#0468sva – The World of Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is a teen (and post-teen) idol, whose recordings are bestsellers and whose videos are watched by tens of millions.  Why does her music and message resonate so powerfully with the younger generation?

Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter with almost eleven and a half million followers.  The blogging Tumblr crashed when she launched her own blog there; when her album was released on Amazon, she crashed that site.  U.S. sales of her Born This Way album the first week of release were above the million mark, and most of those purchases were digital.

At this moment, Lady Gaga is one of the most powerful women in the world, and the most powerful in music.  In only a handful of years, she has generated the kind of loyal fan base that other artists take decades to form.

Lady Gaga’s narrative speaks of freedom from repression, but for Gaga repression is the contraints that society puts on individuals, and freedom is being yourself, becoming a star, and expressing yourself.  Gaga recasts the sturggle for freedom from the social and political realms to the individualist and the therapeutic.  Gaga’s world is one where freedom is not the opportunity to vote, live, and work in peace, free from oppression.  Rather freedom is the opportunity to sleep with whom you want, to take drugs, or to be interviewed by Anderson Cooper in your underwear with a prop saw in your hand.  For Gaga, this transgressive approach to art and life is a way of conquering past hurts, rummaging through the history of popular culture therapeutically salvific.  Gaga comments, “I find freedom in my ability to transform and liberate myself (and others) with art and style—because those are the things that freed me from my sadness, from the social scars.”

What is the fount of Gaga’s sadness?  What created her social scars?  Gaga points to a painful breakup with a past boyfriend, the death of her grandfather, and the bullying she experienced in high school.  While we don’t want to denigrate any of these experiences, they are hardly earth-shattering tragedies.  Such social scars are made even more ironic once one considers that Gaga stands as the current queen of American popular music, an art form whose roots are born out of the pain of the African American experience.  Gaga is no Billie Holiday.  She is instead, a young woman from an upper-middle class Manhattan family, who attended the same private school as Nikki and Paris Hilton. Gaga’s high school classmates have disputed her claims of isolation and bullying, noting she was popular and successful. Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” fused African American social exclusion with her own personal pain to create a sublime moment where American popular music became both high art and social protest.  Gaga, is a far more calculated move, also attempts to do the same: to move into the world  of high art and to articulate her audience’s pain.  Gaga’s sadnesses, however, are typical upper-middle class woes, but that is the point—they are accessible to those who buy her music and her message.

Gaga’s therapeutic message seems at odds with the visuals of her art.  On one hand you have the Gaga persona of a polite young woman on Good Morning Ameria encouraging young people who are being bullied to believe in themselves and pursue their dreams.  On the other hand, we have the Gaga persona appearing on stage and in music videos blending images of sex, death, and violence.  Cultural critic Camille Paglia speculates that Gaga represents the death of sex, noting, “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 strangley antiseptic, so stripped of geniune eroticism have become the icon of her generation?  Can it be that Gaga represents the exhaused end of the sexual revolution?

 

I am not sure that Gaga represents the death of sex.  Rather I  think that her art resonates with a generation whose worldview is shaped by a torrent of media in which sex and violence are inextricalby linked.  Gaga’s music and art is designed for a generation for whom sexual abuse is the norm and hardcore pornography is part of the wallpaper of everyday life.  These teens and young adults inhabit a world in which sex is no longer just about overexcited teenage hormones, but rather is an avenue toward social power.  Gaga resonates with those navigating gender confusion, sexual dysfunction, the reality of absent parents, and who face the spector of self-harm.  The illogical disconnect between Gaga’s feel-good therapeutic message on daytime TV and the Dionysian themes of her performance art makes perfect sense to a conflicted generation who some days want to reach for the stars and other days just want to lie in the gutter, wasted.

—Mark Sayers, Senior Pastor of Red Church, Melbourne, Australia

–excerpted from Christian Research Journal, Vol 34, No.6/2011

Administrator’s Note: This is an explict video that should not be viewed by children.  I am posting it to give a true represention of Lady Gaga’s art and music.  For many adults this will be shocking.  Remember Lady Gaga is the “Queen of American Pop” music and may be influencing your children or grandchildren.  The song she sings on this video, “Born This Way”,  is proclaiming her message of  “sexual freedom.”  Please listen to the lyrics closely.

This is posted for educational purposes only.