I laughed till I cried! Lady Gaga and the death of sex

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[ARCHIVED THREAD] - I laughed till I cried! Lady Gaga and the death of sex (Page 1 of 2)

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:10:56 PM EDT

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

Man, they cut like a knife!

Lady Gaga and the death of sex

An erotic breaker of taboos or an asexual copycat? Camille Paglia, America's foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon

Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age. Since her rise, she has remained almost continually on tour. Hence, she is a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny. She is often pictured tottering down the street in some outlandish get-up and fright wig. Most of what she has said about herself has not been independently corroborated… "Music is a lie”, "Art is a lie”, "Gaga is a lie”, and "I profusely lie” have been among Gaga’s pronouncements, but her fans swallow her line whole…

She 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. "You’re a superstar, no matter who you are!” She earnestly tells them from the stage, while their cash ends up in her pockets. She told a magazine with messianic fervour: "I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived.” She claims to have changed the lives of the disabled, thrilled by her jewelled parody crutches in the Paparazzi video.

Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that. Photos of Stefani Germanotta just a few years ago show a bubbly brunette with a glowing complexion. The Gaga of world fame, however, with her heavy wigs and giant sunglasses (rudely worn during interviews) looks either simperingly doll-like or ghoulish, without a trace of spontaneity. Every public appearance, even absurdly at airports where most celebrities want to pass incognito, has been lavishly scripted in advance with a flamboyant outfit and bizarre hairdo assembled by an invisible company of elves.

Furthermore, despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.

Peeping dourly through all that tat is Gaga’s limited range of facial expressions. Her videos repeatedly thrust that blank, lugubrious face at the camera and us; it’s creepy and coercive. Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual. Going off to the gym in broad daylight, as Gaga recently did, dressed in a black bustier, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels isn’t sexy – it’s sexually dysfunctional.

Compare Gaga’s insipid songs, with their nursery-rhyme nonsense syllables, to the title and hypnotic refrain of the first Madonna song and video to bring her attention on MTV, Burning Up, with its elemental fire imagery and its then-shocking offer of fellatio. In place of Madonna’s valiant life force, what we find in Gaga is a disturbing trend towards mutilation and death…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho "show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

To read the rest of this explosive profile, including Paglia's debunking of comparisons to Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John and Andy Warhol, and to view a slideshow of photographs, visit thethesundaytimes.co.uk/magazine this Sunday

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:14:06 PM EDT

[#1]

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:18:42 PM EDT

[#2]

He's a very talented young man

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:18:43 PM EDT

[#3]

Quoted:

Now, come on! That was damn funny!

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:21:29 PM EDT

[#4]

Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:23:06 PM EDT

[#5]

Quoted:

He's a very talented young man

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:30:00 PM EDT

[#6]

Quoted:
Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:33:04 PM EDT

[#7]

She's no Wendy O Williams.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:34:10 PM EDT

[#8]

Fuck Lady Gaga

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:36:36 PM EDT

[#9]

I'm thinking that Ms. Camillle doesn't like Lady Gaga very much....

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:37:18 PM EDT

[#10]

Love it or hate it, it's doing something right and making more money than probably 98% of us.

I say good on it for taking initiative, working hard and making a boat load of money. That's what America is all about, right?

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:39:30 PM EDT

[#11]

AWWW Pagila gots the butthurt

ETA to ADD:
Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…This is so fucking rich. From the people that brought us the Zipless encounter, anonymous sex, androgynous sex, and taught generations of women to disrespect those that chose motherhood/traditional values. What a fucking hypocrite. This is the end result of a fast food sex nation. Love it sweetheart. You created it and profited by it.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:39:44 PM EDT

[#12]

Say what you will, I'd fuck her till my dick chapped

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:39:52 PM EDT

[#13]

Quoted:

Now, come on! That was damn funny!

Well, it was an interesting analysis, but....

I think that Lady Gaga is just laughing all the way to the bank, with no pretensions at "art" or "meaning."

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:40:30 PM EDT

[#14]

O.A.R. That Was A Crazy Game of Poker, best LIVE performance EVER.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:41:48 PM EDT

[#15]

Quoted:

Now, come on! That was damn funny!

Well, it was an interesting analysis, but....

I think that Lady Gaga is just laughing all the way to the bank, with no pretensions at "art" or "meaning."

No argument from me on that! Still, that is one mean spirited article!

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:44:49 PM EDT

[#16]

lady gaga is nothing more than a goth(ish) version of alanis morisette - another supposedly angst ridden singer, who in reality failed as a singer until she emphasized a life and songs riddle w/ anguish, although her life never had real anguish.

simple formula which makes money for the corporate world.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:48:20 PM EDT

[#17]

Paglia is too stupid to realize by publishing this article she is advertising for Lady Gaga.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:49:40 PM EDT

[#18]

Quoted:

I'm thinking that Ms. Camillle doesn't like Lady Gaga very much....

At some point it seems like we all become locked on a particular era of music. After that era, we feel the newcomers are talentless hacks and feel the new artists don't hold a candle to those of our preferred period. From the article it seems pretty clear which era of music the writer locked in at. I'm guilty of it to some degree, but at least I know it and am honest about it. Hell, if it wasn't for most of the newer car stereos showing artist and song title for the song playing, I probably couldn't tell the difference between a few of the bands out nowadays. Heck, at times it feels like the only difference between the local country station and the local pop station is the lack of rap music on the country station.

Posted: 9/11/2010 6:53:16 PM EDT

[#19]

Quoted:

At some point it seems like we all become locked on a particular era of music. After that era, we feel the newcomers are talentless hacks and feel the new artists don't hold a candle to those of our preferred period.

pretty much.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:01:51 PM EDT

[#20]

Quoted:
She's no Wendy O Williams.

LOL. Wendy O would kick Gaga's ass and then rape her.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:03:28 PM EDT

[#21]

These things never change. I remember and article called "Inventing Eddie Vedder" in Rolling Stone back in '96 or so that refuted some of Eddie Vedder's claims of his tortured upbringing. It turns out he had it pretty good, was voted most popular or something like that in high school and was as active in sports, i.e a jock. In the early 90's that was exactly what a musician didn't want to be especially after Nirvana became huge over night and laid waste to the notion of being popular was cool.

There are always people that will try to be something they are not to gain fame andI love it when they are exposed for the fakes they are.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:06:52 PM EDT

[#22]

I still listen to old school music like GNR and Metallica...Starting to listen to old country now too...

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:13:29 PM EDT

[#23]

Quoted:

Quoted:

I'm thinking that Ms. Camillle doesn't like Lady Gaga very much....

At some point it seems like we all become locked on a particular era of music. After that era, we feel the newcomers are talentless hacks and feel the new artists don't hold a candle to those of our preferred period. From the article it seems pretty clear which era of music the writer locked in at. I'm guilty of it to some degree, but at least I know it and am honest about it. Hell, if it wasn't for most of the newer car stereos showing artist and song title for the song playing, I probably couldn't tell the difference between a few of the bands out nowadays. Heck, at times it feels like the only difference between the local country station and the local pop station is the lack of rap music on the country station.

I hear ya... I remember when The Beatles were new. I hear a lot of new music and there is almost always something out that I like. There is also a lot that I don't care enough about to learn who the performers are.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:24:04 PM EDT

[#24]

Her formula is simple, and it appeals to emotionally damaged people, particularly women. If you can actually listen to the lyrics of her songs it's quite obvious, and without fail, every single woman I know with emotional baggage absolutely swoons over Lady Gaga.

Too bad they're all too dumb to realize she's a fake manufactured to prey on their insecurity.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:51:30 PM EDT

[#25]

Holy overthinking Batman!

Gaga is popular because she has fun, catchy tunes that play well in a club. Period. Yeah, she's a little weird, but that's to be expected from MTV types. But my God, whining that the current generation can't understand the genius of a Janice Joplin? Seriously? I'm guessing the author is a pretentious boomer with an overly inflated opinion of her own pop culture. Protip, the 60s only meant something to those living in the 60s. The rest of us don't care and are sick of hearing about how awesome you think you are.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:55:01 PM EDT

[#26]

Quoted:
Holy overthinking Batman!

Gaga is popular because she has fun, catchy tunes that play well in a club. Period. Yeah, she's a little weird, but that's to be expected from MTV types. But my God, whining that the current generation can't understand the genius of a Janice Joplin? Seriously? I'm guessing the author is a pretentious boomer with an overly inflated opinion of her own pop culture. Protip, the 60s only meant something to those living in the 60s. The rest of us don't care and are sick of hearing about how awesome you think you are.

That doesn't explain the cult like following she has among 16-25 yr old women. There's more than just catchy tunes at play there.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:56:43 PM EDT

[#27]

Quoted:

That doesn't explain the cult like following she has among 16-25 yr old women. There's more than just catchy tunes at play there.

16-25 year old women are stupid.

Posted: 9/11/2010 7:59:29 PM EDT

[#28]

Whomever created her image is brilliant. She can dress up as Gaga and enjoy all of the attention she can stand. The money, the spotlight, the adoring fans. She can also walk the streets anonymously as herself. She could sit down next to you at a coffee counter and look like just another homely girl. Few entertainers have been able to pull that off.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:00:01 PM EDT

[#29]

Gaga is a manufactured entity designed to make money in the music industry. She's not the first and she won't be the last.

Remember the Monkees? Another entity, this time a group of guys, manufactured from an outside force for the purpose of making money.

Both succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. As capitalists you should stop making fun of this shit and learn how to repeat it yourselves.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:08:59 PM EDT

[#30]

Like happycynic said... catchy tunes that play well in clubs. What is not to like? If I were 22 yo and going to dance clubs with my posse, that music would be a blast. Don't be hate'n.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:18:19 PM EDT

[#31]

Quoted:

Quoted:
Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Up the Irons

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:20:11 PM EDT

[#32]

Quoted:

Quoted:

That doesn't explain the cult like following she has among 16-25 yr old women. There's more than just catchy tunes at play there.

16-25 year old women are stupid.

No fucking shit?

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:31:22 PM EDT

[#33]

Quoted:

That doesn't explain the cult like following she has among 16-25 yr old women. There's more than just catchy tunes at play there.

Must be a witch.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:31:34 PM EDT

[#34]

Quoted:

Quoted:
Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Another vote!

GO MAIDEN!

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:36:58 PM EDT

[#35]

Quoted:

Quoted:

Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Doesn't their music sound like the Scorpions?

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:40:14 PM EDT

[#36]

Doesn't their music sound like the Scorpions?
[/quote]

Ban Him Now!!!!!!!

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:40:15 PM EDT

[#37]

Quoted:

Quoted:

Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Doesn't their music sound like the Scorpions?

No.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:47:03 PM EDT

[#38]

Quoted:
Whomever created her image is brilliant. She can dress up as Gaga and enjoy all of the attention she can stand. The money, the spotlight, the adoring fans. She can also walk the streets anonymously as herself. She could sit down next to you at a coffee counter and look like just another homely girl. Few entertainers have been able to pull that off.

Works for this one as well, and, he is ALMOST as strange as she is.

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:52:32 PM EDT

[#39]

Slaanesh at work.....

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:52:34 PM EDT

[#40]

Quoted:

Quoted:

Iron Maiden Fucking Rules!

This !!!

Doesn't their music sound like the Scorpions?

No.

Duran Duran? Or Meatloaf?

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:53:24 PM EDT

[#41]

Quoted:

Quoted:
She's no Wendy O Williams.

LOL. Wendy O would kick Gaga's ass and then rape her.

Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics- The Damned

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:57:16 PM EDT

[#42]

Quoted:

Slaanesh at work.....

NEEERRRD!

Posted: 9/11/2010 8:58:32 PM EDT

[#43]

Fucking hair elves, hiding in airports...

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:09:27 PM EDT

[#44]

Quoted:

Quoted:
Slaanesh at work.....

NEEERRRD!

Well, I am halfway through "Fulgrim," by Graham McNeill, as I type this.....

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:10:52 PM EDT

[#45]

I don't have a boner with Paglia's name on it, but I like what she says about Gaga. Tru dat.

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:11:29 PM EDT

[#46]

Quoted:
She's no Wendy O Williams.

No she is not.

We miss you Wendy.

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:17:10 PM EDT

[#47]

Quoted:

Now, come on! That was damn funny!

Well, it was an interesting analysis, but....

I think that Lady Gaga is just laughing all the way to the bank, with no pretensions at "art" or "meaning."

She's an intentional parody of pop culture.

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:29:58 PM EDT

[#48]

Quoted:

Now, come on! That was damn funny!

Well, it was an interesting analysis, but....

I think that Lady Gaga is just laughing all the way to the bank, with no pretensions at "art" or "meaning."

She's an intentional parody of pop culture.

There's nothing there that Grace Jones, Madonna or Tori Amos haven't already addressed.
With better style and far better music.

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:43:32 PM EDT

[#49]

Quoted:

Say what you will, I'd fuck her till my dick chapped

This.
Like the a hammer in the fist of an angry god banging on a retarded drum set in the back of a city bus during a hurricane. Even if by some chance I was sober.
-K

Posted: 9/11/2010 9:51:22 PM EDT

[#50]

Remember the adage:

'Critics are only failed artists'.

Chris

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - I laughed till I cried! Lady Gaga and the death of sex (Page 1 of 2)

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Lady Gaga and the death of sex

An erotic breaker of taboos or an asexual copycat? Camille Paglia, America's foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon

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