Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Gaga is Born Edition
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2019
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Star Is Born, the movie Hollywood can’t stop remaking, is a fairy-tale about the American dream factory. But it has also, always, been a reflection of the woman in the lead role—and the latest version stars a woman who has been playing a role for more than a decade: Stefani Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga. When Gaga scored her first No. 1 hit, “Just Dance,” 10 years ago this month, critics thought her fame might be short-lived. But
Gaga had a lot to say about The Fame, and within a year she had shifted the sound of the Top 40 in her electro-pop direction. And then, in the mid-2010s, she shifted her own sound, belting out pop standards for everyone from Tony Bennett to Julie Andrews. What happens if this shape-shifter pivots from Grammys to Oscars? And what will that say about the themes of A Star Is Born: artifice, authenticity and agency?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:19.0 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:27.1 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:33.7 | On today's show, 10 years ago this month, the queen of the Little Monsters scored her first number one hit in America. |
| 0:43.1 | And at first, all she wanted us to do was dance. in January of |
| 0:59.8 | 2009, it was easy to think of Lady Gaga as a delightful fluke, a young, new artist singing |
| 1:08.0 | party music, a song with Just Dance right in the title. |
| 1:12.8 | At a time when hip-hop still ruled the billboard charts and electro dance pop was mostly for |
| 1:19.0 | clubs, this chart topper was infectious, irresistible, and probably impermanent. |
| 1:26.4 | Surely going into a new decade, |
| 1:29.0 | nobody would be talking about Lady Gaga for long, right? |
| 1:33.6 | Yeah, about that. |
| 1:39.7 | In January of 2019, we're still talking about Lady Gaga. |
| 1:48.1 | Her cultural impact has been astonishing. |
| 1:52.3 | But over the last 10 years, her influence has waxed and waned. |
| 1:57.2 | Gaga was loved, imitated, but also scorned. |
| 2:01.5 | It was total drama, the stuff of cinema. |
| 2:04.6 | I was the deep boy watches are diving. |
| 2:10.6 | I never meet the ground. |
| 2:15.4 | Crack the sunblocks where they killed us but far from the shade. There's something funny about having her first |
| 2:17.7 | There's not a show showdown. |
| 2:25.3 | There's something fitting about Lady Gaga having her first official front-line movie role in A Stars Bowl. |
... |
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