SameSame.com.au ~ Inside Out Australia

Battle Of The Pop Princesses

International News, By daverh, 12th August, 2009

Admittedly we missed this story when it hit the interwebs late last week, but we just can’t bring ourselves to add fame-chasing popstar Lady GaGa to our Google news feed. But we love a good celebrity feud as much as the next person, and when Irish electro diva Roisin Murphy unleashed some venom at Lady GaGa, we just couldn’t let it slip by.

According to the Roisin Murphy fan blog, the former Moloko vocalist spoke out to the Daily Mail about the rise of Lady GaGa, claiming that the US popstar had nicked her own signature image.

“I met her about a year ago before she got really big and I had no clue that this was all going to happen. She wasn’t wearing shoulder pads at the time, and I was. Lady Gaga is just a poor imitation of me,” Murphy said.

It’s abundantly clear that Lady GaGa has poached liberally from pop’s history books, lifting elements from Madonna, Grace Jones and Peaches to name just a few, so it’s plausible to think that Roisin was in there somewhere. But to claim trademark over the gaudy shoulder-padded look seems remarkably petty, don’t you think?

Indeed, it sounds like a line you’d hear from a teary 16 year old rather than the reportedly charming Murphy. Accordingly, the Irish singer and her management have promptly debunked the original statement, claiming that the quotes were both misrepresented and fabricated by the press.

“As the press are inclined to do, they have taken some comments I made completely out of context and completely fabricated others,” Murphy wrote. “I never said ‘Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of me’. That was a completely made up quote. I respect Lady Gaga’s work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon… I don’t care about shoulder pads! All the best to Lady Gaga – she is fantastic.”

Disaster averted. We’re a little sad that it didn’t escalate further, first with rapid-fire press releases and blogs entries then followed by a couple of dirty diss tracks. Oh well, we’ll have to content ourselves with the burgeoning beef between Parklife’s La Roux and Little Boots.

According to NME, there’s quite a strong commercial rivalry between UK electro-poppers La Roux and Little Boots, which we can kind of understand when you consider that they both released their debut albums this year, and have been two of the most hotly billed female-fronted acts to emerge on the English music landscape. Now, La Roux frontwoman Elly Jackson has fanned the flames of conflict with some recent remarks indicating that she “felt sorry” for Little Boots (aka Victoria Hesketh).

NME reports that the La Roux singer spoke up about the reaction to Little Boots’ Hands record – which plummeted from the UK Top Ten whilst La Roux have conquered the charts – saying that it was met with an “unfair reaction” from UK audiences. “Hype can be a very dangerous thing, it can accelerate people’s expectations,” she said of the Little Boots record before adding that she and producer Ben Langmaid “got away with it” on the La Roux album.

But it could be that Jackson is just bitter after Little Boots pipped La Roux in this week’s NME Future 50 list. Both acts ranked high on the list of innovative artists with Little Boots just scraping past La Roux’s No. 10 spot, landing in at No. 9. That said, the list also included Take That, 3OH!3 and Dan The Automator, so it’s kind of all over the place.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if this phantom feud escalates any further before both acts touch down on Australian soil for Parklife.