The Dubliner Magazine: Going Gaga

Every month our music editor, Rory O’Keeffe, takes aim at a different titan of Popworld. This month, it’s diminutive pop tartlet Lady Gaga. Let battle commence!

I’m getting this feeling of late that the Apocalypse has already happened and I somehow missed it. I look around and things feel mutated, worn out, a touch radioactive. I see people greet the world’s many horrors with jaded indifference; as if they’ve adjusted to it. And in a sure sign of societal collapse, the famous are now chosen by gladiatorial conquest. I must have missed something truly catastrophic. I bet it was cool.

Lady Gaga neatly illustrates this subtle mutation. She’s just wrong enough to be fascinating, grotesque but intriguing, like extreme plastic surgery in bright sunshine. Hard to look at, harder to look away. She understands this; she is of this modern world and knows the ways and desires of its inhabitants. Why else would she willingly, enthusiastically perpetuate the rumour that she has male genitalia?

She’s a figment of her own imagination, no question – we’ll deal with that in a moment. More importantly, she reflects our distorted, highly-polished world. She wishes to make it clear that she is a mutant, oh yes! She’s tasted the cocks and vaginas and narcotics – she’s got back story. Dark indulgences and sexual twitchiness are not unusual amongst pop people, nor accountants for that matter, and we all love a bit of strange. What makes me queasy is that her music is vacuum-packed and sterile, catchy but easily cured. Remove the persona, the costumes and the prominent crotch action, and the songs turn to glitter and blow away.

So where did it come from, this Gaga? We only have her own vague autobiographical whisperings: Catholic school, cocaine, teacup neurosis. We know that she was once a mousy teenage girl, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, of Italian-American ethnicity. If we pry into her past through the Venetian blinds of the Internet, we see her playing the piano on a talent show, unremarkable but endearing. You want to protect her from a world that is going to demand more than innocence and musical ability. But from there to here, there was metamorphosis, an unchecked cell division. There are shots of her performing in bars in her underwear, on the Lower East Side. Every pose screams “I am not normal. Observe my peculiarities. Be shocked,” yet she looks less than fully formed.

All that had changed by 2008 when Gaga released The Fame, a nearly instant pop monster, and since then her world has been a montage from a movie about a pop star on the rise. The singles ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Poker Face’ were perfectly produced and soon became a public nuisance – exactly as pop should be. But there was little to link the music with the Gaga persona. The only drug reference in her music is a general sense of cocaine numbness, detachment and sexless narcism, but not in an exciting way; not dangerous or exposed like great drug music can be. Her live show became conversely more and more sexual, extreme. It’s still all-ages cabaret and very self-conscious, but at times it gets close to spectacular.

So is Gaga drawing a protective cloak over her normality, or is she just a cynical fame-eater who’s clocked the cultural wasteland and knows what we want, if not what we need? I don’t know, and except for typing these words, I have not yet cared. And that’s it really. The Gaga can dress up and play fucked-up crazy all she wants – until she lets it in her music, she will be as disposable as fashion.

Lady Gaga plays the O2 on February 20th and 21st. theo2.ie

Comments

She deserves her 15 minutes - but just 15 minutes! Then, quickly change channels. Gaga is just another Non-Talent the media wants us to endure. They think if you serve crap enough times to people, [like fast food] people will want crap. Generally, the uncltured [and most are uncultured] will favor crap anytime. It doesn't challenge them.

Posted by: JCB | February 18, 2010 at 00:06