.. And it is not enticing or alluring, and it does not give off any other sort of provocative yet attractive signals. It is just icky. But I am getting ahead of myself here…
I have gone through a bit of a weird trajectory with Lady Gaga. She might like that fact. At first I became familiar with her because of Poker Face. It was fucking everywhere. It pounded from clubs and from car doors where early-teen girls sang along in the passenger seat beside their mothers who held out a similar resistance to my own. Did they cave as I caved? I mean, I held out for a while.
‘This is really fucking banal, annoying shit,’ I would say, and others would nod and slug back their drinks in agreement.
‘When can we put something else on, something decent,’ somebody would say. Probably it was me, reaching for a Jane’s Addiction CD.
But then it began to catch in my head. Po-po-po-po / Po-po-poker-face. The beats, the rhythms, the various moments of catchy head-fuckery in each song began to snag on my brain like rusty hooks in deep-sea seaweed. It wasn’t long before I realised the bitch was actually clever musically, and ironically – in the actual sense of real irony. She was self-aware, and aware of her industry, and aware of what she was doing, and aware of the need for a shifting persona, of how to exploit her shifting persona and how to shift it further. We were never talking about Lady Gaga. We were talking about a creation, created by some woman who’s real name I still can’t remember, and perhaps therefore we were never even talking about that woman. But who knew which was which?
Then other songs came, and they snagged sooner, faster, harder.
Then there was Bad Romance. And the chorus in which the words ‘Ga Ga’ appear distinctly. And I thought, You’re just pushing your agenda a bit too far, you dirty whore. My gut feeling was even more drastic. I wanted to break something. Why? I can’t quite explain it. But I felt sold out by a woman I’d never wholly bought into in the first place.
(I have never and would never buy any one of her CDs – or download any tracks, if that’s less outdated than purchasing Compact Discs).
But it was a bit like being castrated moments before full and proper copulation. In a subtle way, with a quick flick of the knife, while she grinned, flicking her tongue like a snake and also like a sexy, expensive hooker.
Without the make-up and those extravagant and artful outfits I believe she is very plain to look at.
And then there was this year’s Grammy’s. I saw one photo of her dressed like an outer space Barbie, and I thought, Wow! that whore bitch castrating she-devil might just lure me back into her day-glow cave, built from bricks of melted-down prosthetic limbs and mortared with ultra-refined pop sugar. Then I saw another photo and noted more certainly the distinctly mocking way in which she posed in parody of both her genre, the occasion, and her own (shifting) image, and I took another step toward that cave…
But then I saw this picture of her performance on stage. (I really don’t want to view any video footage, in which things move, move, move…). And I thought, This is the most disgusting piece of fish-mongering I have ever seen. She’s even wearing the scales to suit. I could smell her sad flange through my PC screen. Beyond my duty as a gay man, I was repulsed (and it was not just my duty as a gay man. It was my duty as human – no sexism intended – to be revolted).
But I am also strangely, weirdly, allured. It’s provocative but considered. Is it? It’s daring. Foolish? Hideous! But, again, daring! And again, it is a middle-finger to you filthy fuckers (yes, me too) judging from your safe and dull armchairs. And probably a middle-finger to you pre-, early-, mid-, late-, post-teens still buying into the shifting, ironic aesthetic of whatever you want to see.
But whence will arrive the crash, the big end, the mighty fall, the day that Gaga goes gaga?
Gagagaga / Gagagagaga.
