...via a music-related internet discussion group consisting mainly of people I know in the Real World™ (i.e. 30- to 40-something white people, mostly male). Prior to today all I knew about Lady Gaga was the name. Based only on this information I thought Lady Gaga was either a children's music/puppet thing I was thankfully not yet exposed to, or some kind of British cross-dressing comedian a la Dame Edna.

But apparently Lady Gaga is something really big. Something like the “new Madonna,” which prompted this pithy analysis from one of my friends:

"The new Madonna" is pretty accurate. She's a media phenomenon that exists at the marketing nexus of fashion, celebrity and music. I'd argue that she's not as creative as Madonna, but that may be my age talking.

In the interest of education for anyone as tragically unhip as me, I just spent four minutes studying 30-second free clips of Lady Gaga tracks on iTunes. Based on this exhaustive research, I would amend my friend’s description a little:

Lady Gaga is what Electroclash thought it was going to be but it took pop culture seven years to get stupid enough to catch up.

If a really strange kidnapper ever asked me at gunpoint to name my favorite song, I think I’d say “Once in a Lifetime”

Everyone knows this song as an anthem of midlife crisis. (“This is not my beautiful house.”) A few people pick up on the existential theme. (“Same as it ever was.”) I think they’re missing that this is a song about the irrational absurdity of natural reality, which is utterly indifferent to a human life. (“Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”) Byrne himself makes this connection explicit in the video, and in his twitchy marionnette dance, evoking images of voudoun possession — the rational mind completely consumed by a primal animism. He also stares in the depth of infinity, and comes away with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being. Against the unimaginable span of infinity, the ethereal nonsubstance of our lives provides us with liberation. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”

For years — from 1980 until today, in fact, when I looked up the actual lyrics on the Internet — I thought that last verse was “Time isn’t holding us, time is ineffluous.” There is no such word as “ineffluous” (I checked), but there should be.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was Men without Hats’ Rhythm of Youth. (1983)

I grew up in a rural place with square parents who listened to stuff like Floyd Cramer and Patsy Cline (not that there’s anything wrong with that...) I didn’t have a cool older brother whose taste I could emulate, in fact I barely knew people older than me at all. We didn’t have AOR in Scottsbluff Nebraska ca. 1980 you were lucky to get the Top 40 countdown on Sunday nights. On AM radio.

So I pretty much missed the 1960s and 1970s musically. In college I was shocked to learn that David Bowie had a career before Let’s Dance. I also thought So was Peter Gabriel’s first album for a long time.

In Middle School my family moved to the big city (Lincoln) which had actual top-40 radio stations and MTV on cable, and a bunch of colleges (and college radio stations) and even a few punk rockers. It was like an earthquake caused the shoreline to recede in my musical brain and this fertile delta absolutely devoid of life was exposed to any seed that might land there, and God knows what kind of crap would grow.

So I pretty much had to discover what music to like. There was a point in my life where’d I’d whiplash between Cyndi Lauper, Hüsker Dü, and Tangerine Dream, and not see anything inconsistent in it at all. I didn’t need to impress anyone with my musical taste because I had no idea whether it was cool or not.

I just knew that I really really really liked “The Safety Dance.”

I have always caught shit for my musical likes and it has never bothered me. I conquered this land all by myself. No one told me what to like or dislike.

Well, Orion seems to like them, anyway...

	Dr. No Monty Norman
	On and On Jack Johnson
	The Music of... Raymond Scott
	The Latin Side of... Vince Guaraldi
	Storytellers (live) Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash
	Rushmore Especially the Mark Mothersbaugh tracks
	Flood They Might Be Giants
	One Cello x 16 Zoë Keating
	Little Creatures Talking Heads