Immaterial Girl
Yesterday, I pleaded for two more days to finish talking about Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video—but I’m going to finish up here today instead.
The second visual plot within the first section of the “Bad Romance” video concerns what I call “Sailor Moon Gaga,” who is wrest from her bathtub by Russian supermodel kidnappers (while she’s wearing Lady Gaga designer headphones—they’re called “Heartbeats,” and they’re made by the high-end audio company Monster—so that, in fact, she’s wearing “little Monsters,” which is Gaga’s trademark locution for her fans). The third motif figures Gaga as the evil queen of Snow White, singing into her mirror, mirror on the wall: about this, I have nothing to say.
And the forth thread is the “real” Lady Gaga: no treatments, no stylization, little eye makeup, seemingly genuine emotion. But the “real” Lady Gaga footage: it’s based pretty closely on Sinéad O’Connor’s doe-eyed video for her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” making its “sincerity” somewhat problematic. While at first blush this footage seems to establish a kind of bedrock authenticity against which the other three performances are to be judged, we gradually become aware that it’s just a performance of sincerity, of vulnerable heartbroken femininity. It, too, is a kind of quotation.
So now I want to fast-forward, figuratively, to the bridge, where Gaga sings, “Walk, walk, fashion baby / Work it, move that thing, crazy.” So not so much a bridge, really, as a catwalk: “Bad Romance” had its world premier during Alexander McQueen’s show at last fall’s Paris Fashion Week. Comparisons of Gaga to Madonna are cheap and easy; Madonna is all over the extant criticism about Gaga. But I’m not imposing anything on the video by saying that at three-and-a-half minutes, Gaga begins to sound eerily like Madonna: it’s completely intentional. And not just any Madonna, but the Madonna of the 1990 single, “Vogue”; and the middle eight of “Bad Romance,” musically, is a pretty obvious theft from precisely that Madonna hit. In the video, Gaga slinks along in impossibly stiff brocade and 12-inch Alexander McQueen heels; when Madonna performed her version of “Vogue” at the MTV Video Music Awards, she was famously dressed as Marie Antoinette, all stiff corset, hoops, and bustle: hardly a club dancing outfit.
All of this begs the obvious and I think quite legitimate question: What makes Gaga’s work different than Madonna’s? In her Warren Beatty-Dick Tracy phase, Madonna repeatedly and very explicitly referenced Marilyn Monroe: indeed, nowhere more clearly than in the video for “Vogue.” In “Bad Romance,” on the other hand, Lady Gaga references the Madonna of “Vogue” referencing Marilyn: Madonna’s gesture is to present a mirror image, an impersonation, where Gaga’s is a mise-en-abîme, what Yeats described as “mirror on mirror mirrored.” It’s the difference between a Material Girl and an Immaterial Girl. There are, or were, Madonna-wannabes; there really aren’t Gaga-wannabes, though there are now well over a million of her “little monsters” following her on Twitter.
Madonna’s stage name is allusive, citational, some would say sacrilegious; Lady Gaga’s is intertextual and ironic. Everyone has pointed out that the Gaga’s “surname” comes from the Queen song “Radio Gaga”: she took not only the name, but shares with the Queen video a pronounced penchant to steal the imagery from Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. Metropolis concerns the creation of a modern-day female Frankenstein, a cyborg called “Maria,” a kind of machine-age Madonna: that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit trail I’m not going to run down right here. But the “Lady” part of Lady Gaga, no one talks about; it must have come in handy when she had her audience with Queen Elizabeth last December, but I actually think it might be a tip-of-the-hat to Madonna—whose stage name, of course, means “My Lady.”
To conclude, in terms of the question I was asked to address: I think the strongest argument in favor of Lady Gaga’s art is that she encourages an active mode of spectatorship that interrogates allusions, echoes, quotations—all the blockages, stoppages, opacities that interposes themselves between Gaga’s performance of femininity and some kind of transcendent, “natural” essence of femininity. And hers is not just a performance: it’s a parody, a pastiche. In other words: Lady Gaga is a female impersonator (hence the irony of persistent Internet rumors that she’s actually a hermaphrodite, or a drag queen). In Gaga’s world—and Madonna sometimes got close to this—the drag queen is normative, not aberrant. Gender is a drag; sex and sexuality, as Judith Butler and others have taught us, is a performance. In the song “Crush with Eyeliner”—which, like Jane’s Addiction’s signature song and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” is an ode to a transvestite—Michael Stipe sings: “We all invent ourselves and, uh / You know me.”
As I hope to have shown, or at least suggested, that’s all there if we’re willing to look at it: but the urgent question is, are we? The problematic politics of Lady Gaga has everything to do, I think, with her insidiously unmarked ironic performance style: what she’s taught us to call her “Pa-pa-pa-poker Face.”
Thank you so much for your insightful Blog. I do think there are some Lady GaGa wannabes, which I will not name here. Looking forward to her next release.
Hi Kevin–I’m trying to temper my “bah humbug” response (for which you have waning patience, I’m sure) by trying to understand what I’m missing when I read critical analysis like yours. So I have a couple of questions about this post. I’m not trying to nitpick but rather to fully understand what you are saying. So:
1) It seems to me that authorship is a big problem for any of the collaborative arts, but especially for this kind of multimedia pop performance. I gather that Gaga has a strong vision of what she wants to do, but is it fair to think of her as the author of the video you’re describing? You seem to do so implicitly in your post. But could it be that she is a performer in someone else’s art? In other words, maybe the director of the video is the “author” of the video; Gaga is following his or her lead. That makes her much less responsible for the aesthetics you describe.
2) I thought that trying to guess at authorial intention was a big no-no, but you seem to be doing just that. For example, you say that that one part of the video is based on a Sinead O’Connor video,another part is based on a Madonna video, and both are intentional. Now, in my world that would be a legit inference. But I understood that intentionality was irrelevant in the po-mo style of criticism: not only is it impossible to know the author’s intention, but that intention is unimportant. What matters is what’s on the “page.” What am I missing here?
On 1) I don’t think there’s any question but that Gaga is “auteur” on her videos–at least, everything I’ve read is pretty clear on this. I’m sure collaborators, including the director, would exert some influence–but the concept and its implementation are almost solely hers. On 2) I’m not sure that what you’re talking about actually comes down to intention? It’s the monkeys & Hamlet thing: if the “Bad Romance” video looks at one moment like “Vogue” (while at precisely the same moment, the song steals bars from the song), and at another moment, it’s a quotation from Sinead O’Connor: well, intention wouldn’t seem to me to have much bearing. I suppose one could argue that she had no idea: that we just get big bleed hunks of stolen Sinead video showing up in hers. But doesn’t that strain common sense? The boundaries between echo, allusion, quotation, etc., are somewhat fluid: but that’s not to say that intertextuality doesn’t exist? Or am I missing your point?
I guess what I’m confused about viz intentionality is this: part of the reason that you ascribe “auteur” status to Her G-ness is that she is smart and cultured enough to *consciously* bring all these influences to bear on her work. As opposed to their just being out there in the ether and ending up in her work just because they’re floating around in the culture. But it’s my understanding–and this may where I’m getting off track–that post-modernist criticism devalues intentionality. We can’t know what the artist intended and it’s not important anyway.
In your response, you say “intention wouldn’t seem to me to have much bearing,” But if we don’t include her intention in the equation, what makes her work special or unique? We could still admire the work, but we wouldn’t care much about who created it or why. We wouldn’t be talking about Lady G, but rather about a video that includes a performance by her.
I have a sneaking suspicion that part of this is a vocabulary problem. There may be a technical lit-crit meaning of intentionality that I don’t understand. It means something special in philosophy, I know, but I couldn’t tell you what.
I mean it in a pretty common-sense way. I *intend* to write these words, which reflect the thoughts I’m having right at the moment. These thoughts are influenced by many things, including the fact that I’m enjoying wasting Larry Ellison’s time and that I just had a double espresso. Of course, my intention is never an exact match with what I actually write. And the thoughts that drive my intention will change as the espresso wears off. But still, broadly speaking, I meant to say something and what I wrote is largely congruent with what I intended.
You mention the middle eight section of “Bad Romance”; what about the middle eight of “Vogue”? That section is note-for-note borrowed for Gaga’s “Dance in the Dark” in that both are spoken word shout-outs to a series of famous pop culture icons that sound nearly identical. You can take “The Fame Monster” and do the really annoying thing all music reviewers do when discussing a female musician’s album–each song strongly reminds the listener of some other musician. “Speechless” IS a Queen song, but it’s also a Gaga song.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Gaga’s blatant allusions to her musical influences. I think they, in a weird way, make her music acceptable to people who are embarrassed to like pop music. Her songs, particularly on The Fame Monster, are a throwback to famous musicians who, by 2010, are okay to like. You can say, “She can sing a Queen/David Bowie/Tori Amos/ABBA song!” or always fall back on, “She writes her own music/plays piano/is classically trained!” when explaining why you have both of her albums on your iPod. Contrast this with Ke$ha; I seriously believe the only real difference between Ke$ha and Gaga (music notwithstanding) is that Gaga wears kookier outfits. Ke$ha’s music, while possibly intertextual, isn’t at all a throwback. Some of her songs have noises and hooks and choruses so bizarre that they make Yoko Ono (who you recently discussed) sound like she’s singing “Row Row Row Your Boat.” She is pop music’s most avant-garde performer. And people DESPISE her.
Hey Rose! I’ll have to cop now to utter Ke$ha ignorance: I don’t even think I’ve heard “TiK ToC,” actually. So I have some homework to do. But aside from that, I think you’ve gone some way to answer Ken’s follow-up comment.