The Fame Chimera

I’ve recently been wrestling with Lady Gaga’s place in music, art and media culture.
When I first heard “Just Dance” on the radio, she just sounded of a piece with a slew of other dance and R&B acts bringing back the sounds of electroclash and anthemic trance. Akon was doing it; Britney, Fergie, Rihanna and Kanye too, so why were people touting her as the Next Big Thing?

Well, fast forward a year or so, and she really is everywhere. She’s now a sensation; not just another pop star, either, but an icon. An Artist. She now commands droves of faithful followers who have found expression and validation in her songs and videos.

Of course, it’s still too early to really get a hold on Gaga’s impact on our culture; she’s only released one LP and one EP so far. She could either grow and develop her art, or rapidly disappear into “Where Are They Now?” specials.

But critics and tastemakers, not just the fickle masses, seem to think that she’s already added something important to our lives, and this is what I’ve been trying to figure out.

Her impact as a sort of folk sensation is pretty obvious. There are people who are largely ignorant of the contributions of past icons (like Bowie, Madonna, Grace Jones, even Marilyn Manson) to the cause of gender-fuckery, for whom Lady Gaga is a vital realization of their own socio-erotic truths. There are even people who are aware of Gaga’s visual and musical antecedents, and who laud her appropriations as reviving something they just really enjoy. They don’t mind that “Alejandro” sounds like a fusion of “Don’t Turn Around” by Ace of Base and “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna. In fact, they like it, since they were fans of those songs to begin with.

And she does bring some worthwhile conversations to mainstream attention, even if they have been culled from others’ past efforts. Unlike pretty much any pop star getting press today, Gaga consistently incorporates gay iconography into her art. The Alejandro video, while riddled with stale art film clichés, does present male eroticism and unconventional dynamics of sexual dominance to an audience whose exposure to this stuff is otherwise limited to Katy Perry’s “Ur So Gay” and “I Kissed a Girl.” So that’s something to be said.

But what about the crowd that isn’t ignorant of the past few decades? It’s fine to say that Gaga is a new medium to spread (revive) ideas of postmodernism and subversion to the larger public. But isn’t that more opportunism on her part than creating something new? Or not even new—creating something expressive, rather than something strategized and calculated?

For me, that opportunism really does stand out. Gaga talks a lot about her music as being purely for expression, and also how it’s deeply informed by her love of the avant-garde. Her most-cited heroes are Warhol and Bowie, which makes her sound pretty enticing, at least in writing. So if this is the case, why is her music so smooth and readily digestible?

Bowie took sounds from various underground sources and fashioned songs that were both subversive and accessible, while Gaga is taking sounds from early 90’s Euro Pop, Alice DeeJay, and Madonna. If she wants to use Bowie as an influence, she should try harder. There are plenty of other acts to take inspiration from, both pop (Bat for Lashes, Patrick Wolf, Cocorosie, Antony & the Johnsons, the Knife, Crystal Castles) and avant-garde (Matmos, Xiu Xiu, Soap&Skin, Scott Walker, Animal Collective). Get cracking, Ga.

As for Warhol, he completely restructured the ideals of the art world to exalt the banal and the ephemeral alongside works of complexity and sophistication. Maybe there’s more to it, but I’m guessing that this has mainly served to inform her assertion that Pop Music can be Important Art. Or maybe this very blog entry is feeding into her ulterior motive: to have the world wrestle with the meaning of her art, and of contemporary art in general. But to me, that’s just cheap. Such talk comes with any pop star who is labeled (by themselves or others) as Important. See Eminem, Marilyn Manson, Kanye West and, yes, Madonna, for similar conversations.

Perhaps, then, it’s not her form that’s important, it’s her content. Which sounds true, if you ever hear her explanations of her songs (Pokerface is apparently about her imagining sex with a woman while mounting her man). This approach would be a lot more powerful if the meanings could be extracted without her explanations, though. Left alone, they just sound like vapidly opaque pop song lyrics. Perhaps a particularly vigilant sophisto can glean some of these “true” intentions, but there’s no way a typical pop fan is gonna catch that stuff. And that severely undercuts any subversive potential of her songs.

No, I think as she stands, Lady Gaga is perhaps subversive in image only. Smooth, friendly sounds supporting videos and photos that startle and titillate the uninitiated, and perhaps reassure the already-initiated that wider acceptance is just around the corner. Perhaps her sound will eventually evolve into something more challenging, but I’m pretty sure that when Gaga mentions the avant-garde, she’s referring only to fashion, and not to music. Her earliest videos (two years before The Fame) show her immersed in the sounds of Norah Jones and Vanessa Carlton. Something tells me that Madonna and Alice DeeJay is about as edgy as she’ll be able to conjure.

I’d love to be proven wrong, though. I may be a skeptic, but I’m certainly not a hater. I wish all the best for the Lady. May she eventually turn her fame into a monster that actually wreaks some havoc upon our culture.

Or at least find some more interesting artists to copy.