Do you get that funny feeling that you’ve heard Lady Gaga’s Born This Way somewhere before? Maybe when it was called Express Yourself or Waterfalls or God is a DJ?
My rough estimate: Lady Gaga has cost Google 10 petabytes in bandwidth same as 10,000 text messages for everyone on earth. If Lady Gaga’s Google bandwidth was charged at what ATT charges for SMS, it would have cost: 10.5 trillion dollars.
The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP’s basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?
Posting this one mainly for the title: Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga, a perfectly succinct skewering of the HuffPo-lead SEO crapathon that is online headline writing these days. All that’s missing is the 20 misspelled tags — Gene Weingarten, Gene Wiengarten, Gene Weingarden, Jean Weingarten, Gene Wine Garden, etc. — for true Master Douche-level SEO. (via the browser)
Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of “production as performance” video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term “VideoSong”:
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules: 1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). 2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.
This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.
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