Pop Off: Lady Gaga's Post-MTV Videos

About 18 months ago — that's forever in Internet time — Neda Ulaby reported a piece about music videos in the age of YouTube. She wrote, "The days of waiting patiently for a favorite music video to appear on MTV are long over, swallowed up by the instant gratification of the smaller screen. But as MySpace, iPhones and YouTube allow music videos to be seen anywhere and anytime, directors are discovering that viewing habits aren't the only things changing."

Her story was about how the look of music videos changed. Great videos from back in the day, such as Michael Jackson's "Thriller," are terrible on YouTube because it's too dark and baroque to read right. All that monster makeup comes off as a gloppy mess.

Contemporary videos, with Beyonce's "Single Ladies" as a prime example, often have starker color contrasts and quicker edits. That's what director Joseph Kahn said in Neda's radio story. He did the interview while he was on the set of a Lady Gaga video, making choices based on what looks good on YouTube or a phone.

Lady Gaga represents yet another change to music videos because their main outlet isn't TV: they can be sexier, more violent, more salacious, more everything now that they don't have to fit into any network's guidelines. That's one of the great points Maura Johnston makes in this Pop Off podcast.

Lady Gaga can do whatever she wants in the video for "Telephone" because there are no standards for language or sexual content on the web. However, the song itself has to be played on radio stations that are subject to FCC guidelines, Maura says. That means there is a bigger disconnect between what you can say in a song and what you can show in the video than there was in the days of "Thriller." Lady Gaga's songs are pop confection knockoffs. It's the videos where she's pushing boundaries.

Does that boundary-pushing have any deeper meaning? Our Pop Off team isn't so sure. This time around, that's Maura Johnston, who is hanging out at The Awl and Jay Smooth, who is at illdoctrine.com. They have more about Lady Gaga's influences and subversions, plus a special musical guest to get things going. Check it out in the player below or subscribe to the Culturetopia podcast here.