Morrissey (Getty Images)

When it comes to former Smiths lead singer Morrissey's attitude towards ailing people nearby, it's gruesome that someone so handsome should care.

Elder statesman of pop Morrissey is known for a certain blithe attitude towards the public--but the more he ignores them, the closer they get, with an elderly woman collapsing near him on Sunday as he visited New York's Strand Bookstore. In this case, the youngest was not the most loved, as Morrissey came to the woman's aid. Per Queerty: "Morrissey, who was there alone, immediately rushed to her side and crouched on the ground to see if she was okay. She had just lost her bearings and was fine."

The unlikely Samaritan was reportedly quite shaken by the incident, leaving the store without purchasing anything (shoplifters of the world, unite!); for his sake, we hope every day is not like Sunday.

Madonna.

Madonna has attempted to explain her reference to President Barack Obama as a "black Muslim in the White House" onstage at a Washington stop on her MDNA Tour. (On her New York stop, the singer had featured a massive "OBAMA" tattoo on her back while singing "Like a Virgin.")

Through representatives, the pop singer whose fall from cultural centrality and desperate attempts to get buzz we've recently chronicled told Rolling Stone that "I was being ironic on stage. Yes, I know Obama is not a Muslim – though I know that plenty of people in this country think he is. And what if he were?"

After stealing from New York's drag-ball culture and the European techno scene, Madonna's finally stolen from Colin Powell's 2008 Obama endorsement.

Kanye West’s newest album, Cruel Summer—a compilation of his G.O.O.D. Music label's artists—is to be released next Tuesday, September 18. A few of the tracks have already been released, but today saw the release of the album's opening track, To The World, which features R. Kelly singing the hook. And at two minutes and 25 seconds in, the following verse comes from Mr. West:

I need a new crib to hold my plaques
Rick Ross had told me that.
Said I'd be all up in Goldman Sachs.
Like, "These ni**as tryna hold me back
These ni**as tryna hold me back."
I'm just trying to protect my stacks
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax.

For those in need of contextual help herein: Rick Ross is a fellow rapper, and "stacks" refers to money. In other words:

• He's just trying to protect his money and find a decent place to invest it.
• He's been advised by fellow rapper Rick Ross to invest it with Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management, because people will no doubt try to prevent his liquid wealth from growing, by hook or by crook.
• Take Mitt Romney, for example!
• Mitt Romney found a way to ostensibly evade the full reach of the Internal Revenue Service—or at the very least, a tax rate for people as wealthy as he is—and if Mitt Romney doesn't have to pay taxes, why should Kanye West?

 
Previously, Kanye West famously told the world that former president George W. Bush "does not care about black people" and later imagined his eventual foray into fatherhood:

And I’ll never let my son have an ego.
He’ll be nice to everyone
wherever we go.
I mean
I might even make him be Republican
So everybody know he love white people.

And now Mitt Romney can say his taxes have been rapped about. Which his opponent can not.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Bjork. (Photo: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images)

Panic of Girls, Blondie
September 13
The iconic Deborah (not Debbie!) Harry-fronted band is releasing its first album since 2003, and is on-trend with current monster-movie vogues: the first single, “Mother,” came with a video depicting zombies coming to life and taking over a dance club. (Vampires are so 2010.) Could Blondie itself be the band of zombies taking over the dance floor? Well, that presumes they’ll take over in a music scene glutted with a panic of girl-pop queens (Deborah Harry may have influenced Lady Gaga, but it’s the younger diva who runs the world). Whether you see Ms. Harry as a vital part of the pop scene or a reanimated 1980s relic, the nostalgia quotient of putting on this album and pretending the Odeon’s still a thing beats downloading a Jay McInerney novel to your Kindle any day.

The Sea of Memories, Bush
September 13
Hey, remember Bush? This album’s title may well refer to all that’s evoked in the music consumer’s mind when first hearing the name “Bush”: “Wait, the guys who did “Glycerine”? We remember the mid-1990s, kind of... And where have they been since Gavin Rossdale married Gwen Stefani? Their name has all those political valences, but their music was the soundtrack to our Clinton Administration lost years! The post-grungers set out to discover whether piecing together half-remembered ephemera—“Glycerine” is good, if not exactly a classic on which to build a decades-long career—will bring them the fame they enjoyed before a decade-long hiatus.

Night of Hunters, Tori Amos
September 20
Ms. Amos, at 48, hasn’t outgrown the cheeky weirdness for which she was always known—ever reinventing herself, the queen of the concept album is putting out an album on the German classical label Deutsche Grammophon. The new project, per a statement Ms. Amos made to her fans, is a “song cycle” that tells the story of a woman who “goes through an initiation of sorts that leads her to reinvent herself allowing the listener to follow her on a journey.” The album’s also about how “the hunter and the hunted” exist within every listener. For a listening public used to pop-star “reinventions” comprised entirely of tossing on a new costume, Ms. Amos’s adventurism (did anyone see the Tori Amos experiment ending at Grammophon?) is invigorating.

Duets II, Tony Bennett
September 20
Tony Bennett is no fool—you don’t stay in-demand at 85 by ignoring current trends. The classic-American-songbook master, who had a late-career renaissance in the 1990s prompted by embracing MTV—is doing the Ray Charles thing. Charles, late in his career, released Genius Loves Company, a not-too-shy-to-brag album that featured popular current artists duetting with the master. Mr. Bennett has followed suit with a second disc of collaborations: his first came out in 2006. This round features suspects usual (Natalie Cole, Norah Jones), unusual (Lady Gaga? What’re you doing here?), and tragic (Amy Winehouse’s final recording is here—a duet on “Body and Soul”).

Biophilia, Bjork
September 27
The Icelandic dynamo has returned to music, albeit not really to the studio: Biophilia is garnering early hype in the same manner as those smeary New Yorker covers. It was created on an iPad! Well, at least in part—and it exists for iPads, too, as each song on the Biophilia app will have its own individual app. We’re not Luddites clinging to LPs, but weren’t MP3s just... easier? We don’t want to have to drag our iPad with us if we want to listen to some Bjork while on the treadmill! Then again, it doesn’t quite sound like treadmill music: the album’s concerned less with pop music than the music of the spheres, using extended metaphors about dark matter, gravity, and bodies even more celestial than that of a certain gamine Nordic oddball.

The Whole Love, Wilco
September 27
The alternative icons have set up their own label, dBpm, on which they’re releasing their eighth album. Freedom seems to agree with them—a “deluxe edition” features a track entitled “I Love My Label.” Perhaps they love their label so for the ambition it allows them to uncork: never a bunch of slouches, Wilco’s outdone themselves with a seven-minute opening track and a twelve-minute closing. We were wondering what “November Rain” done by Jeff Tweedy might sound like!

Metals, Feist
Oct. 4
The cutie whose “1234” taught everyone how to count to four and showed her how to count to “millions sold” gifts us with a fourth record. It’s her first release since breaking out to a sort of fame not achieved by a Canadian chanteuse since Céline Dion, or Anne Murray. And unlike her countrywomen, Feist is cool! Well, cool in the Starbucks-music, Apple-ad sense, which isn’t quite cool at all, but the album’s first single is a bit edgier and rougher, more Alanis than Céline, and Feist has a gig lined up for November 2 in Brooklyn, which counts for something, coolness-wise!

Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay
October 25
Remember when albums had nice, simple names, like Abbey Road or Born in the U.S.A.? Or even Parachutes? Coldplay has left its pretense-free years long behind with an album whose name is either in an ancient Mayan language or a secret code only Gwyneth Paltrow can solve. Ms. Paltrow’s spouse, otherwise known as frontman Chris Martin, keeps his sweetie in crisp white Oxfords with a sure-to-be blockbuster album. Get your handkerchiefs out: tracks are to include “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall,” “Hurts Like Heaven,” and “Charlie Brown.” Cheer up, Coldplay boys! If you’re feeling forlorn and misunderstood, be proactive and make your next album title in the English language!

Take Care, Drake
October 25
Another depressive entertainer in the teary-Coldplay mold, Drake, has seemingly little about which to be sad: he’s rumored to have dated pop temptress Rihanna and--more pertinently--his rise to legitimate music-industry fame from beginnings as a child actor has been meteoric. But fame has its downsides, and Drake has been loudly ambivalent about all the perks that come with a hit record. His second studio album, Take Care, will only compound the number of fake friends and groupies swarming Drake; it will also very likely cement him as an artist to whom attention must be paid.

Untitled album, Florence + the Machine
November
The hyper-publicized Brit-art-pop of 2010 knows how to strike when the hype is hot: Florence + the Machine, a band whose lead singer, Florence Welch, has become a fashion industry darling, is putting out a second album. It comes on the heels of the omnipresent single “Dog Days Are Over,” the official song of chick-flick trailers in fourth-quarter 2010, and while little is known (not even a title or release date!), we’re hoping Ms. Welch indulges her loopy, ruffley visual aesthetic this cycle and pushes her yodely vocals: we’ve listened to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” enough times to know that pop needs a British eccentric.

ddaddario@observer.com

The fast song, "Run the World (Girls)," released over a month ago, is mired in the lower reaches of the Billboard charts--it's aggressive and pounding, uncomfortable to listen to, pushing the clattering dissonances of "Single Ladies" way too far into mania. The slow song, which Beyoncé performed on last night's American Idol finale, is "1+1," a torpid strummy-guitar-intro'd kind of song punctuated by periodic Arethan yowls (and the charming mispronounciation "algerba," one of the song's few gestures at idiosyncracy).

Being a pop star in 2011--a period whose music has been dominated by young female singers--seems to be predicated on determining the exactly proper level of bizarreness to embrace in one's music and persona. Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Katy Perry are outré in their personal style, but their music is more or less interchangeable; Lady Gaga's fashion is even weirder, but her music is the most solidly rooted in solid pop tradition from Springsteen to Madonna. Beyoncé has chosen both routes, again--a wacky jaunt through dancehall beats and apocalyptic imagery and a bland-as-white-bread ballad. With these two extremes fighting against one another--the ballad to remedy the failure of the dance song, and surely more aggressive dance songs to follow--can the singer's center hold?

Below, a video of Beyoncé pushing the limits of pop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbvqTPGwbZ4

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

One is given to understand that much of the population has been wiped out (an almost subliminally-brief image of arrows flashes across a world map--nuclear war? Pandemic?) and that Beyoncé has assumed the role of heroine set to lead her acolytes through this Cormac McCarthyesque landscape. By the clip's end, she's mounted a rearing white horse, a veritable horsewoman of the apocalypse. 

Music videos are an art form without much currency these days--MTV, their stalwart patron in the "Thriller" era, has abandoned them for a ceaseless glucose drip of reality TV, and YouTube's democratic flattening places the glossy "Single Ladies" on equal footing with a lip sync by a Florida 14-year-old. Little surprise, then, that videos have entered their decadent phase: while no one was paying attention, their production values have skyrocketed, their themes grown sinister. 

As a song, "Run the World (Girls)" is a clattering mess. Its message--that girls, which is to say women, are powerful and deserve respect from men--is roughly the same one found in an any innocuous Taylor Swift single. Beyoncé is not, in her lyrics at least, advocating anything resembling a global takeover. And yet the video world her girls would run is a ravaged one. 

Ditto the setting of Britney Spears's "Till the World Ends." She wants to dance "till the world ends," a metaphor, one might think, for the club lights coming on at evening's end. No such luck for those who prefer rapture to The Rapture: the video opens with a clip of meteors exploding and the chyron "December 21st, 2012." Ms. Spears rides out the Mayan-calendar end times by grinding on guys in a grimy club. Explosions light the sky outside. 

Online, theories abound for these pop stars' recent fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Some exegeses are ludicrous, others serviceably plausible (say, what is Lady Gaga's fascination with the Illuminati symbol of Baphomet?). But what these videos are fundamentally about is control. Rihanna's 2010 pleading that her man make her feel "like the only girl in the world" sounds like a workaday come-on, but the song's video reveals that every other girl in the world has quite literally disappeared, and our heroine strides through a toxic-looking red desert.  

Rihanna is no stranger to taking command-or to overtly martial imagery. In her 2009 "Hard" video, she appeared in military drag, straddling a tank and commanding a battalion of soldiers; in 2010's "Rockstar 101," video clips of mushroom clouds illustrated her character's fantasy star power. She was that special thing: a girl who ran the world, even if her reign meant mass destruction.

Singers may be bystanders to the apocalypse (Ms. Spears), or its instigators (Rihanna), or rebel priestesses (Beyoncé). They may even play God-Lady Gaga gives birth to a new race at the beginning of her "Born This Way" video and leads a climactic battle against evil at its conclusion. But, whether annihilators or saviors, these ladies are always the center of attention. In Beyoncé and Lady Gaga's collaborative video from 2010, "Telephone," the two singers kill every customer in a restaurant, and then dance among the corpses. Both singers went on to make videos ("Run the World," from the former, "Born This Way," the latter) in which they lead their respective armies in the name of good. Join us if you want to live, their art confidently proclaims. 

In a time when the pop singer's ability to monetize her skills has plummeted and exploded like a 2012 meteorite, this must seem a terrifically attractive proposition. The singer advances her soldiers into battle onscreen, even as her real-life power among the sort of listeners who used to buy albums dwindles. 

The videos promise that if the listener joins Gaga's race or Rihanna or Beyoncé's ranks or Britney's Thunderdome, he or she will be protected from history's vicissitudes by a conquering diva. For all their sinister themes, these violent videos' assumption that pop singers can ride out a real-life apocalypse in 2012 or beyond, when they have barely managed to justify their existence relative to their counterparts of the early 2000's, is quaint and, harking back as it does to the onetime power of pop, strangely touching. It is even, dare we say it, optimistic.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

After releasing only a handful of songs, WU LYF (pronounced Woo Life) was called by The Guardian "the most interesting band" in Manchester and by the BBC the "anonymous stars of now." The singer has a terrifying, gravelly yelp, and he plays a synthesizer set to sound like a church organ. The guitar is filled with reverb and echo and mostly noodles around melody lines. The rhythm section is loud but minimal. All the songs sound like anthems. Critics say their style is "heavy pop," which is a neologism born out of the band's song of the same name. There used to be a Tumblr for the band to sell its handmade EP. Only 14 copies were made. After turning down most reputable labels in England, WU LYF will self-release their debut full-length in June.

An expensive-looking band Web site explains that WU LYF is an acronym for World Unite/Lucifer Youth Foundation. Shaky videos of them playing live are on YouTube, their faces quite visible. They have a publicist and a manager. They have a Facebook page that lists the contact information for both. No names are given. The manager is listed as "War God."

The Observer contacted the publicist first. "I know the band hasn't done much in the way of interviews," The Observer wrote in an email, "but I thought I'd ask anyway."

Night came and The Observer had heard nothing. We never would, either.

In March 2010, Paul Lester at The Guardian named WU LYF the "New Band of the Day No. 743." He noted the band's absence of a biography and the pleasure of being "baffled in this digital day and age. Even writing about brand new bands, you find that, more often than not, everything is spelled out at the first possible opportunity." The Observer wondered if there was a difference between that and being able to spell out exhaustively the fact that nothing is spelled out exhaustively.

The critic Sean Michaels, who wrote a longer piece about WU LYF for his blog Said the Gramophone, told The Observer he discovered that all of the photographs on the band's Web site traced back to the site for Four23, a Manchester ad agency that refers to itself as "a multi-disciplinary creative studio." Four23 owns a venue called An Outlet, "an independent licensed coffeehouse based in the Piccadilly basin of Manchester," where WU LYF has played many of their shows. Four23's founder is Warren Bramley, a young advertising prodigy. His email matches the one listed on WU LYF's Facebook page under the title "War God."

"It all pushes my buttons," Mr. Michaels told The Observer. "I bought their 12-inch single and it cost me something ludicrous--between 10 and 20 pounds. And its lovely heavy vinyl, it came with a sleeve, it came with a bandana with their logo, and it had two songs on it. And they were pretty good." 

Mr. Michaels included a picture of the group with his post. It features 10 people. They are standing in a horizontal line, dressed the way one expects a young band to look: tight jeans, denim jackets, wrinkled T-shirts. But everyone is wearing a white scarf wrapped around his or her face. They are atop a building, and part of the Manchester skyline is visible, a cold and ash-colored backdrop with the sky looking like rain. There is a leafless tree nearby. On the ground are cans of what look like flares, releasing yellow signal smoke into the damp air. The person in the center of the line has his arm raised to the sky like something terrible might happen if he puts it down.

Cal Mcvann, someone who appears in the photo, posted it on his Facebook page ("About Cal: HIPSTERxHOLOCAUST") in the album "RAINBOW WAARCHES by Cal Mcvann" and tagged all the names. The caption reads "911." Three people--Jaimee Arthurs, Alexander James Hirst, Racheal Crowther--like the picture. The following people had this to say about the photograph:

Joe Broady: "thats fucking ill" [sic].

Kayleigh Heydon: "sickkkkk" [sic].

Jordan Carrol: "aw this is good" [sic].

WU LYF is a four-piece band. Their names are Evans Kati, Joseph Manning, Tom McClung and Ellery Roberts. The Observer wondered if a young band with "pretty good" songs was really worth the effort of finding out more, or if having to make an effort at all was itself appealing. Still, the more WU LYF avoided The Observer, the more we wanted to know. 

There were a number of people wearing white scarves wrapped around their faces mingling about the venue before WU LYF took the stage at Glasslands. The Observer kept his notebook discreetly hidden because the person in charge of booking the show said the headliner demanded that no press or label representatives could be included on any of the other bands' guest lists. The Observer saw at least two label heads, a number of journalists and a great deal of photographers. How did a band with no album out come to believe they had more power than the record industry?

After 12:30 a.m., four skinny and young-looking guys left the room marked "staff only" and set up instruments. They tuned quickly and then walked offstage back into the forbidden room. Through the cracked open door, The Observer glimpsed one of the four--the singer, whom The Observer recognized from YouTube videos--holding a water pitcher and fake pouring it on himself. He was grabbing his rear end in feigned sexual positions, posing for the camera phone of a member of one of the opening acts, Wise Blood. The door closed. Soon the four guys started to file back onstage, and The Observer felt someone touch his arm. It was the guitar player, who was squeezing through the audience frantically toward the bathroom. He was wearing a hideous giant sweater that looked like a rug.

He returned quickly, and the band started to play. At the first notes of "L Y F," for which the band released a video a few days prior to the show, the audience applauded loudly in recognition. The singer wore a jean jacket buttoned up all the way with torn holes on both elbows. His jaw was hard and clenched while he played his keyboard with one tense arm, the other clutching his heart like his chest hurt.

"I'll love you forever," the singer screamed loudly until the veins in his neck bulged and throbbed. It helped that he was good-looking. 

"They're just a boy band," an audience member said to The Observer with a certain venom.

At the end of the song, the singer ripped off the jean jacket in one big movement. Instead of stage banter or introducing himself, he made a Donald Duck sound into the microphone, spewing gibberish. In a normal voice, he requested that all the lights be turned off.

By the end of the second song, he and the drummer--expressing more indifference with his face than if he were in math class--were both shirtless. In addition to being introduced to some of the band member's tiny nipples, the audience was hearing most of the songs for the first time. They thrashed and moved their bodies. When WU LYF played one of the songs that has been floating around the Internet--namely, "I Got Dem Wu Wu Busted Teef Spitting It Concrete Like the Golden Sun God"--the singer announced, "Here is a song all of you know," with genuine hubris. The guitar player shouted "New York City!" into his microphone the same way Spinal Tap shouts, "Hello, Cleveland!" The bassist poked fun at a girl for looking like "the singer from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs." (Many of the girls in the room did. We were in Williamsburg.) What the
y lacked in charm they made up for in intensity. WU LYF will not change the world--or the music industry--but they are excellent performers.

"Well, it's just a band," the bassist said sarcastically in between songs, though it was hard to hear. The singer was making Donald Duck sounds into his microphone again to obscure all the words.

mmiller@observer.com

The Mountain Goats
All Eternals Deck
March 29, Merge
John Darnielle's rotating troupe's 18th album--its first on Merge Records--sounds grim, and not merely because four tracks were produced by death metal icon Erik Rutan. Mr. Darnielle compared the album to scenes in a 1970s "occult-scare movie" and cited influences like fake drug memoir Go Ask Alice and cult gang-war classic The Warriors. With such spooky inspiration, we're beginning to understand just why Mr. Darnielle tends to pick up and shed bandmates. 

Britney Spears
Femme Fatale
March 29, Jive
The long, strange trip of Britney Spears continues, with her new album, Femme Fatale. Ms. Spears has had Forrest Gumpian success in the pop music industry; without exerting any effort, she emerged (or was forcibly dragged) from pink-wigged mania back onto the charts just as dance music was returning to the mainstream. It's hard not to miss the utter lack of persona in Ms. Spears's 2007-era output when hearing her 2011 single "Hold It Against Me," in which a humorless singer attempts to recite a raunchy pun. And yet longtime Britney fans--are there any other kind?--shall be sated until the star's next flickering emergence in two years. 

Wiz Khalifa
Rolling Papers,
March 29, Atlantic
The Pittsburgh rapper says his album title doesn't--at least not solely--refer to marijuana. "I sort of got my 'rolling papers'" from Warner Bros., Mr. Khalifa has joked. While his memory is surprisingly long for someone who so chronically uses ... Twitter (Warner Bros. dropped him before the release of his last album, in 2009), it's exciting to consider what Mr. Khalifa could do with a record label behind him. That is, if he can find another single with as much staying power as the Steelers-themed "Black and Yellow." Maybe a Pittsburgh Pirates single? 

Low
C'Mon
April 12, Sub Pop
The nearly un-Google-able Duluth, Minn., band is nearing the start of their third decade--they got started in 1993, when their soft, slow melodies in the age of grunge inadvertently kicked off the mini-movement "slowcore." They haven't wandered too far from their roots: What's available online sounds methodical and quiet as ever, though devoid of the explicit political resonances from the band's last record, Drums and Guns. Apolitical, perhaps, but still willfully out-there--the record was made in a Catholic Church in Duluth. 

TV on the Radio
Nine Types of Light
April 12, Interscope
Dear Science, TV on the Radio's last album, came in at No. 1 on The Village Voice's year-end Pazz and Jop poll. The band broke through with audiences, too, even getting a poorly sound-mixed spot on Saturday Night Live. What's left for them to achieve? Post-stardom, it would seem: Their new album's cover doesn't feature the band's name. They're now so distinctive--though early tracks lack the weird blats of sound that made Dear Science so much like itself--that they don't need your simple-minded conventions! 

Paul Simon
So Beautiful or So What
April 12, Concord
The venerable guitarist returns with his first album since 2006, and is presumably feeling, well, his venerability: The first single is titled "The Afterlife." Simon's been popular, cyclically, but has he ever been hip? His flirtations with world music (no word yet on what country inspired this album) are earnest, his depiction of a double helix on the So Beautiful album cover daddishly nerdy. The apocryphal reports that Mr. Simon had asked cool older brother of rock Bob Dylan to guest on the album are encouraging. Adopting some of Mr. Dylan's swagger (while still singing more comprehensibly) can only help Mr. Simon. 

Panda Bear
Tomboy
April 12, Paw Tracks
Opining on this delayed release from Animal Collective mainstay Panda Bear (née Noah Lennox), the music blog Stereogum said the album's cover "would make a decent tattoo." While covering a record-listening party for Tomboy, The Village Voice wrote, "Panda Bear fans are the Justin Bieber fans of the indie universe." His songs "kind of have this weathering the storm attitude to them," Panda Bear told Rolling Stone. To what storm is he referring? 

Fleet Foxes
Helplessness Blues
May 3, Sub Pop
Fleet Foxes seemed like they'd tire everyone  out quickly. The Seattle band's blend of folk and choralish harmonies just barely works artistically, and does not spell sales bonanza (hark, the lessons of pop choir the Polyphonic Spree!). Somehow, the band has thrived and is about to release a second album that frontman Robin Pecknold has said is inspired by Van Morrison and Roy Harper. Changes come all at once sometimes: The band also has a new member taken from the wreckage of two post-punk bands. Fleet Foxes' vision of itself is apparently as capacious as any of the band's songs.  

Lady Gaga
Born This Way
May 23, Interscope
The chattering classes were scandalized by Lady Gaga's anxiety-of-influence rip-offs of Madonna's "Express Yourself." What matters, though, is that Ms. Gaga hasn't forgotten how to grab attention. It's tough to criticize Ms. Gaga--she preempts all criticism not by being self-aware, but by constantly upping the ante with her crass stunt artistry. Who knows what other "surprises" this album cycle will hold? Give her credit for this--it took Madonna seven albums to get into weird extraplanetary spirituality, on Ray of Light. With Ms. Gaga's birth-of-an-alien "Born This Way" video, she got there in three.