Lady Gaga
“Bad Romance”

I’ve thought about this some.

Lately I’ve been fucking around with ‘prosumer’ audio equipment, which basically is spending a few hundred dollars where you would have spent a few, er, Hamiltons. Being able to hear my music slightly better has—duh—helped me with a few music-related things. I’m a music-related person.

For one, yes: A lot of albums sound terrible. I’d say close to 70% of my mp3s (I only listen to mp3s. I used to have, say, a few hundred pounds worth of LPs, which were pretty to look at but impractical to use. They were almost impossible to travel with across the country in a decade-old Volvo station wagon. And selling them on eBay? That almost killed me. Never, ever, ever try to sell 300 listings on eBay that all end on the same day. I was such an idiot.) close to 70% of them are v0 or better. They’re high-quality rips of good sources. And still—a high quality copy of a shitty thing will be shitty. The Best Coast album, for instance, sounds terrible. Arcade Fire’s second album sounds basically just as bad. The mid range is scooped and muddy. I never noticed it, but most rap records sound really bad. They were made to come mostly from a huge sub. If you’re listening on some meaty-yet-restrained monitors or in natural-sounding headphones, then the bass will sound like how getting kicked in the balls feels—it never makes your day, put it that way.

I just now listened to a song by Justice and some Knife and some Robyn. Then I listened to “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance.” I listened to the latter about five times in a row. It is for me beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I say this with absolutely no hesitation or qualifications, the greatest sounding pop song in history. It’s better than “Dancing On My Own.” For one, it totally capitalizes on the loud-quiet-loud thing that’s commonly attributed to The Pixies. It does that really well. But it’s somewhat better described as “big-less big-big.” I still don’t know what all the lyrics say or mean, but the song sounds just incredible. I’d say that the sound of it more than anything else is why it’s such a popular song. It speaks to our unheard yearning for awesome-sounding music. I know, in principle we all want awesome-sounding music. But “Bad Romance” is an honest to goodness awesome-sounding song, and let me tell you not everything they play on the radio or hits the Hot 100 is even decent-sounding. “Bad Romance” sounds chunky and frictional. It sticks to your ears like velcro. It slides into your body like expensive VSOP. It does literally everything exactly right.