“Poker Face” was a huge moment in Lady Gaga’s career. Gaga’s previous single was her first one, “Just Dance,” which topped the Hot 100 chart. There’s a lot of pressure that comes with following a chart-topping debut single, but thankfully, “Poker Face” was a massive success, as it also went No. 1. While it’s been 13 years since the song was released, it actually had a big 2021: Google unveiled its lists of the year’s top trending searches today, and in the US, “Poker Face” was seventh in the list of top ten trending songs. For context, “Poker Face” is by far the oldest song on the list, with the second-oldest being Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit “WAP.”
While the list doesn’t directly indicate why “Poker Face” trended so much this year, Google does offer analytics that paint a clear picture. The song had a massive spike in search interest in February, which was when the song went viral on TikTok because of its lyrics. Indeed, the “related queries” Google lists for “Poker Face” are mostly about the song’s lyrics. The reason the song gained renewed attention is because people started to realize the stuttered lyrics Gaga repeats after the song’s chorus are, “P-p-p-poker face, f-f-f*ck her face.”
For the record, this sneakily explicit lyric isn’t exactly a closely guarded secret. In fact, while performing at KIIS FM’s iHeartRadio Wango Tango in 2009, Gaga said of the song (as LadBible notes), “KIIS FM is the smartest radio station in the whole world and I’ll tell you why. Because this song, it got played all over the world on tens of thousands of radio stations, but KIIS FM was the only one that said I had to censor my lyric because they thought I might be saying something bad. And out of all the radio stations in the world that played this record over and over, KIIS FM was the only one that was right and caught on.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.