Lady Gaga . . . hmm. I’ve watched her as one watches an accident at an intersection: fascinated with the sheer force of wreckage, powerless to affect any intervention, hopeful that someone will walk away unhurt. My boys (who don’t care for her music) tell me that she’s an icon of their generation – kind of like Madonna was to mine. Actually, Lady Gaga is nothing like Madonna. Madonna was a creative genius, she was substantive, she is enduring. Lady Gaga, seemingly everywhere from music videos to Yankee Stadium lacks the substance for legitimate comparison. But what does it say about our culture and where our culture is headed that she has emerged as an iconic figure? Camille Paglia, one of my personal favorites in the world of cultural analysis has penned this wonderfully articulate article on the phenom that is Lady Gaga. Here’s a snip:
Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…
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Not really going to disagree on this. But I’m not so sure that Madonna was/is any better. Definitely been around longer, but don’t you think she leans just as heavily on the “sex sells” mentality as Gaga?
Am I missing the point?
I think that Camille Paglia is spot on about the grotesque mix of sex and death. The first time I really noticed this phenomena was about eight years ago when I ate lunch at a popular hipster bar in my hometown. The atmosphere of the place, filled with kitsch decor from the seventies, felt like grotesque merger of sex and death. We live in a culture that denies ultimate Meaning, other than our shrill assertion that individually chosen “meanings” are truly authentic. If there is no ultimate Meaning, than the world is in some sense “dead” to the artist, who may then cannibalize or appropriate the corpse however he/she chooses. If true creativity is generativity, a bearing of life made possible by participating in a source of life, than what Gaga is doing is at best analogous to a more “solo” activity, and at worst a kind of cultural necrophilia (which is horrifying enough to lack euphemisms that I know about, so my apologies).
I am going to have to look up this Lady Gaga girl. I know nothing about her except that she is a recent pop music phenomenon. I try to distance my self from current pop culture since most of what I have seen repulses me. however, the article is fascinating, especially the way the author describes Gaga.
American artist Lady Gaga has revealed that she wants to get ordained so she can marry gay fans on stage.
Wow, I didn’t realize how easy it was. You should have seen all of the sites that popped up trying to get me to become ordained……
Don’t worry, Ed…Lady Gaga will do a fine job of repulsing you
Steve the second sentence of this post is brilliant.
Although I often enjoy Ms. Paglia, I think she is showing her age here. She is missing the point of Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is poking at the hype of pop culture, feminism, and sexuality. People viewing her videos see irony, satire, and a bit of self-engrandizement – a parody of a superstar. This is part of her “mystique”.
EV – the only problem with this, is the people and phenomena she is trying to satirize and ironically reflect are themselves already trying to satirize and ironically reflect similar phenomena in pop culture. We’re moving from Madonna’s bustier with pointed cones to Gaga’s bra with machine guns. The next Gaga will need a bikini top with howitzers, and sunglasses the size of windshields.
Occasionally someone’s able to do this with panache and a few good ideas. Early Marilyn Manson occasionally achieved this – like in “The Dope Show.”
Irony without wit is pathetic. We have been over-ironizing things since the time of Friedrich Schlegel in the very early nineteenth century. Everyone already knows how pathetic pop culture is, except wee kiddies. They idolize her because “technically,” these things she does are what we associate with “creativity” – i.e., rather blindly pretending to push the envelope and imagining that someone might either find us shocking, or be less than accepting of us as persons because of our “difference.” We have difficulty articulating a notion of artistic creativity outside of the “cult of genius” à la Goethe. It nearly makes one want to move back to an eighteenth century aesthetic, in which entertainment is active – discussion, dancing, walking; and the artist is merely a skilled technician who provides a pleasant backdrop to this entertainment in the form of courtly chamber music, or decorative wall hangings.
When “Art” is too frequently at the forefront of attention, it ceases to be art, since we aren’t listening any more / aren’t really carefully admiring it. It’s up front and center, but it becomes more like wallpaper or muzak, and our minds and senses go blank. One needs to take a vacation from it. Bernstein said we all need to hear less music, and to listen to more of it. Our very un-aesthetic taste is proof that we could all deal with less “art” in our lives.