Lady Gaga, Amanda Palmer, and you

Amanda Palmer, who’s part of the Dresden Dolls and has a great solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, also writes a a good blog. She went to a Lady Gaga concert on the Fourth of July and wrote a long blog post about it. It’s a bit rambling, but very interesting. She captures how I mostly feel about Lady Gaga here (contains language):

i’m not really a fan of the music (disco dance music doesn’t do it for me, and some of the lyrics drive me nuts), and i’m not even sure i’m a fan of the performer, but i’m definitely a fan of other aspects…the fact that she writes her own tunes, and her off-song message (her songs kind of have a hard-to-read message, but her stance in interviews etc is generally: be a freak, be yourself, gay is good, self-expression is the shit. to which i say: RAH RAH AH AH AH).

I like some of the Lady Gaga songs if I’m in the right mood, but that’s about how I feel. Way deeper in the post, Palmer writes this, which I liked:

all these voices in your head bicker and argue and obscure the real key to freedom:

your ability to stand still and ask:

who do i want to be

and what do i want to do

RIGHT. NOW.

?

There’s really a lot of interesting stuff in there if you have 10 minutes to have your thoughts provoked.