The Icon and the Monster: Lady Gaga is a Trickster of American Pop Culture

by Meghan Vicks

Lady Gaga is, quite literally, a spectacle of American pop music and fame culture. Since August 2008, which witnessed the release of her debut album The Fame, her presence has flooded both American and world culture-scapes. While her music has certainly garnered great chunks of pop culture’s fleeting and finicky attention, it is her persona that has secured the most lasting fascination and discussion. Lady Gaga is much more than the singer of catchy pop songs such as “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”: she is a performance artist that never sets aside her performance. And her project? – To deconstruct the very pop culture that creates and worships her, and to explore and make problematic the hackneyed image of the pop icon while flourishing in the clichéd role itself. In many ways, she is a modern-day trickster: an ambivalent and transgressive figure whose tricks, or art, take on a measure of reality or truth.

Defining the trickster is a notoriously “tricky” task, as the trickster’s main quality is its indefinableness; likewise, this indefinable quality also (un)-defines Lady Gaga. A figure that eludes all categorizing bounds, Lady Gaga is ambivalence embodied. When rumors circulated that she was a hermaphrodite, she neither affirmed nor denied the gossip. She characterizes herself as androgynous, and upon being told that Christina Aguilara quipped, “I don’t know if [Lady Gaga] is a man or a woman,” Lady Gaga replied: “Look at me, I might as well be a gay man. When I hear comments like that, I’m like, ‘She’s dead on,’ because she saw the Warhol in me.”

Besides embracing the ambiguity and enigmatic nature of her gender, Lady Gaga’s costuming often usurps the borders between body and clothes, top and bottom, and sexy and sacred. Recently, she “wore” a blonde sunhat made completely out of her own hair, thereby making problematic the line where her hair ends and her hat, or clothing, begins. She has worn stiletto heals as shoulder pads, which evokes an upside-down aesthetic; razor blades as sunglasses, thereby utilizing as a shield what normally slices; and has styled her hair as a Renaissance halo while wearing a see-through red lace body suit, ultimately producing the literal image of a sex goddess. Moreover, her costuming aesthetic has an ageless quality, and is constantly (de)/e-volving and undergoing transformation. What can be said about Lady Gaga today does not necessarily apply yesterday or tomorrow; paradoxically, the only constant category is her fluid ambiguity.

Intimately related to her ambivalence is her transgressive vitality. Like other trickster figures, Lady Gaga continually crosses the borders that structure our knowable world and in doing so, allows something new access into the culture. Mythological tricksters, via their transgressions, are responsible for bringing fire and even language to humans from the gods. Lady Gaga’s transgressions work to bring seriousness and meaning into what is traditionally considered to be frivolous and meaningless: that is, pop music. She asks, “How do I make pop, commercial art be taken as seriously as fine art? That’s what Warhol did.” One of the main ways that she transgresses the normal bounds of the pop icon is by hyperbolizing and making monstrous the extreme sexuality of that role. For instance, Lady Gaga adopts the cone-shaped bras that Madonna used to accentuate her feminine sexuality and power, but has them shoot sparks and flames. She makes horrific the sveltely thin yet curvy figure of the pop starlet by wearing outfits that distort, exaggerate, and sharpen those sexualized contours of the female body. She wears an ecto-skeleton outfit while caged in her “Bad Romance” video, highlighting the various prisons, both bodily and cultural, that trap the female figure; significantly, by the end of the video she has escaped. Her “Paparazzi” video presents the murder of an abusive and controlling boyfriend, and its centerpiece is a riveting dance number in which the crippled Gaga transcends and incorporates her handicaps by making elegantly jerky movement of broken limbs, a wheelchair, and crutches. Her performance continually transgresses and functions by transgressing, which allows Lady Gaga to be both whimsical and serious, sexy and monstrous, and meaningless and meaningful at the same time.

Lady Gaga has repeatedly stated in interviews that she lives for her art, and that her performance does not end when the music stops; moreover, her end goal is nothing other than the art itself. “Some artists are working to buy the mansion or whatever the element of fame must bear, but I spend all my money on my show,” she says. “I don’t give a fuck about money. What am I going to do with a condo and a car? I can’t drive.” In this way, she is also reminiscent of the trickster, whose tricks are performed not in hope of achieving some pragmatic or didactic goal, but rather for the sake of the trick itself; the trickster’s tricks equate to art and performance. Regarding clowns, fools, and tricksters, Bakhtin writes, “Their being coincides with their role, and outside of their role they do not exist” (Dialogic Imagination 159). Bakhtin’s statement appropriately applies to Lady Gaga as well. She is reluctant to give her real name, and insists that her family and friends address her by her stage name. She says: “I don’t ever want to be grounded in reality. In my show I announce, ‘People say Lady Gaga is a lie, and they are right. I am I lie. And every day I kill to make it true.’” And: “The outlet for my work is not just the music and the videos, it’s every breathing moment of my life. I’m always saying something about art and music and fame. That’s why you don’t every catch me in sweatpants.” And lastly: “I eat, sleep, breath, and bleed every inch of my work. I’d absolutely die if I couldn’t be an artist.”

Her spectacle, and by proxy her life, is largely a performance of celebrity, fame, and the construction and maintenance of iconic identity. Her first album, The Fame, is about fame even though she wasn’t technically famous when she wrote it. What matters for Lady Gaga is not so much the reality of fame, but the spectacle of fame itself, the illusion of fame that takes on a life of its own and ultimately becomes real. She adopted the paraphernalia, slogans, benefits, and complaints of fame before they were rightfully hers, and in doing so became our current definition of “fame.” Throughout her rise to literal fame, she has continuously performed, torn asunder, and at the same time taken advantage of whatever it means to be famous. She simultaneously parodies and celebrates what she has become. Her second album, The Fame Monster, and world tour, The Monster Ball, are cases in point: meditations and confrontations with the fame monster she has become in the same breath that she worships her monstrosity, making that monstrosity into her very art and performance. Her pretentiousness is fully embraced as if nothing exists outside of that pretentiousness.

What is most controversial about Lady Gaga is her appropriation of Christian iconography laced throughout her performances; this connection to the sacred is also a general characteristic of the trickster. By transgressing and transcending what is defined as human, or by violating the human condition, the trickster arrives at something sacred, at something other-than human. Lady Gaga transgresses what is normally defined as human by incorporating into her grotesque and hyperbolized sexual costumes strategically-placed crosses that cover her most “sacred” lady bits: her nipples and her crotch. She has also been known to style her hair into a halo, and when she met and performed for Queen Elizabeth, she wore a costume that integrated the accoutrements of royalty. By appropriating symbols that are typically reserved for the sacred figures of divine and earthly realms, Lady Gaga, on the one hand, problematizes the distinction between the sacred and the profane, and, on the other hand, insinuates that there is something sacred and ultimately true about her spectacle. There is meaning beyond the catchy surface of her songs, just as there is both pop and sacred iconography beneath her shocking and outlandish costuming.

The spectacle of Lady Gaga ultimately performs a double role: she is the product and performance of modern pop culture, and she is the subversion and defying of those selfsame conceptions of pop culture. She is the icon and the monster created by the same cultural pulse.