Encore du Gaga
Lady Gaga’s got nothing very new going on right now: a new, eagerly awaited album in the can, of course, but for now, a temporary lull in her frentetic output. And during that lull, I was asked by a student group on campus to address the question: “What, if anything, is new about Lady Gaga’s presentation of sex and sexuality?” I tried my best to answer via a close reading of a by now very familiar video, “Bad Romance.” And my answer—fifteen minutes in person, three days here on the blog—went like this:
I think the novelty and the importance of Lady Gaga’s work in this area lies in her shameless appropriation of other pop music and pop-culture tropes of female and queer sexuality. Her “originality”—always in quotation marks, because the very concept of originality seems a quaint, nostalgic remnant in her work—her “originality” consists of the confluence of the different personae she’s able to channel. Lady Gaga conforms precisely to Roland Barthes’s definition of a “text”: she is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”; she is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” As such, I believe she embodies great disruptive potential; but because the quotation marks around her appropriations are so faint as to be nearly invisible, it’s a problematic politics with very uncertain results. If [my student] Justine Selsing is here tonight—or even if she’s not—I need to thank her for prodding me to think about Lady Gaga in this context.
One could, in tedious school-teacher fashion, do a kind of genealogy of Gaga; the family tree would begin back with the earliest pseudonymous rock stars, like Screaming Lord Sutch, and would include the first pop star seemingly without a surname, Cher; glam rock’s great chameleon, David Bowie; of course Madonna, always Madonna, about whom more later; cyborg disco robot-queens like Grace Jones and Annie Lennox; contemporary pop chanteuses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguillera, or, going back a half-generation, Gwen Stefani. In her live performances, seated at the piano, Gaga resembles no one so much as a kind of insincere Tori Amos; and so on. If you were to watch fifteen minutes worth of Lady Gaga video, all these characters, and more, would make an appearance, as well as verbal and filmic allusions to her two favorite directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino. Indeed, Gaga’s most sophisticated videos bear a close resemblance to Tarantino’s work, in this respect: one comes to believe, based on the quotations, homages, allusions that one does recognize, that the work is entirely citational: there are only those quotations I recognize and those I don’t. Indeed a better, if more challenging, way to make this presentation would be for me to say nothing, but simply screen a Gaga video juxtaposed with all its sources. Her videos are a kind of visual-musical hypertext.
I thought maybe I’d get concrete here for a few minutes, and then close with some more airy generalities. I’d like us to look together at the video that earlier this year won seven MTV Video Music Awards and has to date been viewed about 314 million times on YouTube—pushing Gaga past Justin Bieber to become the first artist in history to top 1 billion views.
“Bad Romance” was one of the biggest songs of 2010. It topped the pop charts in nineteen countries; spent more than half the year on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart; and has sold over 4 million digital downloads in the U.S. According to Soundscan, it holds the record for most weekly radio plays in the 17-year history of Billboard’s Pop Songs radio airplay tally. If it felt, for a while, like it was everywhere: that’s because it was. So let’s watch the “Bad Romance” video:
I want to drill down now and do a quick, close reading of two sections of the video. The first is the “Bath Haus of GaGa” scene, which runs from thirteen seconds in, when Gaga pushes the play button on some kind of digital audio device and trips the song proper, until about the 2:00 minute mark. There are four distinct visual narratives in play here. The first motif figures zombies in white vinyl, rising up from their tanning-bed/graves; visually, they combine the gimp of Pulp Fiction with Max of Where the Wild Things Are. In terms of choreography, though, it’s pure Michael Jackson: many of the moves are stolen shamelessly from the 1982 Thriller video, the first music video to push against the time restraints of the AM radio pop song and make possible mini screen epics like Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” “Alejandro” and “Telephone.”
More tomorrow. . . .
Thank you, Kevin. It’s always nice to know I’m not crazy, at least about certain things. I don’t watch music videos much but I saw one of some guys singing Bad Romance. Entertaining but confusing enough to make me want to see the original. The entire time I watched, including the part where I started to get bored, I was stuck in 5 minutes of déja vu. I admire Lady Gaga as a force and was stunned by her depth during an interview with Barbara Walters (whose shallowness equally stunned me). But I can’t shake the feeling I’ve seen it all before.
I’d disagree only with the tonality of that last sentence: I feel like I’m seeing at all before “for the first time.” I find it fresh & new when she recycles old shit. But I’m a hard-line postmodernist that way.
I spend too much time with pompous composers
It is sad to me that I’m so easily bored by pop music. Lady Gaga is a thrill in so many ways and I’ve enjoyed her immensely. But (snooty composer crap) I, IV, V gets to me eventually. She definitely does it better than many, though. My opinion is worth every penny at even half the price!
In case you didn’t see it… http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1935205
THAT: is fantastic!
I’ll spare you my entirely predictable (and previously posted) views on Her Ladyship. But I will tell that at my daughter Beth Ann’s wedding in October, everyone (old folks, children, etc.) took part in a performance of the “Dinosaur Dance” to this tune. It was inspired by the amazing video that Kathy linked to, in fact. What’s more, even I participated–completely without the assistance of champagne, I hasten to add. Quite a sight it was, too.
Bonjour, si vous cherchez de l’actu sur lady gaga, voici le blog que vous attendiez… http://ladygagaz.wordpress.com