Maybe I’m just stupid, but this happens to me every time I have to twist or screw/unscrew something and what I’m doing doesn’t work right away.

THIS IS WHY IT BECAME NECESSARY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE [citation needed] TO HAVE THE WORDS “CLOCKWISE,” AND “COUNTER-CLOCKWISE.” TELLING ME TO TURN SOMETHING “TO THE RIGHT” COULD MEAN EITHER DIRECTION. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

…but I sincerely believe that you could have thrown that song at any, any female country singer and it would have suffered no loss in quality.  I’m confused as to why this, above the remaining songs on the album after Born This Way, Judas and The Edge of Glory, was pushed out as the fourth single - not that Lady Gaga’s lyrical content has always been top-notch (“Where are my keys/I lost my phone”), but the song feels generic, which is not a way I expect to feel when listening to Lady Gaga. “You And I” just sounds to me like a Carrie Underwood song with a little synthesizer slathered on top. Of course, that isn’t to imply that Carrie Underwood is somehow less of an artist than Lady Gaga, but Gaga is supposed to be this legend of our time, creating revolutionary art that is both able to exist in the mainstream as well as push the envelope for what the mainstream accepts. Lady Gaga admittedly has lots of expectations to live up to! And one of those expectations is to be very avant-garde at all times, which I don’t think always serves her music well. Hell, as far as pop songs go, you could do a lot worse than “You and I.” No, rather than the song itself, what makes “You and I” such a trainwreck is its video.

I, I’d guess like the rest of the internet, decided to watch the “You and I” video primarily because, one day, this scraggly looking fellow with a cigarette dangling limply from his lips popped up to the left of some other video on YouTube, and the gender-swapping confused my simple brain. “Gee, he looks familiar,” I said, my eyes lazily scanning the area. “Lady Gaga? Why, she’s in drag! What wonders await?” But as I began the video and watched one needlessly crazy costume appear after another, I found myself feeling an odd combination of boredom and anxiousness. Boredom, because: okay, super duper! You’ve got this mish-mash of haute couture alter-egos… like always? And anxiousness, because goddamnit, Lady Gaga, it seems like men are always trying to strangle you in your videos, and I am about fed up with it.

I thought, at first, that that might be an unsubstantiated claim - maybe I’m just remembering the violent strangly parts more than everything else! But FOR SCIENCE I went back and watched every Lady Gaga music video there is (except for the ones where she’s featured on someone else’s track… which I guess is “Video Phone” and not a whole lot else). I came up with a figure of about 45% - a little less than half the time, Lady Gaga is, at some point, attacked, harassed, or enduring some sort of aggression or violence in her music videos. And it concerns me how often she gets a pass for this, either because it’s framed in this “Quelle Tragique!” arty world wherein being strangled or thrown around or mock-raped is always an acceptable metaphor for fame, relationships, christianity etc; or because ugh you’re just a prude and you don’t get it. Yeah, I think I do get it, actually, and what I’m telling you is that featuring yourself being tortured while tied to a rack with a backing track of what is essentially Lady Bruce Springsteen is skiing blithely through the uncanny valley of directions to take with your music video, AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY.

I think “You and I” would have been a lot more compelling if Lady Gaga had chosen to simply pursue, say, the angle of she and herself in drag. Or the mermaid. Or ONE of the fistful of scenes piled on top of each other and thrown at us throughout the video. Each of these scenes is, according to LG herself, a “metaphor” for love or Nebraska or some shit, and lard does she love her metaphors. I get that! Metaphors are cool, and complex imagery is something I encourage! Except that unlike her previous “weird” video concepts, this one doesn’t give off the feeling of having an underlying direction, some greater message - the scenes just seem disjointed, and, above all, weird. Purposelessly weird. Needlessly weird. As if Gaga’s only remaining goal is to be weird. Which, if true, is quite depressing.

Also, that umlaut. It’s just ~pretentious~.