The Epic Lady Gaga Post

I had originally intended to write a post on Fabolous’ concert at Memorial Hall and how the DTH shat upon it unfairly and probably ruined the show through all the negative press they gave it, but then Lady Gaga came out with a new music video and blew my mind all over my face.

I’ve watched it like eight times now and I just don’t know. Is it genius? Is it completely pointless? Why does she shoot fire out of her chest at the end? IT JUST DOESN”T MAKE SENSE. According to Wikipedia, the video “takes place in a white bathhouse where Gaga is kidnapped by a group of supermodels who drug her and then sell her off to the Russian mafia for sex slavery.” I must admit that that particular reading of the video was lost upon me; I must have gotten distracted by all the jump-cuts and googly eyes. Really, the only conclusion I could possibly draw from viewing the video the first time through was, “This is crazier than a pile of moose shit on coke.”

Watching this video got me to thinking about what I’m going to term the “cult of Gaga,” the idea that not only do people actively enjoy Lady Gaga’s music, but take their fandom further than it’s logically “okay” to do. For example, I have a group of friends who dressed up as Lady Gaga for Halloween, each picking a different Gaga outfit from her various music videos. That's a bit much, in my opinion. But it prompted a hella ton of thought that I can compress into two basic questions.

The aforementioned questions are as follows:

1) Why do people like Lady Gaga so much?

2) What, at the end of the day, is Lady Gaga’s point?

To tackle these brain-busters, let’s think about what Lady Gaga does poorly and what she does well. Gaga is, I will admit, a particularly gifted individual; however, her talents do not lie in the conventional arenas for pop star aptitude. The backing tracks for her songs are unimaginative amalgamations of the electro-pop piffle that dominates pop radio these days, she often sings with the assistance of Autotune to augment her inadequate vocal abilities, her dancing is generally limited to her writhing around while her backup dancers do the real (pardon the pun) legwork, and in the opinion of this blogger her songwriting is not particularly notable*.

The thing is that Lady Gaga realizes all of that is bullshit that doesn’t really matter these days. She understands that in this day and age, the quality of an album or song has little to do with whether it performs well or not. Instead, her skills lie in mythmaking – the ability to convince people that Lady Gaga is worth thinking and talking about.

The persona of Lady Gaga cannot possibly be real, and yet we are supposed to believe that it is. She seems primarily concerned with taking whichever course of action that will elicit the strongest reaction from the public, especially if that reaction is, “What the hell?” To further this aim, Lady Gaga does not break character. Ever.

Plenty of pop stars create personas for themselves that allow them to act in a manner that’s not particularly consistent with their public image – David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce, and Garth Brooks’ Chris Gaines immediately jump to mind – but each of these personas are grounded by the assurance that this is not the performer’s true self and instead a character. It seems that Lady Gaga is going for basically the same thing here, except Gaga takes this idea of the performer inhabiting the character and eliminates the base persona. She inhabits the construct of “Lady Gaga” pretty much all the time.

We never hear any news about Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, the name that appears on Gaga’s birth certificate – she gives interviews only as Lady Gaga (for example, once she claimed to an interviewer that bulimia is only a positive thing), and is never photographed by paparazzi in clothing that would be considered “normal,” because Lady Gaga does not wear normal clothes. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta wears normal clothes. But Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta does not go out in public, unlike, say, Britney Spears, who has absolutely zero qualms about being photographed at Rite-Aid while wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and then going onstage at a concert wearing an outfit that looks like it was designed by a perverted schizophrenic. There is an understood separation between “Britney Spears” the performer and Britney Spears the human being. With Lady Gaga, this is not the case. Lady Gaga is Lady Gaga all the time, because she is Lady Gaga.

If my logic seems circular, that’s because it is – a large portion of the Lady Gaga persona is rooted in her bizarre actions that seem arbitrary and pointless. Often these decisions are rooted in fashion, like the time she wore an outfit made completely out of Kermit the Frog heads. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a brilliant move. Because of Gaga’s pervasive media presence and public image, it’s extremely possible for a person to have a fully-formed opinion on Lady Gaga before they’ve heard one of her songs. People are more apt to purchase music from an artist in whom to they have become emotionally invested to the point that they have formulated an opinion about that artist, even if that opinion is negative. That’s just the way human beings work, and this is how Lady Gaga has sold four million albums throughout the world.

It is reductive, however, to assume that Lady Gaga is acting all crazy in just so she can sell records; I would say that Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta lives her life as a piece of performance art designed to “push boundaries” and “shift paradigms.” Certainly, she actively wrestles with sexual mores – she has spoken frankly and openly about her bisexuality, and her songs and music videos often deal with sex, though generally in the “sex as power brokering” sense with less of an emphasis upon the “sex as activity” sense.

At this point, I should probably talk about the whole Lady Gaga bisexual thing. By speaking on her bisexuality, she points to a continuum of sexuality when usually in the arena of pop music we’re dealing with a fairly firm split between gay and straight, which is pretty cool and definitely helps start a conversation about sexuality that needs to happen more often in pop. Additionally, there are debates floating around various corners of the internet (read: celebrity gossip blogs, various YouTube videos) over whether or not Lady Gaga is an intersexual.

Ultimately, whether or not our good friend Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta has both girl parts and boy parts is irrelevant. Her bisexuality and rumors about her gender do enough to position her as an ambassador for the LBTGQ community. Indeed, when she was awarded some random trophy at one of those MTV awards shows that tend to pop up every couple months, she gleefully exclaimed, “This is for God and the gays!” Yelling something like that tends to imply that you represent a group pretty hard.

Anyhoo, Lady Gaga understands that in the arena of pop music, women are often objectified by male performers. She essentially fights fire with fire by turning misogyny on its head and treating men as sexual objects in songs such as “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance.” “Poker Face” can be read as Gaga’s assertion of sexual dominance over a partner**, rendering him putty in her hands because of how awesomely hot and manipulative she is (or something).

Note her use of the word “bitch” self-referentially in the song “Bad Romance.” She refers to herself as a “free bitch” and essentially commands whomever the song is directed at to have sex with her, but she “don’t wanna be friends (Oh)” and will be having nothing to do with the subject of the song beyond the sexual relationship. In this song, the “bitch” has power. The “bitch” is in control. The “bitch” has confident agency over her own sexuality. In the world of Gaga, bitch is what we aim for.

I’m hitting about sixteen hundred words total here, so I think it’s about time wrap this puppy up by talking about her actual music. Now I understand that “taste” is subjective and probably bullshit at the end of the day, so I won’t hate on her music too much and instead put it this way: every one of Gaga’s songs are really big-sounding, dump pop songs that bring little very little that is sonically new to the table. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I leave to you. The point is that it often seems like more thought is being put into the marketing the brand of “Lady Gaga,” between her fashions, music videos, public image, etc. than the actual “music” of Lady Gaga. Which is more important? Does it matter? And if you buy into her image and then convince yourself that you like the music because of the image, then is there even a difference?

*I stand by all the criticism I have levied against her with the exception of “Poker Face.” That shit is fucking unimpeachable and is the aural equivalent of a carnival freakshow, and works precisely because it cultivates a sound as crazy as how Lady Gaga acts.

**Often it’s suggested (and I’m pretty sure this is perpetuated by Lady Gaga herself) that “Poker Face” is really about how L.G. is having sex with some guy while fantasizing about having sex with a girl, but there’s absolutely no way that you could ever draw this conclusion from the lyrics without having been told that this is what the song’s about. In my opinion, this fact renders this particular interpretation moot because you won’t find it unless you know to look for it, and even if you know to look for it, the evidence is pretty weak.