Camille Paglia on Gaga!

[Flashermac]

<< ...

 

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. [color:red]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.[/color]

 

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 [color:red]diva of déjà vu.[/color] 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.

 

... >>

 

 

 

This gal knows how to rant!

 

 

[unit731]

I don't know who she is.

 

When did Sonny and Cher break up?

[Flashermac]

When Cher went off with that Irish Bono guy.

 

 

[dave32]

Excellent piece. Might just have to read it again. Not kidding.

 

Ps. That Irish Bono guy comment was a joke, right? Just checking sir. BTW, beyond Daniel Craig kissing dudes down in Venice (LA), another big tabloid news item this summer was Sonny and Cher's daughter - Chaste or something - became a reverse-Katoey and had a female to male sex change.

 

City of Angels.

[chuckwoww]

It is a good article but why is Lady Gaga so popular? Ms. Paglia kinda answers her own questions.

[USVirgin]

That was a great excerpt, I'd like to read the whole article. The only song I know by her is the ubiquitous Poker Face, and I've been pretty fortunate to go through life without too much exposure to pop music (except for when I carpooled with a guy who insisted on playing his Madonna and Paula Abdul tapes on the days he drove ). I've never understood why people emphasize fashion over talent, in music. To me, most pop stars are no more talented than the karaoke singers now glorified on American Idol. Plenty of exceptions, though, the biggest being Michael Jackson.

[LizardKing]

Paglia once again misses the whole point. Lady GaGa IS a manufactured personality. Ms Germanotta is a very talented musician from NYU. After she found out that that she couldn't make money by being a classical musician, she created this persona to pay the bills. Good on her, I say. I love the fact she takes the piss out of pop culture and is making bank at the same time! Even better that few folks get the joke (and especially cunts like Paglia!).

[dave32]

Actually, that was the exact point of the piece. Her music is wholly derivative and a smug 'insider' joke. Talking loud ain't saying nothing as the buddha put it.

 

Taking the piss out of pop culture and making bank. Check. Artist who has done something meaningful: Goose Egg.

[dave32]

And Paglia was spot on in her observation that for a 'sex symbol,' she's one of the most antiseptic and unerotic female figures in the spotlight.

 

American pop culture used to be a great thing.

 

Nobody would make that case today. Even those making bank and taking the piss out of it probably harbor a little self-loathing for the crap they exude.

[LizardKing]

Actually, that was the exact point of the piece. Her music is wholly derivative and a smug 'insider' joke. Talking loud ain't saying nothing as the buddha put it.

 

I missed that bit of Paglia's analysis (reading it as a rag on a woman for not being feminist enough where I see her as the opposite), but I'll take your word for it cuz I don't want to be bothered to read it again.

 

Artist who has done something meaningful: Goose Egg.

She tried that and couldn't make a living -- how many can in that genre? Hey, we all sell out and whore ourselves to make a living. This is just Ms Germanotta's way, and she making a point while doing it. Bravo!

 

What's Paglia want, someone to stave while being "pure" because that's her definition of a "true artist?" Or be a successful businessperson? And besides, isn't the very definition of pop music "unmeaningful?"

 

I'd say she's this generation's Madonna -- music is nothing to write home about, but audacious over-the-top personality, brilliantly marketed with a big middle finger flying to the one's who deserve (but will never see) it.

 

Cheers,

LK -- not a fan of Gaga music, but am of the "fuck you" concept to society (including arrogant academics like Paglia who haven't been relevant since the early 80s)