Musings on Lady Gaga

I'm not quite as up on pop music as I used to be in my younger years, but I kept hearing Lady Gaga's music on the radio and reading her name bandied about in celebrity magazines--so I got curious. Her songs at first grated on me, but the more I heard them (especially Poker Face and Love Game) I started to love them. I saw her nutty performace on American Idol and was not sure if I thought she was a train wreck or brilliant. Either way, I was intrigued. I picked up an issue of Rolling Stone at the gym and read the cover feature on her, which was pretty fascinating (not an adjective I'd have expected to use). This link is just a slice of the article--the whole piece is worth a read, though, if you see the issue laying around.

Her entire persona, from her music to her fashion choices to the way she markets herself, is one massive piece of performance art. She compares her work to Andy Warhol's, which seems pretty on target (especially if you've read his book Popism). She's calculating, scarily self-aware, and highly ambitious about her career and the specific legacy she wants to leave on the music world. Watching her videos, they look like parodies of other pop starlets' videos but that's not how she intends them to be. You find yourself thinking, she can't be serious with this...but she is dead serious about perfecting the Pop Music Video. They aren't parodies--they are her own style, which has taken the genre to an absurd extreme that comes off as parody but is actually something new. Postmodernism at its best.

I also like this Slate article on her, especially this exerpt:

Gaga's highbrow bibliography and performance-art theatricality are key to this aura-building, but it's to her credit that she doesn't attempt a regal remove from the debased celebrity culture that trampled all over her favorite Mouseketeer. Instead, Gaga dives into the mud and wrestles with it. We see this in the canny way she plays off of the troubled legacy of her '90s teen-pop heroes. Whereas Britney debuted as a towheaded virgin whose career went on to encompass her public deflowering, Gaga debuted already-defiled: "Just Dance" is about stumbling drunkenly around a nightclub and turning your shirt inside out without knowing it. In this way, Gaga wrote her public meltdown into her very first single while remaining a deft guardian of her actual private life—a teasing pre-emptive strike. In "Poker Face," a celebration of mind games and bedroom power plays, and "Paparazzi," which compares love to stalkerish picture-hunting, Gaga plays a girl completely in control and completely comfortable among the dizzying, superficial signifiers of tabloid-era femininity.