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Bowie did "cold" with great intelligence (and better than anyone); Klaus Nomi did "plastic" with real tenderness; Marilyn Mansion did alienated and f***ed up with a genuine edge. GaGa is late to the game, and she hasn't brought anything new with her. I wouldn't mind so much, except that she's a global superstar, emblematic of her time.
I'm normally a fan of asexuality, but Gaga just makes it feel like an emotional flatline. The lady's got talent, she can sing and she can play, but there's something frigid about her.
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I thought the same about her before I decided to like her. She doesn't have the charismatic sparkle in her eyes like other "stars". Her music isn't sexual or sensual at all. It's mechanical and I feel much more akin to that than any romantic melodrama produced by her contemporaries, or Madonna, or Depeche Mode, or even Morrissey. I relate to GaGa personally second to Morrissey.
Her favorite philosopher is Rainer Maria Rilke and she identifies with his philosophical notion to solidarity and oneness. As you and I have noticed, no one can get really close to GaGa. The costumes, persona, everything is a meticulous, almost impenetrable armor. People do try to understand her, or more accurately dismantle and dissect her (which is only fitting since she is mechanical), but she undoubtedly has an emotional component too, and no one will ever understand that.
This was the nearest Gaga thread I could find - they've just had a lady on Channel 4 news drawing parallels between Gaga and Linder Sterling.
Anyway, I still maintain...that Gaga is a passing marketing fad, much like The Bay City Rollers, Bros, and countless other footnotes.
P.
I can't think of a writer more different from Lady Gaga than Rainer Maria Rilke.
Probably her fascination with his writing is some that she can childishly aspire to, so she can have his quotes tattooed on her arm. And she has tattoo of one his quotes. It's a beautiful selection really.
I know. It is lovely. It's from "Letters To A Young Poet".
I don't know what to make of Gaga. If I had to decide today I'd want her burned at the stake (and not televised or photographed, just matches, sticks, stake, and kerosene, all in an abandoned warehouse, thanks). But I'm willing to wait five years to make a final call on her. She's either way ahead of us or way behind. Hard to tell right now. I would like her to give up meat-bikinis though.
She doesn't register with me at all and it's impossible to form an opinion. She's something that other people talk about.
Not having cable and not listening to the radio really pays off sometimes.
She doesn't register with me at all and it's impossible to form an opinion. She's something that other people talk about.
Not having cable and not listening to the radio really pays off sometimes.
Lady GaGa :the death of sex
did anyone buy The Times today and catch the rest of this article by any chance? What did you think?
As a member of the generation she's describing—not a Gaga fan myself, but the peer of many—I see this as a vast oversimplification, both of Teens Today & of Gaga's potential appeal. You can't really fault her for failing to emote when emoting is furthest from her intent—or, at the very least, it seems in poor form to judge her in a category into which she hasn't placed herself.
I'm as frustrated with Gaga & her rocket-rise to stardom as anybody, but what I've read of Paglia's blustering gives a bad name to her detractors. Who knows—maybe the parts I can't read make up for it?
I can't think of a writer more different from Lady Gaga than Rainer Maria Rilke.
I think ultimately she IS vacuous because she is impossible to pin down. If i were to compare her with Morrissey, he succeeds by escaping determinate meaning in his 'persona' and the force of his lyrics by giving shape to a certain uncertainty about human interaction in modern life; and yet he exists in context - whether that be a romanticised mid-century working-class England or as a homeless flaneur...it is easy to say what he is, behind the subversion and misdirection in his art. GaGa on the hand is a blur...she appears to aspire to be an embodiment of 21st century glamour - an 'auto fact'...but she fails at this because she doesn't belong to any physical geography like, for example, Gilbert and George have sculpted themselves into London. She is virtual, available to all but meaningful to none because everything you can say about her, the opposite is also true. The mass of contradictions within Morrissey made him interesting because, bar perhaps Wilde, his cultural references were original within pop. Within GaGa, they are rehashes of previous concepts that were once forceful, controversial even, but In her hands become compressed, decontextualised and limp.