Madonna // Lady Gaga

Madonna, 80s icon par excellence. I mean, c'mon, who hasn't heard one of her songs. Her 80s songs are still known today, and who has never heard of Like a Virgin?!
Not only is the song very 80s sounding, but the video just screams 1980s. Indeed, the hair, the clothes, the crazy dancing... all these things which you can associate to the Eighties are found in her music video.
Now, I'm not very big on the 80s in general, and on the music in particular, but the whole range of instruments and the beats and all just sound 80s to me. And I think that it is because it sounds like an era but at the same time is timeless that the song has lived on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgkOCJ9PGkk




Lady Gaga has been compared to Madonna many a times. Not only is her recent single Born this Way very similar to previous Madonna songs, but her whole image echoes of the queen of pop.
In the video to her incredibly long song Alejandro, she uses images, like the gun bra, which have been previously used by Madonna. Now, I am not saying she is just a more extreme Madonna, however there are some similarities which cannot be ignored.
The reason I think Lady Gaga will be looked at as representative of our times' music is that she sounds very "now". Okay, her latest song does sound a little old school, but the rest of it is has a very contemporary feel to it. Plus, let's face it, our generation's music is no longer about music itself, it's about music videos. MVs are what help sell these days, so we can no longer dissociate the music from its video. And Lady Gaga is the prime example of the type of videos our generation is all about: extreme and sexualised. In most hit videos, there is at least one sexual image. Our generation has banalized sex and Lady Gaga's videos exemplify this nicely.