Tegan & Sara Vs. Lady Gaga

VS.

Have you seen the new Lady Gaga video? That woman is not a person, she’s a super villain who has somehow escaped from the pages of Scott Pilgrim, and is going to enslave the world through her brand of Warhollian spectacle. Make no mistake Lady Gaga is completely fucking evil, but that just makes her kind of fascinating.



She seems like the end point of pop, and say what you will about her, she seems a true diva. Unlike the caught in the head lights bovine look that defined certain unnamed Pop stars at the beginning of the decade Gaga has turned herself into the event. What makes her special is that there is nobody who’s even pretending that she’s famous for her musical ability. Her fame is completely by decree and by virtue of the fact that she has removed the parts of her brain where shame and awkwardness register. Who gives a fuck if she can sing when she’ll wear a white latex bondage suit, and then a “real life” anime suit that will disturb even the most dedicated fetishists, all before she lights herself on fire while wearing a bearskin, in the process of prostituting herself to Baron Underbeight? Sure why not have her back up dancers be the roadshow cast of Eyes Wide Shut On the sets of Clockwork Orange? The music itself is so utterly beside the point that it’s kind of flabbergasting.

Still every action has an equal but opposite reaction, and if Gaga’s escape from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s head spells our certain catchy flamboyant doom, there’s a certain pair of super powered twins who have come to save us.

Tegan and Sara are simply great songwriters, as dedicated as Gaga is blaise. And the best part is they’re so unabashedly pop that if they announced a collaboration with The Archies tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s nothing small about Tegan & Sara’s songs, though there is plenty that’s intimate. They create soaring antechambers of melody. Listen to Arrow off their newest album.


The sound is as big as anything off of Gaga’s hot tranny mess. And Tegan & Sara’s image, playing cannily on the aloof private nature of twins is probably just as carefully calculated as Gaga’s. But the craft and care in the song sets it apart completely. The haunting melody, dramatic use of discord as punctuation, combined with, a stunning live presence, and drop dead cool persona. If their was any justice in the world Tegan & Sara’s following would be a real life counter part to Dethlok. Why they’d be bigger then Lady Gaga.

Inevitably the two will battle to the death. Hopefully on a Space station that is telecasting their concert to every screen in the world Interstella 5555 style. Its nice to have twin angels fighting on the side of our soul.


EDIT: AND THEN IT HAPPENED (COURTESY OF DEPTFORD. Click to see it in all its heavenly glory rebigified. Which I failed to find a way to do on the page.