I was joking with PostBourgie's blackink about this the day before Thanksgiving, because while I was downloading the new Lupe Fiasco mixtape, I was compulsively listening to Adam Lambert's "For Your Entertainment." I don't watch American Idol. I thought that track he did for 2012 was ludicrously screechy when Vulture posted it. And the video is straight ridiculous:
I mean, come on. The guy is so babyfaced that it's impossible to believe him as dungeon master at some underground club (if you want to pinch someone's cheek while they declaim "Take the pain / Take the pleasure / I'm the master of both," they're doing something wrong) much less that he's two years older than I am.
But in a fairly catchy, manufactured way, Lambert is doing a serviceable version of something Lady Gaga's also done: asserting his inscrutability, and his performance as a paid service, extremely early in his career, indeed with his debut single. The song's got a lot of sexy, dominant imagery: "I'm gonna hurt you real good, baby," etc. But all of that bravado winds up in a declaration that "...I'm here for your entertainment." The whole song relies on a sense that the audience asked for something they're not particularly prepared for. I actually think it's much less likely that Lambert is going to substantially challenge audiences in the ways Lady Gaga does visually (if not musically), and she's got a lot more emotional inflection to her songs than he does, hollering entirely aside.
Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" may be the best being-devoured-by-audience-demands song of the last couple of years, but it came after her life and her career had become a genuine mess, and after she'd already let audiences fairly deep inside both. Gaga started, instead, with songs about her unreadability, and used the paparazzi as a metaphor for romance. Lambert's (not to be too crude about it) topping from the bottom to a certain extent, laying out an agenda for what he hopes to do now that folks are looking to him for music. I don't know if it's an intentionally protective shell, or if it'll work for Gaga or Lambert, but it's certainly intriguing. And that's always good marketing.