25 March 2010
By this stage Lady Gaga clearly wasn’t going to rediscover her inventive pop touch of ‘Just Dance’. However, we do get to revisit the brief reference in ‘Just Dance’ to her phone in the club – and if that was your favourite bit of ‘Just Dance’, or if you’re pining for the phone-based bantz of Crazy Frog, then have I got a Gaga single for you!
‘Telephone’ is another head-first dive down the narrow ferret-hole of ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Bad Romance’. The edgy-Berlin-techno aesthetic is now a US record company’s corporate strategy for brand Gaga. As for the audio accompaniment to the nine-and-a-half-minute event video, ‘Telephone’ is as flat and inane as a ringtone: you’ll find loads of creative interpretations of its symbolism online but it literally is just about using your phone in a nightclub. Again from Gaga, in lieu of hooks and invention we get random repetition-un-un because that’s her thing she does.
Beyoncé wisely keeps her involvement in the audio to a minimal drive-through, and you couldn’t say she’s devoting any more energy than necessary to the video either. I like to think she green-lighted this collab to scope out Lady Gaga up close as putative competition, then reported back to her people that there was nothing here to worry about. She wouldn’t be returning Gaga’s calls.
