Halfway through the third time watching Lady Gaga’s video for her brand new single “Poker Face”, I realized the song is about poker.  Sort of…….  Lady Gaga, while stunning visually, is not exactly an artist exuding depth and talent.  Instead you get the impression she was the face and body matched by record executives to songs that didn’t make a Gwen Stefani album.   However, that said, I’ve not recently seen the game of poker made to look so….uhhhhh….screw it, SEXY! The song’s lyrical content is basically a strung together montage of x-rated double entendres made from familiar poker lingo.  Granted, with Lady Gaga’s over the top sex appeal oozing from every pore in her taut body, she could make unclogging a toilet sound sexy with the right beat.
From the very first chord progression you’re happy.  The brief but obvious ‘nod’ to ‘Sweet Dreams’ is enough for the first time listener to feel welcome.  These cheap parlor tricks are par for the musical course these days, so ironically it gets a pass.   The first audible line other than the voice that may be Timbaland reciting “Mum mum mum mum” around 20 times, is “I wanna hold em like they do in Texas Plays”.   That line must be about her desire for multiple sex partners.  As a patriarchal old school man, that frightens me, so I like it.   “Fold em let em hit me raise it baby stay with me, I love it” has all the sentiments of a veiled cry for domination.  Again, scary but alluring.   It starts getting more interesting when she hits the pre-chorus.  “OH OH OH, I’ll get him hot, show him what I’ve got, OH OH OH”.  At this point in the song I realized that she chose poker as a theme so that she could make references like this without sounding like a complete tramp!  It’s brilliant really (I mean if it had actually worked that is).  Poker has many phrases that can be twisted to sound sexual, and Lady Gaga has exploited this to the fullest extent.
However, her sultry delivery on phrases like “I’m bluffin with my muffin”, while pointing to her crotch (classy), travel from “ambiguous-land” right into “fucking obvious-ville”.  She spends the first half of the song using poker as a way to skeeze up the airways while hiding behind the “perception” curtain, and then blasts right into full blown lyrical porn.   However, her (and I say her as if these creative decisions were hers) less-than-subtle re-interpretations of phrases from the poker lexicon actually do make you want to play poker…..covered in baby oil, with a harem of beautiful women, lying on a leopard skin rug.