Goodbye, detached monochrome. Farewell, greater length and slim cuts. Auf wiedersehen, underground associations.
Excuse the melodrama, but what I’m trying to say is that American Apparel is in the process of being absorbed by the mainstream, and I know exactly who to credit/blame.
Her name is Lady GaGa.
In case you haven’t been to any sort of mass social gathering or turned on Power 106 in the past month and a half or so, Lady GaGa is enjoying a comfortable seat at the Top 40 feasting table thanks to her song “Just Dance,” an up-tempo pop-house-electro-R&B hybrid that combines the rhythm and danceability of club music with unabashedly pop vocals and structure. The song tells the story of a young woman going out to a club, getting too hyphy but still trying to enjoy the music, despite having lost her phone. I’m not here to denigrate the songwriting. It’s catchy and possesses some kitchen-sink realism in the lyrics, especially thanks to the aforementioned phone-losing bit (a rite of passage for many college freshmen).
The real significance of this song lies in its cultural blending, which is especially present in the video.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, let me summarize the video: Lady GaGa and her Gastapo (see what I did there?) march into a house at night where a party appears to have just stopped; people passed out on the floor, under tables, no music, etc. GaGa proceeds to crank up “Just Dance,” and all the tuckered-out revelers spring back to drunken life and continue to rage with GaGa. Highlights include a girl in a Sioux Indian headdress, and Lady GaGa borderline humping a killer-whale shaped pool toy.
However, the real shock is not in the violation of inflatables but the collision of two separate elements in the video, the first being that the video looks like an American Apparel nightmare. Everywhere you look: leggings, lame leggings, sunglasses at night with thick frames, regular glasses with thick frames (possibly without lenses, which enrages me as an actual glasses wearer, but that’s another column), and bright, monochrome colors ““ all the hallmarks of American Apparel products and associated style. Not that there’s anything wrong with good-looking young people cavorting around a house that looks like the one from “Boogie Nights.” The second element occurs right around the 1:08 mark, and is a little more surprising: Akon.
That’s right, Akon.
For those in the know, or those that can decode opening shoutouts, this comes as no surprise. After working as a songwriter for other acts, Lady GaGa, then known as Joanne Stefani Germanotta, started working on solo material with Akon, and was subsequently signed to his vanity label, Kon Live. However, if you didn’t know this going into the video, as I didn’t the first time I watched, it comes as a surprise. Imagine that this party in the video was real and that you were invited. You’d put on your best 1993 Charlotte Hornets hat, red tracksuit jacket, and thick plastic sunglasses, you’d walk in the door, and would you expect to see Akon there with rose petals getting blown on him? Heck, no!
If you go to a hipster party, I don’t expect to see R&B crooners there, I expect to hear them mashed up with Ratatat. So this must mean the cultural earth has shifted, as it always does.
What we’ve got here is a complete collision of utter mainstream Top 40 music and the associated personas with the aesthetics of American Apparel and the associated culture.
In any case, the inevitable cycle of cultural history is clicking around again, with a semi-underground fashion being absorbed into the mainstream, like so many others before it. Who can forget the co-opting of punk and grunge fashions into high fashion in the ’70s and ’90s, respectively?
Aside from historical precedents, this also shouldn’t be too shocking because Lady GaGa is more in an electronic-pop vein anyway, which has had a history of enjoying bright colors and eye-popping fashion. GaGa clearly is a part of that history, and is going to bear that out in her fashion, American Apparel or not. After all, it’s not like Akon was wearing a medium maroon tee and those ball-guillotining pants they keep in the back of AA.
So I could be pulling a John Nash here, seeing patterns where there are none, but I can’t help but think that the whole fashion associated with American Apparel and the whole sort of day-glo electro-disco-house-hipster look is going to be more and more mainstream as time passes. Fashion affects music, and vice-versa, which is why I also think that the music associated with the aforementioned fashion will also become more mainstream. Everyone knows that genre lines are blurring, especially with those in the Top 40. Every hit hip-hop/R&B song now is basically just a club song with more prominent singing. Case in point: “Right Now” by Akon. The backing track has these trance-sounding keyboards, and the beat is pure dance. Case in point two: “I’m in Miami Bitch” by LMFAO. This song is always put in a party mix by any radio hip-hop DJ worth his salt, and it is complete electro-hop, with buzzing keyboards and tongue-in cheek-rhymes about partying. Last but not least, Chris Brown’s “Forever,” with its fast tempo and melodic similarities to “Better Off Alone.”
Ex-Village Voice blogger Tom Breihan had a term for this phenomenon: trance-pop; hip-hop/R&B and pop that have much in common with the tropes of traditional dance music. Breihan’s assessment has held, and the blending of dance and club culture with hip-hop, R&B and pop doesn’t seem to stop, even in the case of sacred fashion cows.
But until T-Pain shows up in an American Apparel ad unairbrushed, the mix is not complete.
If you want to go on a shopping trip for lame leggings, then e-mail Ayres at jayres@media.ucla.edu.