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Get it between 2025-07-15 to 2025-07-22. Additional 3 business days for provincial shipping.
Amazon.com Has an album title ever been so self-prophetic? In its first year, this electropop opus rocketed Lady Gaga from unknown New York lounge singer to the world’s biggest pop star this side of Britney Spears. The Fame’s brand of pop is shamelessly decadent: 11 of its 13 songs are about money, celebrity, sex, clubbing, or a sticky combination of all four. It’s insipid subject matter, unless you consider Gaga as less of a silly, manufactured blonde than an ingenious artist playing the part of a glitzy pop star. Witness The Fame’s impeccably sleek opening songs, from the carelessly rambling chorus of “Just Dance” to the snappy, futuristic beat of “LoveGame”: Gaga’s got the outrageous outfits and dance moves down to a science, but underneath it all, the music is aggressive and authoritarian in ways that most other Top 40 tunes are not. Often compared to Gwen Stefani’s, Gaga’s vocals are in fact richer and rounder, allowing her a certain stylistic versatility, and her personae alternate from wild party kid to vulnerable lover. Some of the risks don’t always pay off, but the Lady Gaga of the dark and ardent megahit “Poker Face” prevails. She is commandeering enough, bizarre and beguiling enough, to ensure that she’ll be basking in our attention for a very long time. --Erin Thompson Product description Personnel: Lady Gaga (vocals, keyboards, synthesizer); Colby O'Donis (vocals); Flo Rida, Space Cowboy (rap vocals); Red One (various instruments, programming); Tom Kafafian (guitar); Calvin Gaines (bass guitar, programming); Victor Bailey (bass guitar); Joe Tomino (drums). The times were crying out for a pop star like Lady GaGa -- a self-styled, self-made shooting star, one who mocked the tabloid digital age while still wanting to wallow in it -- and one who's smart enough to pull it all off, too. That self-awareness and satire were absent in the pop of the new millennium, where even the best of the lot operated only on one level, which may be why Lady GaGa turned into such a sensation in 2009: everybody was thirsty for music like this, music for and about their lives, both real and virtual. To a certain extent, the reaction to The Fame may have been a little too enthusiastic, with GaGa turning inescapable sometime in the summer of 2009, when she appeared on countless magazine covers while both Weezer and DAUGHTRY covered "Pokerface," the rush to attention suggesting that she was the second coming of Madonna, a comparison GaGa cheerfully courts and one that's accurate if perhaps overextended. Like the marvelous Madge, Lady GaGa ushers the underground into the mainstream -- chiefly, a dose of diluted Peaches delivered via a burbling cauldron of electro-disco -- by taming it just enough so it's given the form of pop yet remains titillating. Sure, GaGa sings of disco sticks, bluffin' with her muffin, and rough sex, but her provocation doesn't derive solely from her words: this is music that sounds thickly sexy with its stainless steel synths and dark disco rhythms. Where GaGa excels, and why she crossed over, is how she doesn't leave all this as a collection of hooks and rhythms, she shapes them into full-blown pop songs, taking the time to let the album breathe with chillout ballads and percolating new wave, like the title track that echoes Gwen Stefani in dance diva