The humble beginnings. A late-00s pop record, feat. one Lady Gaga.
Key tracks: "Just Dance", "Paparazzi", "Poker Face"
When Lady Gaga first appeared, I thought she'd be a flash in the pan. Her sound was so trendy it’s like it was fated to go out of date in record speed and her quirky vocal hooks came across like gimmicks that would get old just as fast, and so I quickly filed her down as someone we wouldn’t hear again from anytime soon. My 2008 self was, of course, proven wrong repeatedly and without mercy in the years to come as Gaga started shaping the pop scene into her own playtoy and went on a trajectory that her early hits in no way signalled. I never actually listened to The Fame until way after she had established herself as a particularly strong and unique creative force, and so when I finally got around to it, it was with expectations of hearing hints of her future adventures across its deep cuts. Turns out, the biggest surprise with The Fame is just how absent it is of all that.
A lot of it has to do with how little The Fame sounds like Gaga herself. On later albums she’d pick and choose her collaborators and producers and instruct them to work under her vision, but here the balance feels like the other way around and the producers have much more of an imprint to the songs - most recognisably RedOne who'd effectively codify his own signature sound through this album much more than Gaga established her own. I don't know if it's because as a new artist she either didn't have the courage or simply wasn't able to take a tighter control, but The Fame sounds tame as a result. It features Gaga playing the pop game of the time without doing anything to upset its ruleset, and coming from her of all people that play-by-the-books approach is just not all that interesting.
And in all honesty, there isn't much in the way of songs to really shout out about either. It’s clear that Gaga is already solid with her melodies - I can remember at the very least the chorus hook for nearly every song just by looking at their names - but the writing around those hooks is very lightweight. The songs have played all their cards by the time the first chorus has finished and they're only dealing random sets of pairs rather than surprise flushes, and once again that seems to be more tied to just how timid and stuck to its producers' formulas the album is. I don't actually mind the production job as such - I guess 2008 has now breached that point where I can start feeling faint nostalgia about the whole deal - but most of the time it's where all the kick these songs have comes from. Gaga has scattered effective hooks and melodies all over the place but they lack the detail of her later efforts and sometimes are almost desperate to stick: that's where all the everpresent idiosyncratic vocal hooks come into play, the mum-mum-mum-mahs, the do-duh-do-donts, the producer tag shoutouts and the word salad rambles like opening sloganeering of "Starstruck". I hate to use this word but lot of the songs feel downright basic in composition and lyrics and while they may satisfy the primal urge to tap your foot to the rhythm, there’s little beyond the surface. Outside the singles there’s very few songs within the selection that really grab a hold: I quite like the cheesiness of "Boys, Boys, Boys" and it has one of the more genuinely effective choruses of the bunch, and "Starstruck" has a perky robo-groove and a flow that stands out, but even those come with some caveats.
But of course there’s then the singles, which stand out massively from the rest of the album; that is, apart from "LoveGame" which gives us the infamous disco stick lyric but otherwise just fades in with the rest of the album cuts. But "Just Dance", "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi" are all miles above anything else on the record, and the latter two are the few visible links to where Gaga would head next. The dramatic "Paparazzi" has the same hallmarks of vague concepts interpreted in an over-the-top fashion that would drive Gaga for much of her career, and it's more intricate in its composition than the rest of The Fame. Meanwhile "Poker Face" not just carries the album's by-and-far best chorus, but its oddball middle-eight "rap" is an iconic Gaga moment where she makes something great out of an idea that would fall apart on anyone else’s hands. You can hear Gaga's own voice in these two songs the clearest and not by coincidence, they're also the only cuts on the album that somewhat come eye-to-eye with anything else she's done, "Paparazzi" in particular. And if Gaga is operating in the same comfort zone as anyone else in pop in the late 00s, then "Just Dance" is where she runs for the throne in that very playing field. It doesn't sound much different to other hit songs from that period, but there's a reason why it has stuck around (and it definitely isn't the Colby O'Donis feature, who Wikipedia still lists as being most famous for his brief footnote appearance on this album). It’s not a triumph of originality, but it’s a Very Good Pop Song that doesn’t need anything more to it to strike. I do also enjoy the oft-forgotten fifth single "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)" that distills the more saccharine tracts of the album (mostly in the Martin Kierszenbaum production jobs) into a little sunshine ditty that's light as a feather but blissfully sweet. The singsongy blip-blip melody is a simple little thing that works a lot more than it probably should.
My copy of the album also comes with the bonus tracks "Again Again" and "Disco Heaven" and, amusingly enough, they're better than a lot of the songs that made it onto the record proper and probably should have swapped placed with. "Disco Heaven" is exactly the kind tribute to its namesake vibe that its name implies and possibly thanks to that, its snappier groove comes across more playful and joyous than anything else on the disc. "Again Again" on the other hand is the first real dip into the classic rock power ballads that's now become a Gaga staple, which "Brown Eyes" on the main album already hinted at. But “Brown Eyes” really shows the strength of the producer impact is on the record, with Rob Fusari's awkwardly out-jutting slick production that would sound more at home on a club floor-filler than a piano ballad. "Again Again" on the other hand has a live band treatment closer to the genre it’s in musical tribute to and quelle surprise, it works so much better. They're not enough to really affect my opinion of the album as such, but who'd have thought some random bonus tracks would actually make more of an effort than some of the stuff that ended up on the album itself?
Although, it's not really a lack of effort that's bringing The Fame down. It's a big budget pop record with a hungry lead star backed by people on top of the latest trends and it's extremely clear that a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into Gaga getting a proper blast off. But I’ve had to revise that previous sentence several times to word it in a way that didn't imply Gaga was just along for the ride, and that's emblematic of my issues with the album - it doesn't sound like a Gaga album and if it wasn't for her name attached to this (and how this comes packed with The Fame Monster in many regions), I'm comfortable saying I never would have spent as much time with it as I have done. It's a fine, serviceable album with a few good hits and a lot of decent if a little filler-ish deep cuts, but with no real identity of its own and Gaga feels like a guest on her own album, like it’s coincidental her name is on the cover rather than someone else’s. And as she’s made her move forward, she’s naturally left The Fame behind. This was a genuinely huge album when it came out, but it’s weird to consider that now, given how in the grand scheme of things it acts as little more than a brief, expendable prologue for its artist.
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