Lady Gaga and Fame of Monstrous Proportions

What is it about Lady Gaga that can so quickly divide a room? Love her or hate her, but you have to admit she is capable of provoking shockingly strong reactions. Why? Her enigmatic caricature sends the world into a tailspin, and, like any good mystery, we won’t rest until we understand her.

My first exposure to Lady Gaga came about a year and half ago when I saw some variation of this photo, featuring her famous Clara Bow lips. I thought to myself, “My she certainly has changed her look,” because I had mistaken her, after a passing glance, for Lady Sovereign. In my pop-music-free happy existence, my mind easily traded one female pop singer for another. They’re all the same. Just corporate-manufactured fodder for the masses, right? I would soon come to realize the error of my thinking.

Soon after that, some of my co-workers started making a big fuss over Lady Gaga. I heard her music because it was piped into the store, which was almost permanently tuned into whatever XM Station for "music liked only by 13-year old kids and clubgoers " was available. I could barely differentiate her songs from anything else that was playing. However, I sat up and took notice when she played the MTV Music Awards. I watched the video of her performance online and was absolutely riveted. Here was something different, something creative, something exciting. I started paying attention to her music more and heard the heartbeat of intelligent social commentary pulsing through it. Lady Gaga was finally on my radar.

The video for Bad Romance sealed my fate. I could barely pay attention to the song because I was so enthralled with the images, with the fashion, with high-style drama of it all. Yeah, maybe I’m just as much a sucker for shiny things as most girls, but again, there was a raw intelligence to her act that I simply couldn’t get enough of. Bad Romance had it in spades.

Here’s the thing about Gaga: she doesn’t wrap love and domestication in a shiny bow as a gift to adolescent girls. She is dangerous because she is unsentimental. She doesn’t pine for a savior or knight in shining armor; she is a knight in shining armor, saving true Feminine Power from the oversexualized, vapid, plastic doll-things that have been selling their souls for the last thirty years.

Think about it. Why do we want to pick apart her sexuality? What she said, in obvious jest, [I’m a hermaphrodite.] was uncritically accepted by America because, “Aha!” we finally had an explanation as to why she was So Weird, why we couldn’t pin her down with an easy label. She must have a penis! That explains everything. We needed to devalue her as a woman because, previous to the Gaga Phenomenon, the value of a celebrity lay only in their sex appeal (believe that it’s about their talent if you want, but that’s simply not true),. Yet, here she was contravening this notion by producing a currency that pretended to be about sex, and was, in reality, anything but. Her value lays in her art, not in what she has between her legs.

The patriarchy seethes at her power and her courage because it cannot explain it. Not even Madonna had that kind of effect because she was so scarily, aggressively sexual that our easy determination that we would “definitely fuck her” became the only role that we needed to assign to her anymore. No matter how many times she reinvented herself or had amazingly creative musical tours, she really had become all about sex, and nothing more. In my mind, Madonna was like John the Baptist, preparing the way for Lady Gaga. Without Madonna, Lady Gaga would not exist. However, Lady Gaga so easily eclipsed Madonna that she instantly rendered Madonna irrelevant.

The other thing that fascinates me about Lady Gaga is that she is not afraid to make herself ugly, disgusting or vulnerable. She plays to our curiosity about her private parts by putting them on full display (again, reclaiming Feminine Power because it was her choice and not a vain publicity stunt “oops, my skirt was too short” media grab for attention because her star was beginning to wane). She is willing to become a true fame monster, with pearl appliqués that looks like pustules, hideous makeup, bizarre costumes, claws, and masks. She wants to repulse you because she knows that repulsion can also operate like a fascination magnet. Humans have difficulty looking away from that which is ugly. She plays to that. She plans for it.

Then I read this manifesto that kind of shook up everything I was thinking - such that the comfortable notions I had of Lady Gaga's place in the pop culture world no longer held. Nicolas Bourriaud isn’t a philosopher. He is an art critic and French curator. However, he’s the guy that proclaimed the death of postmodernism (PoMo) and the birth of Altermodernism (AlterMo), so that makes him kind of important as far as cultural commentators go.

This is very interesting to me because recently I’ve been formulating this hare-brained idea that our society was re-experiencing Modernism. On nearly a global scale, young people have been echoing the actions and sentiments of the Lost Generation – those disillusioned with and living in rebellion of traditional society post World War I. Since I first recognized the resurgent pattern between modern youth and the Lost Generation, I have been waiting for our own brand of Eliots, Pounds, Loys, Hemingways and Fitzgeralds to emerge.

Modernism was a profound cultural movement in the West that was marked by pessimism, individualism, parataxis, an inability to accurately convey meaning through language, irony, symbolism, and “a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic.” Take the language of a Hemingway story or an Eliot poem where the frustration with the limitations of language is absolutely palpable. Take the themes of empty decadence, Hamlet-ititis (being frozen and unable to act), and the disparity between what is overtly stated and covertly expressed.

It is not the writers, artists and intellectuals behind Modernism that are responsible for its birth. It’s the generation of young people who lost themselves in drinking and sex and music (sound familiar?) because it’s the only way they knew how to cope with the decimation of their generation as a result of World War I. These people are your grandparents, the original Baby Boomers, and the progenitors of your parents. Has modernism affected your life? Yes. Are you reliving a version of it now? Perhaps.

Most of these “movements” are punctuated by war and the Iraq War has been the ellipses between PoMo and AlterMo. When I first read about AlterMo, I thought it was aligning itself with my aforementioned beliefs that we are experiencing a second-wave modernism. However, it appears that my perception of AlterMo was incorrect.  Bourriaud expressed AlterMo in different terms. From Wikipedia: “Altermodern, a compound word defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, is an attempt at branding art made in today's global context as a reaction against standardization and commercialism.”

Bourriaud writes,

If early twentieth-century Modernism is characterised as a broadly Western cultural phenomenon, and Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.

To further illustrate its meaning, Bourriaud outlines four main theses. AlterMo is:

1. The end of postmodernism.

2. Cultural hybridization.

3. Travelling as a new way to produce forms .

4. The expanding formats of art.

First, let me answer Bourriaud's manifesto by facetiously proposing my own movement. I’ll call it Alt-Altermodernism. It’s “Almost there, but not quite” – a variation of Altermodernism. It’s post-capitalist, but not yet anti-consumerist. We see the failings of capitalism, but we are unwilling to give up our desires for the latest iAccessory of the moment. We want to share in Bourriaud’s vision of a global culture, but ultimately, we are too skeptical of globalization to use it as a motivating factor for praxis. We’re done with postmodernism, but are we ready to move on to something else? Maybe, because of Lady Gaga, we are.

Douglas Haddow writes in the latest issue of Adbusters Magazine in response to Bourriaud’s assertion that “postmodernism is dead”:

Mr. [Kanye] West and his Murakami-grubbing, Jetson-worshipping, DaftPunking, Auto-Tuning barf parade brought post-modernism to its absurd conclusion, and now Gaga is nailing the coffin shut with her hypnotic transmedia brand of nihilistic marketing gimmicks…

[Lady Gaga’s] persona is so infectious because it is the most accurate reflection we have of capitalism’s mutagenic effects on the human form and psyche. Her music is just a pretense, a rationale for her celebrity. She is the bizarre Paris Hilton. The manipulation of capital is her true art, and the “Haus of Gaga” is not a fashion/performance collective but a new breed of PR firm.

Even more crucial is the cultlike passion that she inspires in her followers. It demonstrates how even long after its death, postmodernism’s specter will continue to beckon us toward the apocalyptic future that the “fame monster” wantonly desires.

I appreciate what he is saying, but I do not agree with it. Gaga  is beyond the realm of Postmodernism. Haddow asserts that she is “nailing the coffin shut,” but I don’t think she was the harbinger of Pomo’s death. Haddow says she will, “beckon us toward the apocalyptic future,” but as Lady Gaga has said herself, “the apocalypse has already happened.”  Haddow and his ilk may revel in her drama and the fact that she’s different, or they may call her a corporate marketing tool, but they are incorrect. They may say she exhibits fissiparous postmodern tendencies for multiple identities, or accuse her of being an empty, postmodern symbol or her message of being all about sex or selling shit. Meanwhile, she seditiously subverts the symbols and the labels and the hype. She may have endorsements and she may make money, but these are all means to an end. She is a reaction against standardization and commercialization. I believe that it’s not about the money for her. Her business savvy does not equate to being a soulless, corporate puppet. Here’s why: She is using revolution to sell her music, not her music to sell revolution.

The only thing Lady Gaga is selling is herself (and, herself as revolution). She knows exactly what she is and she impeccably performs her duty. Because of this, she is an Altermodern Messiah. I don’t think she ever set out to be an Altermodern Messiah, nor does my heaping intellectual praise have any affect on what she says or does. However, there is intent behind Lady Gaga’s actions.  She is a post-capitalist revolutionary who is brilliantly exploiting the failings of the system and who brilliantly manipulates the media. This self-awareness and self-referential brand of marketing is changing the way we think.

She is more mind and spirit than body. She is androgynous. She is hypnotic. She is an intellectual. She is threatening. She is cultural hybridization and the expanding format of the arts. She isn’t the embodiment of some PR machine. She has transcended the language we use to talk about celebrities, and become something else entirely.

That is why I am fascinated by her and intrigued by her. She has provoked me and challenged me. Even her banal lyrics have something reminiscent of Hemingway’s stilted prose to them. Take the lyrics to her latest opus, Telephone. They are about the breakdown of communication that is now inherent in society because of our codependent over-reliance on faulty technology. Furthermore, the song is about resentment toward the fact that we can constantly be accessed anytime, anywhere because of our cellphones, but our inability to live without one. These are good themes, and similarly intelligent themes can be found in lyrics to LoveGame, Paparazzi and Bad Romance.

Read what she says about her own music, “Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way. He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, to use something simple and shallow and take it to another planet. That's what I'm doing too. When you listen to a song like 'LoveGame,' is it communicating my soul to you? No ... I make soulless electronic pop.” Her music is inane, her lyrics are simple, and yet they have a message for anyone who cares to examine them on an intellectual level. Her art may be shallow, but she is not.

it