Songs about telephones: Lady Gaga & M.I.A.

13 May

I should, at some point, write a longer post discussing songs about telephones. There seems to be a preponderance of them from the last few years, and it seems that they are working through some interesting issues in relation to cell phones as part of the soundscape. Or something.

For now, however, I’ll just post this, which is intended merely to point out some similarity between M.I.A.’s “URAQT”, and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. I don’t think this similarity is theft of any kind, to be clear — but it’s really interesting! How did the tempo and rhythmic content of these songs end up being so similar? Is there something about the actual “pacing” of the technology that’s they’re picking up here? Food for thought.

Anyway, you should find an illustrative sound clip here: right then.mp3

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Comments 3 Comments
Categories Lady Gaga, M.I.A., Musings, Pop music

3 Responses to “Songs about telephones: Lady Gaga & M.I.A.”

Dave May 14, 2010 at 11:01 am #

Good ear Feltham!

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cancrit(at)gmail.com May 14, 2010 at 3:58 pm #

Thank you, Cobra!

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DMCA Takedown (or, “Blogger cut off my telephones”) « CanCrit - June 22, 2010
[...] PDRTJS_settings_2008843_post_80 = { "id" : "2008843", "unique_id" : "wp-post-80", "title" : "DMCA+Takedown+%28or%2C+%22Blogger+cut+off+my+telephones%22%29", "item_id" : "_post_80", "permalink" : "http%3A%2F%2Fcancrit.ca%2F2010%2F06%2F22%2Fdmca-takedown-or-blogger-cut-off-my-telephones%2F" } Apparently somebody out there doesn’t want you to hear this, the admittedly crappy mash-up I designed to demonstrate some similarities between M.I.A.’s “URAQT” and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”. Although I’ve recently made a move to WordPress, my old posts are still available at Blogger — and this morning, I received a DMCA takedown notice, indicating that somebody had filed a claim of copyright infringement (not specified, though presumably having to do with my sound clip), and that Blogger had removed my post from public viewing by setting its status to “draft”. (WordPress has sent me no such notification, so the post remains available here.) [...]