GS Announcement

After nearly four years of intensive critical-creative output and interaction with popular culture, Gaga Stigmata, in its current journal incarnation, will be coming to an end at the strike of midnight on January 1, 2014.

In these final months, we are requesting submissions in the following three veins:

(1) Any new essays on Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP era 

(2) New essays on any pop cultural phenomenon that manifests what we call a “stigmata effect” – that is, the blurring of lines between superstar and fan, between high and low art, between art and interpretation, between the “original” and the “copy.” In particular, we are interested in essays about about Miley Cyrus, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Ke$ha, Lana Del Rey, and Katy Perry, but you are not in any way limited by this list.

Additionally, we are also seeking essays that explore new pop cultural phenomena such as the aesthetics of new media forms (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, YouTubers, .gifs, Vines, Instagrams, etc.) 

We are also interested in essays that explore manifestations of the stigmata-esque intersection of the “art world” and the “pop world” in contemporary culture. 

(3) Any essays about Lady Gaga that have previously been published elsewhere. (We would like to create a one-stop on-live archive of the best Lady Gaga scholarship and creative criticism ever published; we will of course give credit to the original source of publication).

You are welcome to write traditional essays, and/or to use a creative-critical format for your work. Youtube videos, photoshopped images, memes, and .gifs can all feature in your work.

You are also welcome to submit more than one piece during this final incarnation of the journal, after which the journal aspect of the project will move into an archival stage. 

Miley’s War: Love and Rebellion in the Millennial Trenches

By Devin O’Neill

The following will be a review of the new Miley Cyrus album Bangerz, and the promotional and branding strategies surrounding the album’s release.

First we’ll discuss the music, since that’s definitely the neglected part of the equation.

Miley’s come up with a new pop sound, and it works. I love it. I’m going to have to rethink my approach to a lot of what’s on the radio, to Top 40, because of what’s been done here. It makes a lot of current pop sound dated. Recent Top 40’s been influenced heavily by 120-BPM dance music. Big-tent electronica. Think Ke$ha, LMFAO, even the new Britney. Miley’s drawn a line and departed from all that.

She and her team have accomplished this by, basically, incorporating cutting-edge trends in hip-hop – trap, drill, what-have-you – into her sound, alongside country and pop. The textures are round and thick, not excessively massive or blown-out like a lot of the pop on the radio. It’s got a great bottom end and tons of clarity, and reminds me of soundscapes I’ve heard from Die Antwoord, Drake, even Dr. Dre.

She’s mixing and matching musical styles, but her personality ties it all together into a vital brand. She can pose herself as country, and pull off a hip-hop-hoedown with Nelly on “4x4”, the only modern club banger I’ve ever heard with a straight-up cowgirl-line-dance rhythm.

The whole album is like this. She uses her raunchy southern-girl attitude to smooth the edges between raw hip-hop and the other forms she’s playing with, while rocking her new look. The result is very pop, very confrontational, and very her. One massive debutante fuck-you. “Do My Thang” is an archetypal example of the sound, and probably my favorite track on the album.

Her lyrics are raw, confrontational, and naive, which, in the context of this sort of ratchet/cowgirl persona, works perfectly. Think 2 Chainz yelling “SHE GOT A BIG BOOTY SO I CALL HER BIG BOOTY”. Hard-skulled punk-hop. In fact the weakest moments, lyrically, are those where Miley tries to over-rationalize or move outside her pure attitude. Attitude is the fuel this album runs on. Attitude and romance.

Yeah, Miley’s 20, so a lot of these songs are about love, sex, even marriage. They’re wide-eyed and openhearted, and, combined with her determination to decide what her own moral boundaries are, make for a compelling window into the fire of youth. It’s almost like she has unlimited energy, and she sings with an enormous amount of confidence and conviction.

The album art is straight out of Tumblr. A collaged, retro explosion of ridiculousness, neon, palm trees, and lo-fi digital. Anyone who hasn’t spent time in some pretty weird corners of the Internet might be confused. Others will recognize the aesthetic immediately, especially if they’re into performers like Geneva Jacuzzi. It’s all archival scuzz.

This singularity of identity, though, isn’t restricted to the album. So now, we get to the rest of the equation. Now we get to the secret plan.

“The Witch’s Dorothy”: On Gaga’s conflation of hero, villain, and witch

By Sarah Cook

In which I get one step closer to articulating Gaga’s intriguing use of failure, if we can equate failure with evil (i.e. witchery). If failure can be the same thing as a bad witch. If a bad witch can be good for certain things.

These notes are in response to Gaga’s performance of “Applause” (Applau-Oz) on Good Morning America, 9 September 2013.

1. That Gaga hovers somewhere between witch, villain and monster. That this hovering is the crucial source of her difference, i.e. her creativity, her power.

Audre Lorde: “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”*

1.2. Gaga embraces various differences – between her repeated incorporation of disability, multiple sexualities, the burqa, & her invitation to those who are “broke or evergreen…black, white, beige, [of] chola descent,” or Othered in any variety of ways – is this her endorsement of the creative power of difference? Does Gaga herself descend “into the chaos of knowledge,” the chaos of identity?

And can a rich white female ever invoke the power of Others in a way that is not problematic?

2. Gaga’s monstrosity has perhaps been established since The Fame Monster, sometimes occurring with a cyborg twist à la “Born This Way,” sometimes as manifesto (think of those haunting images that accompany the “Manifesto of Little Monsters” video done with Nick Knight). But with the inauguration of the ARTPOP era, I think we are seeing a new extension of Gaga’s monstrosity, one that harnesses magic and transformation – the bubbling cauldron and colored smoke in the “Applause” video – along with the multiplicity of stage presences that have occurred during each of her recent live performances. A magical, playful monstrosity. And now, with the incarnation of Oz, we see the previously clear distinction of the hero/villain binary made messy – or perhaps made articulate, specific – through the conflation of wizard/witch/Dorothy.

3. The Wizard isn’t the real villain of the story, we know that. His innocent folly and simple-minded desire for the mask of power – layered upon his own desire simply to go home – is ultimately dismissed: the true villain, the Wicked Witch, is rightfully killed and the Wizard actually provides Dorothy and her friends with what they need. With Gaga’s manifestation of all three of these figures on the stage – good, somewhat evil, more evil – she is therefore complicating our distinctions between the good figure and the bad one. How do we distinguish maniac from evil sorceress from small-town girl when they’re all showing up within and hovering so closely to the same body?