[Vznvtthq]

I've not had a spare moment to come back to this thread, but I felt like resurrecting a favourite link from a couple of months back:

http://www.fatshionista.com/cms/inde...temid=69&p=412

a super-spot-on reading of Gaga's engagement with / challenge to the male gaze in the Alejandro video, and the Alejandro video as a response/companion text to / progression beyond Madonna's Express Yourself video.

[mobbemeatiedy]

This is a quick little tidbit I found online a few weeks ago about the song "Alejandro". It's fun to think that it could be true, but it's more than likely not. I don't think Gaga's that clever.


Alejandro means man’s defender and protector (God).

Fernando means ardent for peace (Jesus).

Roberto means bright or shining fame (Holy Spirit).

Babe is the same as Child.

Don’t call my name, don't call my name, God.

I’m not your child, I’m not your child, Jesus.

Don’t call my name, don't call my name, holy spirit.

God, just let me go.

- Lady Gaga

[tickerinet]

You know you want to.

This is your one-stop shopping for Gaga academic wank. Your own or someone else's.

Let us begin with an intro! Courtesy of Salon.com.

[XGoFivk7]

must be the wine I sponged but I can't figure out what this thread is about...

[TerriLS]

Long-winded and overly academic/reading too much into it interpretations of her work.

[XGoFivk7]

thanks

[tickerinet]

Long-winded and overly academic/reading too much into it interpretations of her work.

But in a good way! I think there is a big need for interpretation here, given the density of meaning in her imagery. For instance, the Alejandro video, I'd love to hear what people think the fuck is going on. Especially since we have a few humanities majors here. Sorry if it sounded sarcastic.

[Vznvtthq]

Gaga Studies! I don't have time to say anything now, but will wank massively in the near future.

[JesikaFlpk]

Nancy Bauer wrote an interesting piece on Gaga, feminism, Sartre, and Simone De Beauvoir for the New York Times The Stone blog: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...20/lady-power/

[Drugmachine]

There's a great little blog called Gaga Stigmata that posts all sorts of scholarly writings on Lady G.

http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/

[Trientoriciom]

Has Lady Gaga killed off sex? Top feminist claims biggest pop star on the planet is all style and no substance

Leading American feminist author Camille Paglia accuses Lady Gaga of being an 'asexual copycat' who carefully scripts her every move

Since leaping to fame two years ago, Lady Gaga has become one of the biggest popstars in the world with sell-out tours, No.1 songs and a league of fans.

But after managing to outshock yet again with her raw meat dress at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, it looks like the honeymoon with Gaga and her 'little monsters', as she likes to call her fans, may be beginning to wane.

Leading feminist author Camille Paglia, 63, has hit out at the singer's flamboyant, racy image - insisting her over-the-top sexuality is actually 'stripped of genuine eroticism'.

She cites the star's willingness to walk through an airport in yet another crazy outfit - as she did in New York last night - as an example of 'every public appearance... has been lavishly scripted in advance'.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...substance.html

here's an excerpt from the original article by paglia:


Lady Gaga and the death of sex

An erotic breaker of taboos or an asexual copycat? Camille Paglia, America's foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon

Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age. Since her rise, she has remained almost continually on tour. Hence, she is a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny. She is often pictured tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up and fright wig. Most of what she has said about herself has not been independently corroborated… “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”, and “I profusely lie” have been among Gaga’s pronouncements, but her fans swallow her line whole…

She constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair. “You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!” She earnestly tells them from the stage, while their cash ends up in her pockets. She told a magazine with messianic fervour: “I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.” She claims to have changed the lives of the disabled, thrilled by her jewelled parody crutches in the Paparazzi video.

Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that. Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.

Peeping dourly through all that tat is Gaga’s limited range of facial expressions. Her videos repeatedly thrust that blank, lugubrious face at the camera and us; it’s creepy and coercive. Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual. Going off to the gym in broad daylight, as Gaga recently did, dressed in a black bustier, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels isn’t sexy – it’s sexually dysfunctional.

Compare Gaga’s insipid songs, with their nursery-rhyme nonsense syllables, to the title and hypnotic refrain of the first Madonna song and video to bring her attention on MTV, Burning Up, with its elemental fire imagery and its then-shocking offer of fellatio. In place of Madonna’s valiant life force, what we find in Gaga is a disturbing trend towards mutilation and death…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

To read the rest of this explosive profile, including Paglia's debunking of comparisons to Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John and Andy Warhol, and to view a slideshow of photographs, visit the thesundaytimes.co.uk/magazine this Sunday

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...icle389697.ece

if somebody can find the whole article, i'd love to read it.

[Sdinozes]

I read that earlier this morning. Camille Paglia, IMO, is absolutely irrelevant...and she did a great job of supporting my opinion with that "article" that reads like an out-of-touch high school essay. Also, attacking someone because you don't think they pull off "sexy" is a bit misogynistic, don't you think?

[Trientoriciom]

mark simpson's response to the paglia wankery:


Mark Simpson's Love Letter To Lady Gaga

The Gaga backlash, which recently found itself a leader in Camille Paglia, was inevitable. It’s also misguided.

By Mark Simpson



My bitch is better than your bitch! And she wore that dress before yours did! My bitch would kick your bitch’s ass!

This is the kind of thing the older generation -- my generation -- has begun to say ever more loudly about the younger generation’s first bona fide superstar, Lady Gaga. David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Grace Jones, and—crossing ourselves and throwing salt over our shoulders—Madonna all did it years before Gaga, and so much better.

The world’s most famous gay Madonna fan, Camille Paglia, was recently given four pages in the U.K.’s The Sunday Times Magazine to say this, “demolishing” Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, as an “asexual, confected copycat who has seduced the Internet generation.” Paglia is a worthy critic indeed, and her mocking epithet “the diva of déjà vu” is bound to stick like chewing gum rubbed in a hated schoolgirl’s hair. But after reading her impassioned assault -- which, for all its fascinating history of female Hollywood stars, seemed to boil down to “she’s not Madonna, and I don’t fancy holding her meat purse” -- I found myself liking Lady Gaga more rather than less.

Paglia’s essay was further proof of Gaga’s importance. As I like to say to gay friends of a certain age who rail almost daily against Gaga on Facebook, for someone so shallow, so talentless, and so derivative she certainly seems to hold your attention. The passionate hatred Gaga provokes is all part of her remarkable potency. When was the last time pop music mattered? When was the last time you cared? Until Lady Gaga came along, just a couple years ago, pop seemed thoroughly pooped. Some nice tunes and haircuts here and there and some really excellent financial institution ad soundtracks, but really, who thought pop could ever trouble us again as a total art form?

Gaga has single-handedly resurrected pop. Or at least she’s made it seem like it’s alive. Maybe it’s a kind of galvanic motion -- those pop promos sometimes look like Helmut Newton zombie flicks -- but boy, this is shocking fun. And yes, her persona is something of a pint-size Bride of Frankenstein, assembled out of Photoshopped dead star body parts. But isn’t everyone nowadays?

Of course she’s not David Bowie or Madonna. It’s not 1972 or 1984. Instead, we’re a decade into a new, blank, digital century when creativity is curation. The pop past weighs heavily on our shoulders -- but Gaga wears it so lightly and sprightly on her tiny frame it’s inspiring. In the flickering, shape-shifting shape of Lady Gaga, tired old postmodernism never looked so frisky. And it turns out to be really good on the dance floor. The 21st century didn’t really get going, or have a decent soundtrack, until Ms. Germanotta came along with her Gagacious beats.

But the older generation’s resentful backlash against Lady Gaga -- how dare the kids think they have a proper star to speak for them! -- is well and truly underway. Paglia’s piece was well-timed and has already prompted a host of copycat columns around the world complaining about Gaga the tiresome copycat. It had to happen, of course. She is now so huge as to be completely unrivaled in pop cultural terms -- the most famous woman on the planet: too big and tasty a target for the press not to chew up.

That mesmerizing meat dress she wore to the MTV Video Music Awards -- where she picked up eight trophies, including Video of the Year for “Bad Romance” -- displayed a spooky kind of prescience. The inevitable lip-smacking Gaga backlash seems almost to be a predetermined part of the Gaga plot. And to those who like to tut and roll their eyes over the meat dress and intone “It’s been done before, dear,” please remind me again which year it was that a female artist, let alone the biggest artist in the world, accepted an MTV award, or any music award, dressed as a rib-eye?

Gaga “wants to have it both ways,” complained Paglia in The Sunday Times, “to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal.” But isn’t that what really great pop -- pop as a total art form -- tries to do? Put images and concepts into contexts they’re not supposed to inhabit? Like the pop charts? Isn’t that what Madonna at her best was doing? Yes, it’s probably ultimately a doomed project, but if there’s anything that approaches avant-garde for the masses, it’s that meat dress at the MTV awards, or that jaw-dropping video for “Bad Romance,” complete with smoking skeleton and sparking bra.

In the indignant roll call of the artists Gaga has “ripped off,” one who is rarely mentioned is the Australian-born performance artist Leigh Bowery, who died in 1994 of AIDS-related illnesses. Bowery defied gender, and pretty much any category you care to mention, with his stunning, hilarious, and terrifying body-morphing outfits, sometimes fashioned out of his own (ample) flesh. Like Gaga, he had a very keen sense of humor about what it means to be human and set out to sabotage conceptions of “sexiness.” Famously, he once lay on a divan in a shop window in a London art gallery preening himself for a week.

Gaga, however, is reclining in the shop window of the world. Paglia’s accusation that Gaga is “asexual” spectacularly miss the point that Gaga is postsexual. She’s post–the now boringly compulsorily “sexy” world that Madonna helped usher in, bullwhip in hand, which is now as burned-out as that “Bad Romance” skeleton. Gaga isn’t asexual or even particularly androgynous -- she’s transexy. She’s deliberately overexposing “sexiness,” making it as transparent as her skin sometimes seems to be. Instead of just rubbing herself up, she’s showing gender and sexuality up by taking them to grotesque extremes. Even if she sometimes looks like Dali doodling his ideal inflatable doll.

But I doubt any of this will persuade those of my generation who have decided to spoil the younger generation’s fun and let them know how ignorant they are. After all, that’s the only kind of fun we oldies have. Even if her detractors’ dreams came true and Lady Gaga was publicly burned at the stake in Central Park, they still wouldn’t be happy. “Oh, look at her!” they’d say, rolling their eyes. “She’s so tired! Joan of Arc did that in 1431. She had much better hips. And she did it in French!”
http://out.com/detail.asp?page=1&id=27486

[23InetrySypekek]

^^Brilliant piece!

[Buyemae]

Edit: These posts really make no sense without Belinda's posts.

[tickerinet]

Gaga's fucking Zizek.

Zizek's Gagawank

[Drugmachine]

Has bell hooks written anything on Gaga yet? I'm reading Outlaw Culture right now and I think she'd write excellently on Gaga.

[salomal-qask]

Has bell hooks written anything on Gaga yet? I'm reading Outlaw Culture right now and I think she'd write excellently on Gaga.

Well, she rips into Madonna in Black Looks for co-opting black culture (the essay is called "Plantation Mistress" or something). Since most of hooks's writing deals with race study, i don't see how Gaga would fit into her writings. Of course, she can have an opinion that isn't a critique of race. I'd be more interested in what Butler says about Gaga and gender and performance.

[Drugmachine]

In Outlaw Culture, she has an essay about Sex, how Madonna appropriates sexual subcultures and subverts their iconographies into a narrative of white, American, heterosexual colonization. It would be interesting to read her critique Gaga's imagery, given her own forays into fetish territory.

[mpegdvdclip]

I'd be more interested in what Butler says about Gaga and gender and performance.

I think (?) I'd like to hear what Butler thinks about Gaga, but at the same time, teaching Butler to undergrads who think that Gaga is THE EXAMPLE of performativity can be a quite frustrating enterprise. So I almost worry about adding fuel to that particular fire. Not to mention Gaga's pat turnaround from conceptualizing identity as a product of fame, celebrity culture, &co to this whole mantra of being "born this way" seems to me a bit contradictory - or if nothing else, more invested in claims of biological determinism than in what was, to me, a more interesting persona (persona-as-self).