We're all Gagaists now!

The dark twin of Lady Gaga’s (in)famous debut was released just some weeks ago and the
feuilletons from both sides of the Atlantic are hardly holding back their gusto. Maybe there is
a nascent sub-genre on the way, the gagaism, a specific construction of praise and
proclamation for the up-and-coming artist, which is as almost interesting as Lady Gaga’s
actual music tracks. A few of these verbal pearls and attributes are: “anti-pop in high quality”,
“eccentric couture for the masses”, avenging “valkyrie” of pop, or “avatar of avant-garde
freako fashion”.

Noting elaborate language, I conclude that now it’s the time to unwrap some dusty books,
trying to find some hints for Gaga’s current triumph: and then there were the Dialectics of
Enlightenment, a book – authored by the almost-Marxist Theodor Adorno and his partner in
crime Max Horkheimer - which paved the way for contemporary cultural criticism through a
groundbreaking study on the post-war human condition in an intellectual void.

What does that have to do with Lady Gaga?

Well, a part of the treatise was a very harsh yet poignant critique of popular culture. The
philosophers did not hear Gaga’s beats at that time, but they were watching stereotypical
Hollywood movies, bad soap operas and were not all too proud of jazz as in comparison to
Mozart. Dealing with music, Adorno and Horkheimer had a rather cynic outlook, ascribing
pop properties as imitation, sameness, cyclical recurrence and complete lack of variation. I am
sure they would have loved to punch Gaga with a verbal sledgehammer due to her
approximately hundred prearranged harmonies. But is Gaga really a product made up on the
assembly line?

Lady Gaga's music is oversexed, overloaded and overdriven. This makes it the perfect
soundtrack for the end of a decade, which has started 1999 with Britney Spears' beat-hook-
driven schoolgirl pop debut and was carried through this era by various incarnations of the
holy Madonna, mother of pop.

Ten years later, the notion of a lascive music princess may have changed its garment, for she
is wearing stilettos, armor and weird geometrical costumes, but not its essential driving force.
Lady Gaga is awakening our Dionysian spirit; repeating seductive and hedonistic slogans all
over again with the aim of uniting our bodies so that they'll form a pyramid of ecstatic, faun-
like, lustdriven torsos within an endless bullet-time dance move. Lady Gaga is wearing some
avant-garde attire which is topped only by her ego and ample media presence and her
gagaesque live shows display an odd but intriguing mixture of baroque music sessions
directed by Marquis de Sade, typical rock 'n' roll profiling à la Queen or Kiss, intoxicated
Roman Saturnalia and the Futurist movement.

She is not very original and borrows a lot from Madonna and other emancipated female icons
of the decade like Gwen Stefani. Using the energy of "girl power" spread by the Spice Girls,
the lady is warming up the typical sound of the 80s, adding both 90s' beats and a 2000 electro-
chique.

Gaga's dancefloor anthems are also part of a musical conditioning which would have made
Pavlov proud. When I used to spend my time waiting for something, I was entangled in all
sorts of music: Rushing water with a buddhist undertone was the soundtrack in a dentist's
waiting room, gangster rap rhythms getting out a discman (the 90s!) or an iPOD marked an
integral part of a kiddo's coming-of-age which accompanied me several times during
busdrives to campus. And the cool university students in the coffee bar nodded rhythmically
to some new and thrilling indie band. My sojourn at the miami-esque Mediterranean island of
Malta, where I was composing my final paper for college, provided me with a new
background mix: The ecletic clubsound which could be heard everywhere - restaurant, taxi,
bus. Not a surprise that it was Gaga who constantly animated me to “just dance”. Apart from
checking out the local clubscene, where her voice was omnipresent almost every evening and
every night, I had seen Lady Gaga live when she performed at the "Isle of MTV", a concert
which proved the maybe sad but still undeniable fact of capitalism's marriage with mass
entertainment.

Of course Gaga's long shadow over Europe was not as formidable in depth or spanning as the
DJ mecca Ibiza on its heydays or Berlin’s influence on underground during the slow
emergence of the raving scene.

2008/2009 is one of the last witnesses to an era. Forget the classical DJ as critical MC or
techno guru. Instead, various discotheques are serving the mainstream now by sticking
electro-sharp, synthiebacked pumping needles into the sunburnt and hedonistically tired skins
of the generation with no name.

Switch the location. If it ain't Europe or America, try out Japan, Down Under, Zealand or the
Copacabana. Even the Russians got invaded. Gaga's tunes were the soundtrack for two
consecutive summers. What else did the silly seasons offer? Not much. Obama trumped
Hillary in the democratic primaries, a war in the Caucasus escalated and the G 8 countries
accentuated their trust in the market at the Tokyo summit. One year later, Obama struggled
with his health-care reform, the coup in Honduras compelled some folks to look up this
country on wikipedia and swine flu started its crusade on humans. And the Lady was stuck in
the middle.

Her transnational ego-brand is a benefit for the millions of tired souls on our planet. They
(just) dance, enjoy disco sticks, party, throw with sexy money or simply live for the fame with
the monstrous side of life hiding everywhere. Is it the post 9/11 generation which is simply
living the dream? Are they testifying the decline of the marked economy while the beat goes
on and echoes in the halls of the thousands of glamour islands around the world? Again I
check my books: Writing about the consumer of pop culture, Adorno and Horkheimer unmask
the pledges of entertainment and attest the culture industry an affinity to deceive its customers
by perpetually and eternally promising them an escape from reality, which will in fact, never
fully come true. And these shallow, hedonistic dreams of the post-Grungers may easily decay
as a house of cards. One may ask whether some people are already trapped in their self-
delusions of grandeur or whether they just wish to be (I don’t think every female teenager
wants to live in the playboy mansion for real, do they?). However, a fascination for the
sparkling f(l)ame remains.

I don't know.

But I know that there is yet another ingredient of Gaga’s show: A sexual symbolism which is
both different from the biaaatch-attitude of commercial rap and unattainable eroticism of
aloof and coldish beauty. Gaga is playing with her sexuality in her persona, lyrics and
performance, projecting (secret) desires on the public including transgender and sensual-
sapphic visuals and vice versa absorbing the audience’s expectations or needs in her own
synthesized world made up of partially bizarre and pornographic, but also typical girl-next-
door or hot cheerleader elements, furnished with a pinch of haute couture. Still, she changed
love for romance (What would Adorno say about the first single of “Fame Monster”, Bad
Romance. Guess the pal would worry more about the upgrade of Vista to Seven than the
downgrade of Love to Romance) and this trick may be a valve for the world’s audiences to
release their oppressed urges.

But yes, I know that Gaga's tunes are contagious, that her dance moves are paradoxically both
vulgar and sweet and that she is not your typical SoCal bimbo (she's a New Yorker). But I am
not feeling wholly ok to admit that there is something real about her, something behind the
surface. The respect for a musician may also depend on his or her dealings with the outside
world. As most celebrities coming from out of nowhere, she is building a cage or a shield,
though in her case it is a house, the "Haus of Gaga"; a popculture-intellectual taskforce
promoting the very Lady Gaga by using - for a pop singer - quite unusual brands as the
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, designer Donatella Versace or wacko artist Andy Warhol.
However this construct, with all its originality, does not amount to a real pattern, it is rather a
bling bling shape, mostly imitating (Adorno: Hear Hear!) though on a few occasions showing
the potential for own development. Her few instances of genius and character such as her
commitment to LGBT rights, some very special but modern form of emancipation, her
interest in socio-political issues and obviously her musical talent, are constantly threatened by
everyone's - thus also her - addiction to filthy lucre and the endless desire to celebrate victory,
success or mere existence. Serving the pleasure industry and self-promoting the “mechanical
reproduction of beauty” makes more sense than banging notes on some rusty piano (a view
Charlie Brown’s friend Schroeder would gladly support). And just for the record: Rilke had
something to say about the undisciplined “lord of desire” in his third Duino elegy: “To sing
the beloved is one thing, another, oh, that’s hidden guilty river-god of the blood.” Another
note: The Lady recorded a song with the Lord of Angst, Marilyn Manson….

Honestly, does it really matter how much millions Fame has been sold or in how many
countries it crushed the charts? Not really. But it can matter if we see Gaga performing in
Vietnam (!) amidst a beauty contest (call me gaga, but the lady in Vietnam is as recondite as
an alternative universe where Ho Chi Minh is jamming with Charlie Parker in a bar in
Alabama), being a musical top-act for the Paris Fashion Week (elitism, anyone?) or appearing
in Gossip Girl’s portrayal of youthfulness-mania. With a little help of my friends A. & H. I
deduce a predominance of the effect and the prevalence of details over the work itself in
Gaga’s art..or pop..or pop art: a condition which is manifesting in the arrogance of the self-
perceived ueber-artist. Just count the times when Lady Gaga is wearing sunglasses when
she’s interviewed inside or when she herself is verbally referencing Warhol and acting out her
intellectualism. And her fans are happy to gulp brainfood of fancy artists or writers. I wonder
though who will really look them up in a lexicon. Or wikipedia for that matter.

Playing the barbie card helps the commerce and gives new material to curious critics, but is
still too plastic for wholehearted seriousness. Moreover, our zeitgeist makes the classification
of a statement/action (which may appear at first sight as superficial or just dumb) as irony
highly fashionable. Thus, we run the risk of selling a surprising, shocking or just plain silly
element of culture, immediately under the disguise of art. Flamboyance is seen as deliberate,
exaggeration as ironic. But what remains after all this, what is the kernel of the brute?

I don’t know.

That's why Gaga will be always Gaga; she will gain new inspiration and create some form of
a techno-poppy-dance-hyper-hybrid surrounded by a cloud of astonishing superstructure via
an interesting approach. She has a flair for the sound of our time and she’s putting us a
newoldish aesthetic so that finally, we can forget about the weight of the world when we enter
a club and see the flashing lights. She knows it best, as she said, "we're plastic but we still
have fun".