I know. There are a gaggle of Lady Gaga haters out there. Some critiques that have been leveled against her: her music sucks, she’s too cerebral/self-aware, she’s a creation of the corporate marketing machine, she’s not doing anything new.
Me, I’m fascinated.
OK, so her music isn’t as interesting as her presentation, but “Bad Romance” is a pretty great song. And the video is complex, disturbing, self-referential, and sexy. I refer you to this excellent blow-by-blow analysis of the video’s (de)construction of feminine fame, as connected to Swedish poet Aase Berg’s latest book, With Deer, which I haven’t yet read but now very much want to.
(And then, for fun, check out a hilarious, homemade re-creation of the video.)
Yes, Lady Gaga’s cerebral. She’s smart and shrewd, which in my book is admirable. On a recent episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck (admission: I’m a huge NPR nerd), a caller named Jessica said she taught Gaga back when she was Stefani Germanotta and a freshman at NYU. Even then, Jessica said, Stephanie/Gaga was interested in what a 21st century pop artist would look like, how one might use technology, metaphor, and costume to delineate a new kind of pop icon.
Gaga is her own creation. She’s not the result of a corporate marketing plan ??? rather, she harnessed the machine to turn herself into exactly the star she wanted to be.
But is the creation that is Lady Gaga new? Cher, Madonna, and David Bowie are some of the icons that are often trotted out as having done what Gaga’s doing in terms of fashion and presentation (plus, their music’s better, the skeptics say).
Maybe. But there’s something about what Gaga’s doing with gender and sexuality that strikes me as quite unique. She is often awkward and often not particularly sexy.
In fact, it seems to me that she’s interested in exploring the destructive power of sex/sexiness. Her wild, wonderful, bizarre outfits focus attention on her body but not simply as an object of sexual consumption. Instead, her body becomes a site/act of creation and destruction at the same time.
She’s so conscious of the reflecting the consumptive power of the gaze ??? all her sunglasses/glasses/veils/hand gestures to her eyes seem indicative of this. You can look at me but you cannot see me, she seems to say. “Can’t read my poker face“”
(This makes me think, somewhat tangentially, of Amy King’s wild manifesto on Delirious Hem’s This is What A Feminist [Poet] Looks Like, specifically where she talks about the two kinds of poets ??? those who reflect and those who create. I’m thinking about how Gaga deflects rather than reflects, how she creates as she deconstructs.)
And then there’s all this chatter on the web about whether Lady Gaga is a “real” lady at all. She’s obviously not transgender, but the way she asserts her mostly un-curvy body as simultaneously sexy and dangerous causes great discomfort to people who want their starlets busty and ready to be taken.
The assumption that runs under the “Lady Gaga is a ???hermaphrodite’” discourse is that she can’t possibly be a real woman because she so aggressively displays her non-stereotypically sexy body.
As one commenter on the previously mentioned NPR show’s website wrote:
[S]he embodies a post-gender queer identity – that’s the way in which her performativity is so interesting – it speaks to the young generation who are also interested in pushing past labels of male/female/gay/straight/bi, and it’s in that way that’s she’s really a pop star of the 21st c[entury].
:: :: ::
To bring this post to a literary close“
My musings on Gaga led me to wonder if there was anyone in the literary world doing similar things in terms of flipping the script on gender, sexuality, queerness, the gaze, etc..
Thanks the wonders of social networking (Buzz? did we really need another?), I’ve gotten some suggestions and have started to compile a list, which might make it into another blog post at some time.
But there were two shoutouts for the poet Regie Cabico, and I thought, yes, of course!
Strikingly, there are huge differences in their ability to access fame. Gaga comes from a place of economic and racial privilege that allowed her to harness the media machine. While Cabico has gotten lots of grant monies, the nonprofit art world isn’t going to launch him into the spotlight that he deserves. And of course, there are also the different places that pop and poetry occupy in this society.
But Cabico and Gaga are working with themes of gender and sexuality in ways that excitingly transgress ??? and Cabico goes further than Gaga ever will in his discourses around race.
Certainly, there’s the performative aspect of Cabico’s work that holds the same kind force and power that Lady Gaga projects. It’s quite thrilling to be in the audience at a Cabico performance. If you have a chance to see him perform, don’t miss it!