The My Space culture has levelled the playing field significantly. The power which record company majors have for too long taken for granted has been greatly undermined. Power to the people I say. But, undeterred, the self appointed media mogul beasts continue to try and usurp the social networking grapevine by advising us what’s cool and what’s not.
In Caroline Sullivan’s article in The Guardian she shamelessly takes their side by dutifully informing us “the people who influence what we listen to” are heralding the new wave of ‘electrogirls’ as the next big thing.
Apparently, sassy females like Little Boots and Lady GaGa mark a dramatic shift in pop music culture to put spotty outmoded male guitar bands in their place.
Little Boots turns out to be a well mannered 24-year-old singer and keyboard/stylophone player from Blackpool, England named Victoria Hesketh. Her influences include David Bowie, Gary Numan and Kate Bush. For her cultural studies degree she wrote her dissertation on “The concept of originality in the music of Jamie Cullum”. At the age of 18, Hesketh participated in Pop Idol, being eliminated after three rounds. She has persevered to become a kind of one woman Human League or electro Goldfrapp. Her songs are catchy and fun although she makes for an unconvincing pop iconoclast.
Hesketh does at least looks less of a marketing product than American-Italian Joanne Germanotta who sings, wriggles and pouts under the guise of Lady Gaga. (You guessed it, her name is a homage to Queen’s ‘Radio GaGa’).
Lady Gaga says that “My goal as an artist is to funnel a pop record to a world in a very interesting way” . She claims to be her own woman but in the video for ‘Poker Face’ she looks very much in the same mould as the mainstream pop queens like Britney, Gwen Stefani, Pink etc
I may not be part of their target audience but I’m not yet too gaga to see that this particular new broom sounds suspiciously like an old broom with a new handle.
See what you think:
