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Just hit 40K with my fic. Had planned to pull a ghoster, but my writing's getting sloppy and so I'm gonna stop writing for tonight. I'll get a solid 7-8 hours of sleep and wake up refreshed and ready to tackle it. I may not finish it this weekend, but I'd prefer to take a little longer and make sure it's up to scratch than rush it out in order to get it finished.
Watched Doctor Who, gonna stick with a spoiler free summary and just say that I enjoyed it and, as always, I am looking forward to next week.
Thirty-day Challenge, Day 23: Your opinions on Lady Gaga
My first exposure to Lady Gaga was through Samuel. He was playing through a list of songs on YouTube from his PC while I was browsing on Fran just a few feet away. He was playing Pokerface and I just found it annoying to start with, but after a few repetitions it had gotten into my head. I became aware of Paparazi and Just Dance and even admitted to liking her stuff, but it wasn't until Bad Romance that I really became a fan. Most of my early exposure to her was actually over the recurring rumour that she was a transexual/hermaphrodite.
Okay, so reasons that I like Lady Gaga:
1) Her radio hits are simple but catchy with a well-designed hook in the chorus.
2) Her album songs tend to be deeper and have actual meaning, rather than everything being the radio schlock designed to make people buy into the record.
3) She knows how to get people talking.
4) Her styles are wild and incredibly creative.
5) She's a really down-to-earth person despite her "crazy" persona and she always comes across as kind and well-intentioned in interviews.
I'm not gonna call myself a "Little Monster" because that's actually the side of Lady Gaga that I really don't like. Maybe she wasn't like it at first, maybe I just didn't notice it, but she's an unbelievable attention whore and just seems to be trying to amass followers like some crazed cult leader.
Some of her messages really don't sit well with me either. I get that Born This Way is trying to support the LGBT community, but the message of Born This Way doesn't account for anybody being bullied for phenotypical reasons, rather than genotypical. If you're tattooed, pierced, overweight, disfigured; you can't say you were born like it, so the song doesn't really work. It's all pretty tricky for things like class, because saying you were born like it implies that your socioeconomic background has some kind of lasting visible mark on you.
I know I'm taking that way too far, but it's just my belief that when an artist really tries to express a message in a song to push forward social change it either ends up as a bad song or the message gets distorted.
So, in summary: I like Lady Gaga, I have some of her songs on my iPod, but I'm not a huge fan.