In 4:58, Lady Gaga Simultaneously Does Her Best Work of the Year and Highlights What Has Been So Wrong With The Rest of It So Far..

So, yesterday morning the Grammy nominations for 2011 were announced.  Now, you most likely stopped paying attention somewhere between Rihanna getting an Album Of The Year nomination and poor little Taylor Swift getting shut out completely, but the nomination mini-concert was approximately 173 % better than expected.  Lady Gaga spent the first half of it trying to make Marry The Night happen (memo to Gaga – it’s NEVER gonna happen), but she closed the show with a surprise duet with country superstars Sugarland, and did an absolutely perfect rendition of her recent hit You And I.

Now, we’ve given Gaga a lot of guff the past twelve months for releasing what appears to be both the best AND worst album of 2011 (depending on what track you happen to land on.  Heck, depending on what section of any given song you land on), but this was just gorgeous.  Especially considering it was done at about 6:00am in the morning.  And that the original song is such an overproduced bombastic mess.  That’s the thing that has been so frustrating about Born This Way era Gaga – from a song-writing perspective, she’s at an absolute career best peak, but every single track is so suffocated by ideas that hooks are lost and the emotional cores are drenched in everything from drunken bar room session musicians to random german techno.  Kitchen Sink production can sometimes be a thrilling thing (see pretty much everything amazing by Girls Aloud, ever), but it always tends to obscure Gaga’s best work.  By stripping back You And I to a piano and a guitar, the melody just soars and it works surprisingly well as a (sapphic) duet.

Here are five other things we learned from the below performance :-

• Clown make-up actually works very well in pop music, as long as it’s not being worn by Christina Aguilera.

• More A/C Country-Rock ballads could do with overt lesbian overtones.  It’s like Melissa Etheridge, but without all the uncomfortable domestic legal dramas.

• When you write the best melody of your career, sometimes it’s better not to drown it out with $3,000,000 worth of Def Leppard-isms in the production.

• The ‘Marilyn Monroe attacked by a make-up gun’ look sits on that right kind of weird look people enjoy from Gaga.  So much better than that ‘autistic German transexual who forgot to take his meds’ look she’s been sporting the past twelve months.  Sexy Weird equals Good.  Weird Weird equals Bad.  And, you know, weird.

• Sugarlandy Gaga would be a GREAT idea for a side project.

Anyway, sit back, relax and enjoy Lady Gaga and Sugarland knocking out the best version of You And I seen to date :-