by Nick Cox
This is the second in a series of articles on women in popular music today; the first was about Ke$ha.
A common lament in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death last summer was that, at his peak, he had achieved a level of universal popularity that would be impossible today because of the fragmentation of popular culture in the Internet age. That seemed plausible enough at the time, but now I’m not so sure. Gaga, to be sure, is no MJ—after all, he was already one of the greatest musicians in the world at the age of nine. But she has still gotten more popular, more quickly, more thoroughly excluding nearly everyone else, than any pop star has in at least ten years. She is, without a doubt, “The One”—no one in music today can even begin to compete with her star stature, and we may have to go back almost as far as the King of Pop himself to find someone who does. It is almost as though, after he died, his spirit took up residence in her body in recompense for the opening slot on his tour that he promised her shortly before his death.
Regardless of whether or not you believe in this sort of quasi-reincarnation, Jackson’s death, just over a year ago, was right when Gaga really started happening. She had already appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that winter, but back then she was little more than a novelty act with a few decent hits—“Just Dance” and “Poker Face”—and a lot of weird outfits, and there was little reason to imagine that she’d have much of a future. But less than two weeks after Jackson died, “Paparazzi” dropped and it all started coming together. “Bad Romance” came out in mid-October, followed a month later by The Fame Monster, and all the while Gaga’s fame was growing inexorably. All of a sudden it seemed like she was all anyone wanted to talk about. Her name flowed more and more effortlessly off of people’s tongues, as though they had been saying it forever. More than anything else, this strange familiarity was the sign that Gaga had made it: by February it was like she had always been there—if anyone but her had kicked off the Grammys, it would have felt wrong. Six months earlier she had been little more than a novelty act, and already the world was inconceivable without her.
Gaga’s overwhelming popularity is something of an enigma. Last year, when she was clearly on the rise but had not yet taken over the world, most critics settled on the theory that people liked her because of the way she expressed, or maybe just epitomized, the image-obsessed world of the rich and famous. For some this was a good thing: this Entertainment Weekly blog praised her as a “guilty pleasure,” calling her “our modern guilt personified.” Others, like The New York Times, snarkily derided her for what they saw as nothing more than showy pretension without substance, and made fun of her “outfit made of bubbles”. Both camps were quick to draw the convenient comparison between her and Madonna, and even the pro-Gaga camp clearly did not take her all that seriously. Neither one could have guessed that in just a few months she would appear alongside Bill Clinton on the cover of Time magazine’s ”100 Most Influential People” issue.
But of course, she did. She also sold out three back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden in less than five minutes, made Barbara Walters’s annual “10 Most Fascinating People” list, and was one of the four people that Larry King selected to interview for his show’s anniversary week—the other three were LeBron James, Bill Gates, and President Obama. Around this time the silly rumor that she might have a penis gave way to the serious rumor that she might have a life-threatening autoimmune disease; if before people were eager to discover some freakish tidbit about her private life, now they were just concerned for her health. It is a testament to her popularity that, in today’s bloodthirsty culture of withering celebrity gossip, most people don’t even want to dig up any dirt on Gaga—they just want to be reassured that they won’t lose her.
The freak-of-the-week interpretation on which the critics had initially settled clearly needed revision, and they are still struggling to formulate a satisfactory explanation for Gaga’s enormity. The most coherent new interpretation, as well as the most immediately relevant to this blog, was offered last month by feminist philosopher and New York Times blogger Nancy Bauer. In an article entitled “Lady Power”, Bauer argues that Gaga’s appeal lies in the way the way she reflects and embodies the crisis of modern femininity. Young women today, she writes, are faced with a confounding contradiction about who they are and how they ought to behave in the world. On the one hand, they are assured, unlike previous generations of women, that “the world is basically [their] oyster.” But at the same time, they find that they must conform to increasingly high standards of sexual attractiveness if they want to “get the pearl.” Gaga, she says, “wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity,” but cautions, citing Simone de Beauvoir, against letting self-expression slide into self-objectification.
This interpretation is decent enough, but Bauer might be wrong to construe Gaga’s underclothed theatrics as “frank self-objectification.” Sure, she may be thin and well-proportioned, but by conventional standards her appearance is still far too strange to qualify her as a sex object—we probably won’t see her in Maxim. And this strangeness is precisely what gives her image its critical edge: she is just weird-looking enough to disrupt the socially-hardwired arousal reflex that most stars just slavishly replicate. She may not avoid self-objectification—that would be a lot to ask of any famous person—but she does manage to break apart the petrified equivalence of objectification and sexualization. She makes herself an object of the gaze without automatically becoming an object of desire, which I would say is a far greater accomplishment than somehow avoiding self-objectification altogether.
That being said, I also have a much more serious objection to Bauer’s analysis and to the party line on Gaga in general, which is that they tend to forgo any mention whatsoever of her music. This may not seem like a relevant issue for feminists, but it absolutely is: while we feel perfectly natural praising female pop stars for their canny self-presentation, their provocative or empowering public personas, and all the great things they are doing to subvert gender stereotypes, it seems for some reason that we almost always forget to praise them as musicians. Feminism may be most in its element when dealing with direct challenges to the gender norms that are its primary concern, but it should be careful not to act as though these direct challenges are all women are good for, and forget the ways in which they are not just challenging the norms but rising above them. By that token, feminists ought to consider the possibility that Gaga’s popularity might not have much of anything to do with feminism or gender per se. Her secret might just be that she’s really, really good; that would surely be a far greater victory for feminism.
In an interview with The Independent last year, Gaga related a story from early in her career. One night, after “a couple of drinks,” she was getting ready to play her set in front of an especially rowdy and inattentive audience. “It was a bunch of frat kids from the West Village,” she said, “and I couldn’t get them to shut up. I didn’t want to start singing while they were talking, so I got undressed. There I was sitting at the piano in my underwear. So they shut up.” It was at that moment, she said, “that Lady Gaga was born.” By taking her clothes off, she “made a real decision about the kind of pop artist [she] wanted to be. Because it was a performance art moment right there and then.”
I see the story of Gaga stripping down to her undies in order to secure her audience’s undivided attention as a microcosm of her entire career, one that illustrates what I find problematic about her reception so far. We should recall that, even though Gaga calls it, in hindsight, a “performance art moment,” all she meant to do at the time was to get the audience to shut up and listen to her music. It’s understandable that she would want to endow her drunken gambit with the dignity of Art, but I wonder if this may have ultimately led to some confusion, on the part of both her audience and herself, about what her art actually is.
In the years since, if there is one thing she has consistently done extraordinarily well, it is getting our attention, with her infinite crescendo of outlandish outfits and enormous music videos. One wonders, though, whether we might be paying attention to the wrong thing. Yes, she is great at getting our attention—but could it be that she is too great at it? Are we so transfixed by her attention-getting antics that we’ve forgotten to recognize her as the outstanding songwriter and musician that she’s become? Are we talking so loudly about her clothes that we can no longer hear her piano?
Nancy Bauer writes that Gaga “keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is.” Well, I’ve got a guess of my own: could it be that, underneath it all—the mask made of disco-ball and the sunglasses made of cigarettes and the bra made of M-16 rifles—this supposed feminist performance artist is really just a rock star? Could it be that simple? It would explain why she is currently “The One”—nothing but the fact that it’s been years since the world has seen a rock star as galvanizing as she is. Back when Michael Jackson held the crown, there were still plenty of other live contenders: Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, U2, just to name a few. If Gaga is alone, perhaps the fault lies with everyone else, for failing to measure up to her—she just had the good fortune of appearing in a musical dry spell.
If that fateful night in the downtown club has stayed with her all these years, keeping her from fully releasing her inner rock star, another performance from just the other day may have helped to exorcise that demon. Last Friday, after her first two sold-out shows at the Garden and before her third, she gave a performance for The Today Show that featured “You and I”, a song from her new album that she has debuted during her Monster Ball tour. An enormous departure from nearly all her previous songs, “You and I” is a 70s throwback that bucks any and all spurious Madonna comparisons—it sounds more like Elton John, or maybe even “Hey Jude”. And during her Today Show performance, she did something that could almost be construed as her take-my-clothes-off stunt in reverse. She started the song wearing a ridiculous pair of disco-ball sunglasses that made her look like a bug; but as she moved into the chorus, she took them off and threw them aside, as if to say “I don’t need these anymore—I’ve got your attention, and now I’m just gonna sing my song!”
“You and I” should silence any doubts that she is worthy to become, after a ten-year drought, the first great rock star of the new millennium: when I saw her play it at the Garden on Wednesday, her tight choreography flew briefly out the window, and for a few minutes she just sat down at the piano (again in her undies) and pounded away, first with her hands but then also with her heel and eventually with her ass, her band accompanying her all the while. Within the meticulously, sometimes overly staged spectacle of her live show, “You and I” was a burst of rock ‘n’ roll spontaneity that showed beyond a doubt what Gaga might be capable of if she realizes that, yes, she has our full and undivided attention, and she can feel free to do, and sing, whatever she wants—we’ll all listen, I promise.
Photo from Domain Barnyard’s Flickr.
