Moz goes GaGa

[Worm]

I think that, these days, Shakespeare and Mozart are all of a color. A lot of the things I like are, to most of the people in my life. I like those things because I like them (I like my BlackBerry a lot, too), not because of how they make me look to others. I haven't constructed my identity from them, I pull them close to me because in them I see parts of myself. You could get all chicken-and-egg about it, I suppose, but I think the crux of it is that I, at least, am not actively trying to project an image. I dress plainly. I look corporate. Even my hairstyle, which is, on a personal level, an act of protest, is blandly trendy right now. I do not expect that people looking at me will be able to guess what I love and what makes me who I am. At most, I project an image of someone who is personally tidy, organized, serious, and fairly conservative. All of those things are true, but they're not defining characteristics.

GaGa would counter that the choices you make really do constitute "you", whether you realize it or not. Using rhetoric as a model, you can't actually separate form from content, though in many practical ways we all do it. The essence of style is one's ability to collapse the distinction. When GaGa demonstrates her sophistication and taste by donning a costume made entirely out of condoms, IUDs, tampons, and dildos, her stylistic choice is directly, if distantly, related to Oscar Wilde's comment that his primary goal in life was to live up to his blue china.

When we look at ourselves and identify the different roles we play, and all of the various rules and stylistic modes attached to each, we naturally organize a hierarchy of forms: in our minds, at the bottom are those forms which have little to do with our "real selves", let's say my "Hot Dog On A Stick" uniform, and at the top are those forms which are closest to our inner snowflake-self, let's say a tutu. We favor the top and grudgingly accept the bottom. But in truth we are exactly as we are meant to be-- we are exactly as capitalism wants us to be, which is protean, fungible, and permanently uprooted in all senses of the word. GaGa can thus be seen as a "genuine", fully interpellated subject, exhibiting a much greater level of self-awareness than you or I have.

If you're interested, I can refer you to a journal article about the delivery channels for pornography and the ownership structures of various media channels. Sickeningly interesting. In short: Britney Spears was absolutely "training porn."

Levande, Meredith. "Women, Pop Music, and Pornography."Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8.1 (2008): 293-321.

Of course she was training porn. She bears witness to a troubling hypothesis, which is that the notion of "female empowerment" through sexuality, a feminist idea, was skillfully hijacked by the patriarchy to re-entrench male domination by a more circuitous route.

Porn = Male Domination Of Women

Porn * Madonna = "Female empowerment"

Britney Spears + Female Empowerment = Socially Sanctioned Porn

Socially Sanctioned Porn = Socially Sanctioned Male Domination of Women

A bit circuitous but you get my drift. Hey, it's like money laundering, except with misogyny!

The final form of this is Britney Spears, Lady GaGa, and other quasi-feminist icons who blur the line between pop music and pornography, but it is also the everyday Kevin Smith heroine who resembles a Barbie doll but likes football, "Star Trek", and claims to know the secret weapon unlocks on Halo. Men are devious f***ers, aren't they?

 

[joe frady]

You sure do talk purty

 

[PregnantForTheLastTime]

GaGa would counter that the choices you make really do constitute "you", whether you realize it or not. Using rhetoric as a model, you can't actually separate form from content, though in many practical ways we all do it. The essence of style is one's ability to collapse the distinction. When GaGa demonstrates her sophistication and taste by donning a costume made entirely out of condoms, IUDs, tampons, and dildos, her stylistic choice is directly, if distantly, related to Oscar Wilde's comment that his primary goal in life was to live up to his blue china.

When we look at ourselves and identify the different roles we play, and all of the various rules and stylistic modes attached to each, we naturally organize a hierarchy of forms: in our minds, at the bottom are those forms which have little to do with our "real selves", let's say my "Hot Dog On A Stick" uniform, and at the top are those forms which are closest to our inner snowflake-self, let's say a tutu. We favor the top and grudgingly accept the bottom. But in truth we are exactly as we are meant to be-- we are exactly as capitalism wants us to be, which is protean, fungible, and permanently uprooted in all senses of the word. GaGa can thus be seen as a "genuine", fully interpellated subject, exhibiting a much greater level of self-awareness than you or I have.



Of course she was training porn. She bears witness to a troubling hypothesis, which is that the notion of "female empowerment" through sexuality, a feminist idea, was skillfully hijacked by the patriarchy to re-entrench male domination by a more circuitous route.

Porn = Male Domination Of Women

Porn * Madonna = "Female empowerment"

Britney Spears + Female Empowerment = Socially Sanctioned Porn

Socially Sanctioned Porn = Socially Sanctioned Male Domination of Women

A bit circuitous but you get my drift. Hey, it's like money laundering, except with misogyny!

The final form of this is Britney Spears, Lady GaGa, and other quasi-feminist icons who blur the line between pop music and pornography, but it is also the everyday Kevin Smith heroine who resembles a Barbie doll but likes football, "Star Trek", and claims to know the secret weapon unlocks on Halo. Men are devious f***ers, aren't they?

You work at Hot Dog on a Stick? No wonder you spend so much time on Solo. I thought my job was deadly dull.

WRT the porn, I'll summarize. Media conglomerates own many channels. They may own parts of record companies, they certainly own radio and tv stations, and the cable companies are also tied in. Pornography is highly profitable (I think we've all read the statistic that it's over 50% of ecommerce) and so is Pay-Per-View porn. A cable company with its fingers in tv and radio is highly motivated to promote the porn aesthetic across all forms of media, in order to drive customers toward the ultimate destination of (very discreet, very pricey) pay-per-view porn.

Promoting sexual liberation for women is both a valid and a risky cause: how can that be accomplished without benefiting men? Since our culture is so thoroughly locked into the male POV, it can't. We (women) all see ourselves via the male gaze.

I'm thinking of Madonna at her very sexiest: the video for True Blue. Frolicking in the waves, wearing her cropped blond hair and lots of red lipstick (Lipstick is a very sensual thing, if you've never worn it. It makes you very aware of your lips--what they are doing, what shape they take, how much you pout. You smirk, you purse. The physical sensation of wearing lipstick mimics the feelings of sexual arousal, in which lips [among other parts] become engorged and sensitive. So that's why the red lipstick is an inward pleasure, one I don't consider as being there solely for men to see.) She has on a simple cotton shirtdress, knee length--but it's soaking wet, which, like the lipstick, heightens the awareness of skin.

Now, any of you men who have girl-next-door fetishes (and I think more men do than don't) might find Madonna really sexy in this video, too, but as a woman, viewing all of Madonna's imagery, this is the one instance I'd like to trade places with her.

This is much closer to sexual liberation than anything Gaga has done. I've never seen a Gaga image that pressed any buttons for me. There's nothing I identify with. Madge may be crackers, but she is a real woman, at least.

Of course, Gaga isn't aimed at women's lib, necessarily. She claims not to be a feminist (in truth, she does not know what the term means.) She addresses a newer, genderless and transgendered generation, in which men and women are all sorta the same. This is the result of a generation and a half of people being taught that men and woman are exactly the same except for the fancy bits downstairs. Maybe when all the generations who were raised with a more thorough indoctrination into genderedness are dead and gone, we will be in a new era and individual concerns will be paramount. But this is a problem I see with the way society is going. We are becoming completely self-centered--not just selfish, which is a constant. Humans are selfish. We know this. But until now, you still had find a team to ally yourself with. You couldn't customize every option of your life and your entertainment to your own tastes. You might have to sit through Cosby Show, even if you hated it, so that your sister would agree to sit through Moonlighting with you. I just don't think that endless personalization is a good thing. I think it forces a focus on utterly irrelevant details, which serves to distract us from trying to influence bigger, more important issues that affect all of us, no matter which color smartphone we carry.

Am I saying that if all phones were black and tied to the wall with a wire, we'd have paid more attention to the Bushes and to healthcare reform and the governmental response to Katrina and the upper-class tax cuts which are due to expire and will instead be renewed? Yeah. I am.

 

[Dave]

For somebody who doesn't or hardly knows what he is talking about and recently complained that people try to win arguments instead of research for facts, this is a bit flat. Very flat actually. Or for better understanding, poor.

So that was it then. No outline of her career so far.

Has anybody actually ever seen her play anything that she did not rehearse before? To play an instrument and say something rehearsed in front of a camera or on a stage is relatively easy. It is no proof that she really wrote the songs.

There was a television film here on television a few months ago in which they showed how Scientology brainwashes their members with hypnosis and NLP with the end goal to achieve utter freedom of any inhibitions and how its members start to think that they are some alien. She reminds me of those.



She will be in the media for as long as she lives, because she had this lovely network that got her there and that will keep her there. Don't worry, you'll get old with her as you grew up with Madonna. And doesn't she have this lovely fanbase? Theory has it that with a certain fanbase the career of a musician will never die.

From what I know by now she is 28 and not 24, used to be in a relationship with a guy who owned a bar and did drugs back then already. So the more recent revelation that she takes cocaine did not really surprise me. She was supposed to be Michael Jackson's tour support and performed at this tribute to him when he died, said she loved Michael Bolton, there was something with Elton John and a duet with Susan Boyle never happened. I looked this information up yesterday so that I also saw the picture with KISS and another one that looked more like the one with Morrissey.

Well, maybe not.

Oh yeah, she's a member of the Illuminati. I thought you knew. Go look at the thread about her Telephone video. Or this link.
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=3423

 

[Dave]

GaGa would counter that the choices you make really do constitute "you", whether you realize it or not. Using rhetoric as a model, you can't actually separate form from content, though in many practical ways we all do it. The essence of style is one's ability to collapse the distinction. When GaGa demonstrates her sophistication and taste by donning a costume made entirely out of condoms, IUDs, tampons, and dildos, her stylistic choice is directly, if distantly, related to Oscar Wilde's comment that his primary goal in life was to live up to his blue china.

When we look at ourselves and identify the different roles we play, and all of the various rules and stylistic modes attached to each, we naturally organize a hierarchy of forms: in our minds, at the bottom are those forms which have little to do with our "real selves", let's say my "Hot Dog On A Stick" uniform, and at the top are those forms which are closest to our inner snowflake-self, let's say a tutu. We favor the top and grudgingly accept the bottom. But in truth we are exactly as we are meant to be-- we are exactly as capitalism wants us to be, which is protean, fungible, and permanently uprooted in all senses of the word. GaGa can thus be seen as a "genuine", fully interpellated subject, exhibiting a much greater level of self-awareness than you or I have.



Of course she was training porn. She bears witness to a troubling hypothesis, which is that the notion of "female empowerment" through sexuality, a feminist idea, was skillfully hijacked by the patriarchy to re-entrench male domination by a more circuitous route.

Porn = Male Domination Of Women

Porn * Madonna = "Female empowerment"

Britney Spears + Female Empowerment = Socially Sanctioned Porn

Socially Sanctioned Porn = Socially Sanctioned Male Domination of Women

A bit circuitous but you get my drift. Hey, it's like money laundering, except with misogyny!

The final form of this is Britney Spears, Lady GaGa, and other quasi-feminist icons who blur the line between pop music and pornography, but it is also the everyday Kevin Smith heroine who resembles a Barbie doll but likes football, "Star Trek", and claims to know the secret weapon unlocks on Halo. Men are devious f***ers, aren't they?

You sound like my mom, meaning that your argument is outdated and a little hysterical. Blah blah blah we're all consumers and our lives are run by marketing. That's a major concern of yours and you should do something about it. In your own way you're making nutty conspiracy claims and you're rehashing old arguments about Madonna to do it.

If you see Lady Gaga as an example of Male Dominance, that says more about you than it does about a pop star, no matter how many fancy magazine articles you recycle to make "your" point.

 

[Media Whore]

For somebody who doesn't or hardly knows what he is talking about and recently complained that people try to win arguments instead of research for facts, this is a bit flat. Very flat actually. Or for better understanding, poor.

So that was it then. No outline of her career so far.

Has anybody actually ever seen her play anything that she did not rehearse before? To play an instrument and say something rehearsed in front of a camera or on a stage is relatively easy. It is no proof that she really wrote the songs.

There was a television film here on television a few months ago in which they showed how Scientology brainwashes their members with hypnosis and NLP with the end goal to achieve utter freedom of any inhibitions and how its members start to think that they are some alien. She reminds me of those.



She will be in the media for as long as she lives, because she had this lovely network that got her there and that will keep her there. Don't worry, you'll get old with her as you grew up with Madonna. And doesn't she have this lovely fanbase? Theory has it that with a certain fanbase the career of a musician will never die.

From what I know by now she is 28 and not 24, used to be in a relationship with a guy who owned a bar and did drugs back then already. So the more recent revelation that she takes cocaine did not really surprise me. She was supposed to be Michael Jackson's tour support and performed at this tribute to him when he died, said she loved Michael Bolton, there was something with Elton John and a duet with Susan Boyle never happened. I looked this information up yesterday so that I also saw the picture with KISS and another one that looked more like the one with Morrissey.

Well, maybe not.

Let's say you are right.

• She is a talentless harbinger illustrating everything that is wrong with the modern idea that mediocrity is good enough.
• She has ridden the wave of luck and decent financial backing.
• She has nothing new to say or add and frankly has deceived those who consider her any sort of musician.
• She is a media whore who given the right conditions will sidle up to anyone if it means she can have her picture taken.

So?

 

[Dave]

Let's say you are right.

• She is a talentless harbinger illustrating everything that is wrong with the modern idea that mediocrity is good enough.
• She has ridden the wave of luck and decent financial backing.
• She has nothing new to say or add and frankly has deceived those who consider her any sort of musician.
• She is a media whore who given the right conditions will sidle up to anyone if it means she can have her picture taken.

So?

But we love real rock stars that really mean what they say, man, like the Sex Pistols.

oh wait...

 

[Media Whore]

But we love real rock stars that really mean what they say, man, like the Sex Pistols.

oh wait...

I know I'll be dabbing a bit of Johnny Rotten's new fragrance behind my ears just to give myself the air of manufactured anarachy.

 

[Happy Maudlin]

But we love real rock stars that really mean what they say, man, like the Sex Pistols.

oh wait...

I know I'll be dabbing a bit of Johnny Rotten's new fragrance behind my ears just to give myself the air of manufactured anarchy.

You all are a funny lot.