Did you see what she...? What was she wearing???!!! Is she a...??? Glee!!!
We were away when Lady Gaga "exploded" onto the scene. From the beginning I decided not to like her. She wasn't my style--she was played on the radio, after all. I tried to stream some songs on iTunes, but they sounded quite fake. Then again, you only get 30 seconds of a song and, in Kenya, with all of the internet hiccups, those 30 seconds took well over two-minutes with buffering, lost connections, etc.
Somehow I ended up listening to a couple of her songs someplace in Jerusalem, where music of all sorts floods the streets and shops on a consistent basis. I wrote a Passover Haggadah while listening to The Fame Monster on repeat.
She's provocative, no doubt, but it doesn't seem empty and vacuous, unlike Ke$ha, whose appearance on American Idol left me offended at her opprobrium. Gaga's music videos push boundaries that we'd rather keep maintained. But I think she does it with a purpose. I think that Lady Gaga achieves in music and design what Andy Warhol achieved through art. Bu using the superficial, they actually point to something much deeper. By using over-exposure, they both mirror the absurdity in order to expose the absurdity in our own lives and culture. Warhol used death and cult of celebrity to expose our fetishes and consumerism. Gaga exposes something else, maybe something I'm not quite sure how to articulate; perhaps both the piety and hyper use and abuse of sex and people. There is something more going on here, to be sure and Gaga is actually saying something true.
Also, her name is a tribute (apparently) to Queen and their song "Radio Gaga", which is aces in my book.
The best Gaga cover, via Paste Magazine:
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