Gaga Stigmata

Photo courtesy of MuuMuse.com

I’m rather tired of the media revering Lady Gaga’s performance art bravado and mindless exhibitionism. In a recently released interview with British music publication New Musical Express, M.I.A. revealed, in no uncertain terms, that she is fairly disgusted with the accolades Lady Gaga constantly receives. Though I share her sentiments, I would have augmented her statement to opine: “None of her music reflects how weird she so desperately tries to be or presently thinks she is. She models herself after Grace Jones and Madonna, but her musical catalog sounds like raucous and discordant Ibiza music.” Am I the only one who watches her endless, dizzying spectacles and feels utterly nauseous?

The 24-year-old dance-pop sibyl is such a work of entertainment engineering that giving her due as an artist brings with it a certain ruefulness, the sensation of being manipulated. Lady Gaga is so beyond any kind of embarrassment that she’s made mercantilism its own aesthetic. Not that I begrudge her the millions in album sales or the inevitable mantel full of Grammys, I just feel that the rampant obsession is overreaching.

She is the commodification of our own hysteria; the personification of her fans’ overrun imaginations and false realities. Lady Gaga is a product—her body and specter available for purchase and consumption through a range of media. Her music has taken a backseat to her visage. Her excellent voice, her classical training and her musical imaginativeness are all hindered by her vast inability to craft great songs.

The static notion of her celebrity is a figure of blind worship. Lady Gaga is the flywheel in an enormous piece of media-eating machinery. No other advert, print, video, blog or billboard has so thoroughly knitted itself into our consumerist culture. Ebola isn’t as viral. To all of her fans, she is an incendiary extravaganza of music, dance and performance art. I, however, fail to see why she is revered so highly as a pop musician when her music is sorely lacking.

Her performance constructs a constellation of ignorant ideologies. The temptation to deconstruct should be avoided. She embraces the sordidness of being a pop icon while making it part of her aesthetic. Though the media might laud her as being subversive and preeminent, I see her as being contrived and factitious. Just as Freud’s imposition of oedipal and hysterical narratives onto his patients did not yield tidy and conclusive results, the media’s exaggeration of Lady Gaga’s ostensible burlesque is far from the mark.

Read your pokerface? We can’t even see it any more under all that lace. Talent, she seems to say to her breathless female fans, is all well and good. But what it’s really all about is using your painted poker face to get yourself splashed onto TV screens.

Artifice, not music, is her chosen art form. Her admirers confer that it’s ironic. It’s postmodernistic. It’s Haus of Gaga, darling. Except that we’ve seen that conical bra before and thrilled at its subversiveness when Madonna wore it 20 years ago. A little pyrotechnics display tacked on just serves to emphasize its lack of cutting edge.

Photo courtesy of Collegian.psu.edu

Her message is crudely simplistic: that with the right amount of frightening self-belief and furious media savvy, ladies, you too can call yourself an artist while singing the lines: “We like boys in cars/ Boys, boys, boys buy us drinks in bars.” Lady Gaga properly demonstrates where being vacuous, incoherent and absent minded becomes a fashionable thing. Isn’t it rather ironic that she settled upon “Gaga” for her alias, as it is often the first sound emitted by babies when trying to imitate speech.

While Gaga continually reinvents her appearance, her music has been slow to evolve. Much has been made of her latest single, “Alejandro”, which sounds like a ripoff of Ace of Base’s 1993 hit, “Don’t Turn Around”. Its music video is a little too reminiscent of Madonna’s ’90s fare. It’s like walking by the neighborhood miscreant who is ranting and raving about how we’ll all be damned to hell while on your way to work. No need to stop and listen, he’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. A shiny veneer is all well and good, but a well-built product beneath it is what will truly stand the test of time.

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