Repeater Song: 2010-01-02
At this past New Years DJ Gig, the kids, making requests helped me discover a new repeater song. That is:
- Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
Now I had heard this song before the gig a couple times on the radio, and when I added it to my music library. But it never impressed me as a song that I’d care to listen to repeatedly (a repeater song); that is, until the kids asked for it a few times, and then I observed them dancing gleefully when I played it. Before the gig, I deemed this song as just a take-off of her hit last year: Poker Face. I really liked that song but was kind of put out that Lady Gaga would attempt to milk the success of that one by making the newer, Bad Romance piece sound so much like it. The two do sound very similar in the instrumentation and rhythmic patterns used, the tempo, as well as the repetitive yet ingenious digital effects.
But something neat happened to my perceptions when I saw the kids enjoying the newer song so much. I realized that the same things that made Poker Face such a great dance tune in 2009 could also be found in this latest hit. So now, I really like Bad Romance, and so, I must praise Lady Gaga and her production team for recognizing the patterns that work so well, and then creating yet another repeater song such as this. Good work folks!
It seems that whenever I’m looking for new repeater songs, one way to find them is to do a DJ gig because the kids will often request lots of great music. I have noticed through the years that knowing that others enjoy a song constitutes a sort of positive peer pressure on me, which can transform an otherwise mediocre, average hit, into a great repeater. This appears to have been the case with the Bad Romance hit.
And there once again is that curious phenomenon: It takes more than just the item itself to make the item seem great. If I hadn’t done the gig and witnessed those people enjoying it so much, I might never have come to like that song myself, even though the song is the same now as the one I heard prior to the gig. Hmmm.