Bluffing

"Read your pokerface? We can’t even see it any more under all that lace. Talent, it seems to say to her breathless female fans, is all well and good. But what it’s really all about is using your painted poker face (and poker legs, poker boobs and all the other hokey-pokery) to get yourself splashed on TV screens.

...artifice, not music, is her chosen art form. It’s ironic. It’s postmodernist. It’s Haus of Gaga, darling. Except that we’ve seen that conical bra before, thrilled at its subversiveness when Madonna wore it 20 years ago. A little pyrotechnics display tacked on just serves to emphasise its lack of cutting edge."

-- Hattie Garlick, commenting on Lady Gaga, and the ascendency of women in Rock, and how decent music has been lost in a world of artifice - just as a pretty face (or an ugly one) gets hidden under make-up or surgery - leaving us without one good song, as a sign of The Times.