Lady Gaga: Poker Face
What is Lady Gaga hiding behind her poker face?
A friend of mine is a great poker player. Really great. Now anybody can learn to be good with numbers—calculating the odds on a given hand winning and taking a calculated risk accordingly. But he is a skilled reader of people’s faces. He can normally tell when somebody is bluffing… pretending to have a better hand than they really do. And he’s not afraid to use that information. My advice is this: if you ever play against him, it pays to be careful to control your facial expressions to make sure you don’t give anything away. It pays to have a poker face.
But I’m not so sure the same applies off the poker table.
Stefani Joanne Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, has hit an Australian #1 again with her single “Poker Face”. It’s an infectious tune, and a curious message: the female persona is playing the game of love with her cards close to her chest: manipulating the boys partly for fun, partly to make them all the more interested. It’s about playing hard to get.
One thing I love about Lady Gaga is how she got her name: one of her old producers gave her the name after seeing her play a song on the piano with such intense craziness that it reminded him of Queen’s “Radio Ga-Ga”. Her track has a real passion to it—and a warmth which is sometimes hard to get across in electronic music.
But to be honest I’m glad the girls I know don’t deliberately try to put on a poker face around boys. It’s hard enough for boys to understand girls and girls to understand boys without deliberate deception!
And I don’t know if I’d agree with Lady Gaga that “when it’s love it’s not fun if it isn’t rough”! Being upfront and honest is more my cup of tea. And while it might make a boring song, in my experience it makes a more fulfilling relationship.
Interestingly this single didn’t do quite as well in the US as it did in Australia—perhaps the US has had enough of lies and deception?
A fun song - but as always I wouldn’t plan my life around its lyrics!
Stay in the loop