The Gaga reflex
After watching Lady Gaga’s videos on loop for over an hour, we were just about ready to go and poke her face. She’s late for the press con at Edsa Shangri-la, and the manga-ish costumes a few of the dedicated followers have put on were starting to wilt. Someone exclaimed, “She’s upstairs tweeting!” to which we were partly amused, partly annoyed. Finally she walked in, wearing a Turkish-like tall hat made out of hair, a khaki trench coat with a metallic corset, fingerless gloves, and signature disco shades. Her hair was in a short bob, streaked pink, and she seemed tired, or at least conserving her energy for the show, which was to be in a few hours.
The quick Q&A didn’t give us new insight into the artist — she parlayed her standard answers of being a passionate artist, that she liked dancing around in her underwear, and how her album “The Fame” is an invitation to the glamorous life, even if you can’t afford it: “It’s about intrinsic fame. It’s penniless, cameraless. There’s no agenda. I want everyone to feel like my friends in New York feel. We’re famous without anyone having to tell us we are... we grew up empowering ourselves as feminine beings, and lived our lives as if we were beautiful, dirty rich.”
This is where the disconnect happens. In magazine interviews, Lady Gaga comes off as quite intelligent and funny, a very self-confident, self-aware and sexually comfortable young woman. In person, she seems like a more articulate Paris Hilton (and I credit that to her being from New York). Her artistic conceit is that her entire performance is art, and she does have the chops to back it up — her singing, songwriting and dancing skills are on the spot, and she can even play the piano bent over in her panties, wearing a galaxy on her head. She has an art school background, and claims street cred for doing the whole seedy-bar self-promo thing before making it big, first writing music for others, then herself. Yet, it was almost like she came out of nowhere, her debut album quickly going the same color as her hair.
She emerged on the scene as a perfect piece of pop media, completely manufactured it seems, an inevitable late 2000s mashup of Gwen Stefani (the Italian-ness), Christina Aguilera (the voice), Pink (the audacity) and Britney Spears (the raunchiness). She’s actually more like a mainstream Peaches. Kanye has called her the Madonna of the generation, a rather hasty acclaim, since Madonna evolved, sometimes painfully, into what she is and we are witnessing only the first incarnation of Lady Gaga, and whether she can last a second or third round remains to be seen — she epitomizes everything that is acceptably outrageous, but is hardly subversive. But for the moment, she’s very, very interesting and has quite successfully taken everyone along for the ride.
In Rolling Stone she says there is no difference between Lady Gaga and Stefani Germanotta. Her life has always been about dressing up and being camera-ready, and she has meticulously perfected her craft. She grew up hanging outside TRL, in a generation that was all about image, in an era where reality and fiction got confused, in a city with multiple surfaces yet incredible depth. She was a rich kid, and probably had parental support when she decided to “slum it” in the New York club scene and the gay scene where she started to craft the Lady Gaga persona and sound, blending aspects of Bowie, Queen, and Cher into her look, but taking it into stratospheric, sometimes pyromaniacal, heights of fashion. So yes, she is both manufactured and she is not. She was born knowing how to work the pop machinery, and her contrivance actually passes as a form of genuine self-expression, her entire being, pure performance. She’s the show that never stops. But is it art?
The Paparazzi video is perhaps the best piece that showcases Lady Gaga’s particular strain of genius. We can’t attribute everything to her — stylists, fashion designers, makeup artists, directors and even wheelchair makers were all involved in creating the product. But as part of Lady Gaga’s branding, it’s a witty and well-executed music clip, with Helmut Newton homages, intense Mugleresque robocouture, and a hint of handicap fetishism àla Crash (the movie based on JG Ballard’s novel). As a statement on the mutually parasitic paparazzo-celebrity relationship it falls short, but then again a self-acknowledged fame-whore like Gaga isn’t really expected to make one.
Love her or hate her, Lady Gaga knows how to get the online forums burning over ridiculous things (blogs have claimed she’s admitted to being a hermaphrodite and even posted photographic evidence. Um, I think that’s a tampon string). She’ll wear a Kermit coat on German TV, make us consider dropping Dadaist references into our own wardrobe, and, unlike Britney and Paris, she actually wears underwear. Girl deserves some credit.
