It’s Been Done
link Lady Gaga and the death of sex | The Sunday Times.
Most people would profess not to care for the shtick and move on. Not Camille Paglia, a person you do not want writing critiques of you. Ms. Paglia, for those not familiar with her writings, is a teacher, author and social critic who is quite influential among intellectuals and liberals. However, despite writing articles that appear in Salon Magazine, one could hardly describe her as a liberal. She can write opinions that are divergent from the typical liberal mindset and has been known to voice opinions quite in contrast to them. Though many conservatives may not agree with many of her views, they are insightful, original and thought provoking. It would be unfair to categorize her as a liberal, she is independent and iconoclastic in her views.
So when she decides to take the scalpel to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon, it’s not as a music critic but as a culture critic. At last someone more qualified than yours truly, has dared to come out and declare what I’m sure has been on the minds of many. Lady Gaga? We don’t get it. Banal music aside, the most interesting thing she had to say was not about Lady Gaga per se, it was this comment:
“…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. 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…”
I have a simpler, less intellectually embossed version of this. It’s been done. The originality and honesty of musical artists appears now to have been replaced by images and personas that are packaged and marketed according to successful formulas created on an excel spreadsheet. Fame and exposure has taken precedence over talent as a measure of success in western society. When William Hung famously mangled a Ricky Martin song on American Idol years ago, he achieved not boos and the hook, but instant fame, fortune and a record deal! When you consider almost any ‘rock’ or pop band over the past 20 years, they could be interchangeable versions of each other. The long hair, dirty jeans and unkempt look is essentially a uniform for musicians. It’s as if band publicists all shopped at one rock star store like some LL Bean outlet to outfit their people. “Hey Irv, if you’re going to the Rock Store, could you pick up a few things for me from the new Keith Richard collection?”.
It’s almost impossible to think of any successful young female artist today that isn’t obliged to flout her sexuality and comeliness in the most overt ways in order to achieve popular success. If it’s not outrageous, it doesn’t capture media attention, if it doesn’t capture media attention, it’s not going to sell. The phenomenon of Lady Gaga is reminiscent of cars you’d see in Tijuana or Manila, garishly overdecorated vehicles which only happen to be cars. A lot of today’s acts are far from being edgy and original, in fact they are stereotypical and cliche. Any argument as to good or bad is doomed to endless inconclusive debate, but the biggest danger to ‘outrageous’ acts is not that they are bad, it’s that they are boring.
And don’t even start me on that hugely oxymoronic genre of rap music. Rap music has as much to do with Black sensibilities as Chop Suey does to Chinese food. We’ll visit this later.