Sometime this weekend I will compare Lady GaGa’s musical arrangements to ragtime piano per girlboymusic’s request. Stay tuned!
As a ragtimer from way back, my first instinct is that what GBM is hearing is Gaga’s Eurodisco underpinnings overlayed with American hip-hop-based pop hooks, which is a rough modern translation of ragtime’s left-hand-sets-a-4/4-beat, right-hand-fucks-with-it ethos. The modern method of writing hooks in brief clusters (which has its origins in sampling) can sound a lot like the bursts of melody that ragtime composers used in opposition to the beat.
I mean, in addition to her Jolsonesque vocals, which C4BB already brought up.
There’s also a lot of non-musical effects which she borrows from the ragtime era: the crazy dress-up, the direct addressing of fame/fans/fashion in her lyrics (more and more she reminds me of Eva Tanguay, which is all to the good), the playing with racial and sexual identity — it’s all very New York vaudeville/revue ca. 1911, the primary musical engine of which was ragtime.
That said, modern preservationist ragtime piano recordings only offer the merest sketch of what ragtime, as a living musical tradition and cultural movement, was in the 1890s-1910s. Scott Joplin was a curmudgeon prone to making essentialist statements about the piano which musical historians have tended to take as gospel because they don’t want to do the work of listening to what people were actually playing and dancing to at the time; but the banjo, the marching band, and the sixteen-piece show orchestra were just as much instruments of ragtime as the piano.
I’m starting to wander… I always do when I get on the subject. But ragtime comes up so rarely that I almost never get a chance to talk about it.
Well, feel free to bring it up more often. (I love turn-of-the-20th-century music, but I know next to nothing about it.)
Anyway, your first paragraph is what I think I was reaching for, but I think it’s the stuttering/repetition of which she’s so fond (p-p-p-poker face, papa paparazzi, f-f-fever, rah rah ah ah ah, etc.) that’s the most responsible.
