstream gets a hearty cheer from me, especially if it’s the biggest act in the charts doing the subverting.
How big was Lady Gaga that year? Well, in the first two weeks of February 2009 ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Poker Face’ occupied the top two places in the Irish singles chart – the first time any act had done this in Ireland since 1985, when ‘Into The Groove’ and ‘Holiday’ were number one and two in the same week for Madonna. There’s serendipity for you: like Madonna then, Gaga was shooting across our sky as a fully-formed and immediately-iconic female US superstar. What’s more, two months after first topping the Irish singles chart, ‘Poker Face’ goes back to number one in April 2009; four other acts had come and gone at number one in the meantime.
So, ‘Poker Face’ is subversive, liberated, and triumphant. However, I also remember it as a real disappointment, and this re-listen doesn’t dispel that. ‘Just Dance’ was effortlessly cool but ‘Poker Face’ is deliberately gauche, with a commitment to naffness that almost seems reactionary. The poker metaphor would be corny anyway as one line, but verse after verse is really doing the dog on it. Electro-pop, in the ‘Just Dance’ universe thrilling and inventive, is here made boring and blunt. That puh-puh-puh fuh-fuh-fuh hook is a mission statement: boxy and uncool are now brand values. Gaga certainly commits, since ‘Poker Face’ became the template for her typical hit, alas. Imagine if ‘Just Dance’ had been the seam she mined; we could be talking about Lady Gaga at the level of ’80s Madonna and Prince. Instead she became a one-dimensional pop persona churning out cartoonish, gibberish cookie-cutter hits – a ’10s Suzi Quatro except wearing the inside of a cow instead of the outside. Deal me out.
Irish Number Ones 