Lady Gaga is a problem of America’s associative identity. She isn’t just silly or flamboyant. She, with every action, shows more strongly how much a problem we have with ourselves. Now that the fanfare from her new album has died down, let’s take a look at the phenomenon we’ve just experienced and the real ugliness it shows about our grip on the world.
David Shields, in his new book Reality Hunger, takes a hard look at the art humans create and the relationship that art holds to perceivable reality. It’s his assertion that man had no sooner started carving buffalo onto cave walls and writing receipts for grain than he started adding his own perception of reality. It’s every artist and writer’s unstoppable desire to bring their idea of reality into popular belief.
All animals fight for physical territory. Mankind fights for intellectual sway.
Lady Gaga fans, take a hard look at her body of work/art/action, and tell me what on earth you think she’s trying to accomplish. It’s well-known that she “wants to be the next Madonna”, or that she “wants to be world famous”. Fine, all animals fight for their time in the sun… but it’s because they have something better than those around them, because they bring something original and undeniable.
There is not one ounce of art in Lady Gaga. Her music is bad, rehashed Ibiza Pop glittered with Casio keyboard tchotchke nostalgia. Her lyrics are beyond banal, and it doesn’t get any worse than it did in “Bad Romance”. Cheesy nihilism, bad rhyme technique, and teenage melodrama abandon sung to you by a girl in her twenties who somehow feels the need to lie about her age. “I want your horror, I want your design”…
Yeah, and I want to smoke Parliaments, hang out at R Bar, and throw up on my H&M blouse on the cab ride home. Real gritty stuff, Gaga.
Let’s compare Lady Gaga’s reality-application to that of the other young female stars of the moment… Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Too many music writers try and draw a compare/contrast between Beyonce and Taylor. Nothing could be more moot. They’re telling the same story from different sides of the country. Swift, while nauseatingly innocent, connects with middle-American white girls… connecting their fairy tale dreams with high school politics. Beyonce sings to street-wary women, not necessarily black, who feel that men are immature and untrustworthy game-players. The moral is that womanly strength will win the day.
Lady Gaga sings to…
There’s the problem. She sings to your denial that you don’t know who you are, and hopes to sweet fucking Christ that you don’t try and figure that question out. She encourages nothing, asks nothing, suggests nothing, and having left your intellect safely tucked in its crib, doesn’t dare even challenge your ears.
For the lady that wears a dress made out of a thousand Kermit the Frog dolls, she sure has boring music. As M.I.A. said, “None of her music is reflective of how weird she thinks she is, or how weird she wants to be.”
Her fans have no relatable reason to like her. Read fan tributes on YouTube or other Internet forums. No one gives reasons that she’s great… they just explode with unwavering fandom. A fandom that wouldn’t exist without some kind of deep, personal connection.
So what is it? What does she bring? Clothes that aren’t forward-thinking or even artistic… Music that isn’t forward-thinking or even artistic… and nothing but lies about who she really is. Her age is a lie, her name is a lie, her origins were lies, her reasons for writing music are lies.
Her fans don’t care. They’re lonely nobodies, who’ve latched on nails deep to the idea that being someone famous and being notable does not have to include personal development or growth.
There is no man behind the curtain. No, really there isn’t. There’s just an incredibly lonely America, wondering who will hold its hair when it throws up.