...Lady Gaga

First of all, I just want to state very clearly that I like the music of Lady Gaga, I really do. Her catchy melodies are guaranteed to get me up on the dance floor, and it’s been many an evening where I’ve unreservedly sang along to one of her songs at Karaoke (or three, or five...) The point is, Lady Gaga deserves a proper analysis, because despite her millions of fans and hugely popular records, not to mention her avant-garde style of dressing and shocking stage antics, Stefani Germanotta leaves me feeling a little cold. Is she an artist? Personally I have never regarded her as such. For me, her outfits and lyrics are both devoid of any meaning, and her way of speaking is both patronising and pretentious. She wants you to love her or hate her, but honestly, until she brings out another amazing record, I’m feeling kind of apathetic.

At first glance she seems to be very different to anything out there, a very unique and talented songwriter. However, my first point is: does her superficial uniqueness equate to groundbreaking musician? In a world of highly sexualised bimbos and bland Indie outfits, is a woman wearing nothing but meat really bringing anything fresh to the music scene? (Meat? Fresh? Oh forget it...) My second point: what exactly is so incredibly different about Lady Gaga, anyway? If we’re judging on music alone, then while being very good at writing catchy hooks, her songs are easily comparable to other female solo artists of this generation. Many have said that she is not merely emulating her (rather predictable) musical heroes, that she is blatantly copying them and churning it out as her own work. If it wasn’t for the eerily hypnotic videos and the laughable outfit based publicity stunts, her music would be seen as quite pedestrian, if particularly catchy. Let’s try and untangle the music from the image. She sings about fame, about parties, about social anxiety, topics that singers have covered many times since Elvis first picked up a microphone. The girl could leave the house in nothing but a piano key necktie and flippers, but until her lyrics are original and have a deeper meaning to them, then I’m not buying this ‘unique’ label. (Besides, we all know Madonna did it first and slightly better, even if nowadays her image is more comparable to the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.)

Lady Gaga also involves herself with issues that touch her heart, like the inequality of homosexuals, and...wait, that’s about it. But that’s admirable, right? Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that she has a huge gay following? Ok, too cynical. Anyone who helps the cause of other more marginalised people, whether for completely altruistic reasons or not, should be given some kudos. However. Dedicating Alejandro to her gay fans, when the vague lyrics seem to depict either a heterosexual relationship between a third party female and the listener (“’Cos she’s no good for you, no good for you”), or between herself and several third party males (“Don’t call my name / I’m not your babe”)? Confusing. It seems as though Lady Gaga can stand on a platform and preach about gay rights, and have homosexual males writhing provocatively in her videos, but touching lyrics about a normal, loving homosexual relationship? Unlikely.

Speaking of her fans, I read a really interesting article by the columnist Camille Paglia recently, which, although perhaps a little too critical for the sake of being controversial (ironic really, given the subject of her article) did raise some interesting points concerning Lady Gaga and her ‘Little Monsters’. To sum it up, Paglia claims that Lady Gaga treats her fans as though they were mentally damaged, and that only she can understand their problems and issues. From her article in The Sunday Times (12/10/10): “[Lady Gaga] constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair.” This troubles me. Removing taboos from both depression and mental illness is admirable, but glamorising it? Giving it a name that promotes inclusion? Anyway, as much as Lady Gaga protests that she herself was also an outsider, the reason she gives is superficial and probably untrue: all the girls were blonde at school, so her and her brunette hair didn’t fit in. And now she’s blonde. This privileged young woman, who went to a prestigious school in New York, who had support from loving parents every step of the way, who was bankrolled by music agencies to begin her career; how can she hold herself up as a beacon for emotionally unstable young people? How can she ever hope to reach these people, to really grab hold of their hearts and say, “I understand what you’re going through!” when her entire public persona appears to be false? She claims to love her fans more than any artist has ever done so in the entire history of pop music, yet she gives them nothing. They give her their adoration, souls, and money. She feeds them an elaborate network of lies and a false empathy, and to make matters worse, her music is also soulless, full of disconnected, unfeeling lyrics such as, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick!” Lady Gaga never has a relationship with men, she just fucks them. Fans, I see a pattern emerging.

To get back to my opening point though, contentious as it is, I personally have never respected Lady Gaga as an artist. Not in the meaning of a musician (which in itself is a completely dreadful employment of the word; not every painter is an artist, why is every singer?) but in the original meaning of ‘one who makes art’. Here is a woman who (literally) wears her politics on her sleeve, who claims that there is great meaning in everything that she does. This is clearly not true. Lady Gaga is a young woman who started off a semi-talented musician, but needed something to separate her from the Amy Winehouses and Katie Meluas of this world. Her outfits are not layered with deep philosophies; they are just increasingly more ugly and shocking than last week's mess. It wasn’t as if she started off with a narrative in her work, wearing designs that created a real artistic discussion. What she did is she started wearing quirky things to get noticed, and as her outfits escalated in insanity she gave them clichéd and clumsy meanings, as if that were her intention from the start. One day, will she finally run out of things to drape across her naked flesh? Will she then let her music speak for itself, or will she turn up at Heathrow airport, having murdered a bystander, their flesh wrapped around her shoulders, the dripping blood causing her 8 inch platform boots to slip on the floor, a protest against the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy? (See, I would consider myself fairly normal psychologically, but even I can come up with macabre bullshit. It’s not that hard. ) Seriously though, this stuff isn’t art. It wasn’t art when she ripped off glam rock, it wasn’t art when she moulded her hair into the shape of a button, and it isn’t art when she wears half a cow. It’s just excellent PR, which journalists lap up because they can’t be bothered to research real stories anymore.

Lady Gaga’s image is grotesque but no longer has the power to shock. Her music is catchy but soulless. And her persona is false, spouting contradictory rhetoric that uneducated teenagers lap up like she’s the first musician to ever philosophise about the music industry. I see her fans gang up on interviewers in comments on Youtube, screaming nonsense such as, “Don’t ask her about fake eyelashes, ask her about Freud!” Jesus. To be fair to Gaga, if her audiences are idiots then why not take them for a ride. You can’t get rich and famous without their pocket money, can you?

The Fame. Lady Gaga’s aim summed up in black and white. Unlike her hero, Andy Warhol, Lady Gaga could never make art out of her commercialism. It is fame, not high art, that she wants to achieve. Maybe to her, fame and art are the same thing.

...London

There I was, covered in straw, surrounded by various farmyard animals, my newborn skin shivering at its first contact with the northbound wind...

So maybe the circumstances of my birth aren't directly comparable to those of the Messiah, but they're close enough. I was born in a place outside of London, a scary, unknown patch of land that's rarely seen in our national media or discussed by our politicians, unless something really terrible happens there. That's right, I'm talking about the rest of the country. Ahem.

 I was born and raised in the East Midlands, in a place that could easily be described as both a post-industrial cesspit and a rural idyll. I'm not even kidding. My county has been used as a metaphor for shit in both Peep Show and In The Loop. You could be living in a town where, because of poorly cleared away Ironworks, your children are born deformed, where both the teenage birth rate and the obesity rate are higher than most of the town's young residents. Or alternatively, you could wake up every morning in your four-poster bed and smell the fresh country air as you make your way to the window and look down on the picturesque village below, knowing that in twenty years time most of the elderly villagers will have passed away to be replaced by commuting out-of-towners. 

To try and get back to my original point, what I'm trying to say is that I have lived in an underrepresented area of England since I was born, and living there has shaped me in ways that I can probably never fully articulate. Not only are my views on my own community affected, but also other areas, peoples, and ways of living. A person's view depends just as much on where they stand as where they're looking. In particular, living in a place like mine - which only really satisfies the elderly, the unimaginative, and the stressed - has strongly affected the esteem in which I hold our capital.

"A person's view depends just as much on where they stand as where they're looking."

Throughout my childhood, London was alternatively a frightening maze of dark alleyways housing only the scariest and deadliest criminals, and an Illyrian paradise with unforgettable characters at every turn, where every second is full of enjoyment, culture, and intrigue. In short, my friends and I thought it the most exciting place in the world, despite all the murders and stuff. Whatever it was, it wasn't the boring, nondescript town I'd grown up in. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that man can afford.” You can't blame a girl for having unrealistic expectations. 

It appears as though I couldn't shake these Utopian images of unrelenting amusement from my mind, as I chose a London university over a Northern one, despite having to settle for a Single Honours. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, there was a place along a yellow brick road (or in my case, the M1) that potentially held the key to all life's problems. However this is where the simile ends, as whereas Dorothy wanted to return to her provincial country life, I wanted to escape it. I never understood the idea behind programmes such as Escape to the Country. I was eighteen. I was fairly pragmatic, but still secretly believed that I would bump into famous people all the time (so far only Piers Morgan and Kate Thornton – where are the good ones hiding?) It seemed that there was more opportunity in London than the rest of the country put together. If Madonna can go from small town girl to Material Girl just by uprooting to the city, then surely anyone can? (Albeit with less scary upper arms.)

Here's the thing though: when you enter the Emerald City you can no longer see the whole, luminous image. You are no longer looking in, but looking out, and it changes your perception completely. I am still completely in love with this city, three years after moving here to study. Yet I know that I cannot shop every day, cannot party or go to the theatre every night: images of an 'Illyrian paradise' are superimposed with my daily life; buying bread and milk, paying bills, studying. I see more of the school library than I do of anything else; it took me over two years until I finally got round to visiting the national gallery. (Next time I'm planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery, somewhere I've been meaning to visit since I was a starry-eyed first year.) 

Don't get me wrong; I'm still a country girl in a bigger world. Having never witnessed first hand the true brutality of its streets, I still walk around London without a care in the world, unaware of what's around the corner. Having been brought up in a predominantly White area I'm still a little awkward and overly cautious when talking to people from a minority background. I also don't carry an A to Z, despite it being one of the most essential items a Londoner can carry. It's easy to fall into the naive mindset that as soon as you exit the Underground, your destination will be right in front of you. I can't help but wonder; can an outsider ever really understand this city? While my first hand experience of living here has changed my perceptions into something much more realistic, sometimes I feel like I am only skimming the surface. Is London a Utopia or a Dystopia, or can be it both? Is it different things at different times to different people? Will I too, at the age of fifty, tire of life and flee back to the countryside?

I think, despite the excitement and the thrills of this wonderful city, that deep down, my real happiness and contentment lies in the fact that at any time, I can click my red ruby heels (should that be Wellingtons?) and go back to the countryside anytime that I like. Perhaps me and Dorothy aren't so different after all.