Instead, her “Poker Face” lyrics work as single entendres: “I wanna roll with him, a hard pair we will be/ A little gamblin’ is fun when you’re with me.” That hidden meaning is really hidden you probably wouldn’t pick it up without Gaga pointing you in that direction. The guy doesn’t really know what she’s thinking. Soon after the song blew up, Gaga said that the song had a hidden meaning - that it was really about bisexuality, about fantasizing about a woman when she’s with a man. Gaga can’t have been the only person who turned poker into a barely veiled sex metaphor, but she did it more successfully than anyone else.Īt first, Gaga said that “Poker Face” was a song for her past “rock ‘n’ roll boyfriends,” who were all big into gambling. In 2006’s Casino Royale, for instance, Daniel Craig, the newly anointed James Bond, played Texas hold ’em, which did not seem like a particularly Bondian thing to do.
A 2006 law shut down a lot of those gambling websites, but poker itself was still bouncing around in the zeitgeist. People younger than me were making healthy livings by gambling online. Anytime I’d go to another dude’s house, there was a good chance that he’d have a celebrity poker tournament on the TV. Gaga recorded “Poker Face” just after the mid-’00s poker boom, when various cultural forces conspired to turn gambling into a gigantic mainstream thing. The “Poker Face” video reflects that sensibility, but the the song itself is powered by pure, direct horniness.
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Gaga tracks tend to be messy and maximalist, so full of ideas that it can be hard to wrap your head around whatever’s happening. RedOne later claimed that “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” took about one hour apiece. Lady Gaga had just met producer RedOne when the two of them wrote “Poker Face.” In their first week working together, Gaga and RedOne wrote and recorded “Just Dance,” “Poker Face,” and at least one other hit. That’s what happened with me and “Poker Face.” And if you started to consider the music as a vehicle for that kind of image-play - and Lady Gaga clearly hoped that you would - then the songs soon came to sound much more powerful. Soon enough, every new Lady Gaga video became an event, even if you didn’t like the music. Lady Gaga always gave some kind of berserk visual feast. Suddenly, you could pull videos up again and again on YouTube, as long as the videos gave you something sufficiently interesting to look at. A few years earlier, videos had been something that might be on MTV when you got home from school. This mysterious figure took pop stardom very, very seriously, and she was going to make sure that people knew her name.Īny discussion of “Poker Face,” or really with that first Lady Gaga era, has to start with the videos.
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In the months that followed, every Gaga video and TV show appearance revealed some wild, theatrical new twist. The music was still pulsing, infernally catchy dance-pop, but the imagery reflected something grander and more ambitious. If Gaga seemed slightly eccentric in the “Just Dance” video, the “Poker Face” clip revealed her to be some kind of sci-fi demon. The opening shots of the “Poker Face” video were disorienting for any music snobs who heard “ Just Dance” and wrote Lady Gaga off as an assembly line club-pop singer. She’s a dance-music wraith from another dimension, and the world is not ready for her.
Gaga looks like Gozer appearing on the rooftop at the end of Ghostbusters, if Gozer was ready to party. In front of her, two Great Danes sit at attention, like Egyptian statues. There’s a spiky black-metallic shoulderpad on her vinyl bodysuit. Gaga’s face is covered by a mask made from crushed-up disco balls. Lightning crackles through the clouds as Lady Gaga rises, in slow motion, from a swimming pool. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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