Pop sugarcube Lady GaGa doesn't exactly have her finger on the pulse of what's happening. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in recent American history, this vampy twenty-something (a New Yorker by way of Australia) is releasing an album summed up by lyrics like, "All we care about is runway models, Cadillacs and liquor bottles." Finally, someone with the courage to speak for the people!

Now of course music can have tremendous transformative power. Pop music is no exception; the right pop song can provide blissful escapism even in the most Dickensian of times. But The Fame has none of that power; its primary ambition seems to be simply to make its architect famous by following overused blueprints. There's little obvious irony to her vacuous fetishizing of celebrity culture. Both in song ("Just Dance") and off stage, she romanticizes the excess-filled lifestyle of burnouts like Amy Winehouse ("Amy Winehouse is the closest thing to rock 'n' roll in a long time, she lives the life," GaGa gushed in a recent interview).

There are a few ill-fated genre experiments, like the jangly guitar-rock on "Summerboy" and the requisite piano ballad "Brown Eyes." But The Fame mostly lives in the pop fast lane, with big and boisterous tracks meant for banging in the club. The best moments are as much a testament to her collaborators as GaGa herself.Her Auto-Tuned vocals are unremarkable, and the lyrics are grating even by club standards. Even the producers mostly slip into comfortable cruise control. The powerfully peppy "Just Dance" is already an international hit, and not undeservingly so, but producer RedOne may be running out of tricks, as it's not far from his earlier work with better pop artists like Robyn.

Like Winehouse–and Madonna and Gwen Stefani, who are the clearer creative guiding lights–GaGa repackages the sort of sound that has already worked for other people in the past. But those artists were all trend-setters at some point; GaGa contents herself to being an incurious follower. If Robyn and Rihanna looked over their shoulders, they'd find GaGa gasping off in the distance, never taking a single footstep off the path already trod.

—Adam McKibbin
10.23.08