From The Fame to Born This Way: Lady Gaga and the Monstrous Evolution of Identity

By Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks

This is the first in a series of pieces that analyzes the video for "Born This Way." Each day for the next week, we'll be posting an essay that explores a specific aspect of the video.

When Lady Gaga hit the pop culture-scape with “Just Dance” in 2008, her performance was accompanied by the slogan “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow,” which was appropriately projected in her video-screen glasses, the first of many props that would celebrate the power of the image in culture. Since then, Lady Gaga has remained steadfast in her declaration that her performance – her lies – are her truths to be taken seriously, even while blatantly marketing, branding, and “selling” herself out. The power of performance was explored in depth throughout the era of her debut album The Fame, during which Gaga literalized and embodied the spectacle, perpetually drew attention to the power of the image in our everyday and humdrum lives, and exhibited how fictions, lies, performances, costumes, and poses make up our existence, personalities, and identities. In short, during The Fame era, Lady Gaga became synonymous with performative and creative identity – an identity that rejects essentialism, determinism, and foundationalism.

These notions are echoed in “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” a video shown during an interlude of the Monster Ball; in this video, Lady Gaga discusses “the lie” as the “real truth.” “It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill,” she says. “We are nothing without our image, without our projection, without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather to become, in the future.” During these two years of The Fame and its dark twin The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga repeatedly illustrated – in her daily outrageous outfits, in her music videos, in her stage performances – how life is art. There was no difference between the street and the stage: Gaga never took off her costumes, in fact, they were not costumes in the classical sense just as “Lady Gaga,” she repeatedly told us, is not a persona or a stage name – there is no fixed identity behind the mask. If art is synonymous with life, then life itself is but a performance – and we are all a part of the (freak) show. This was the idea of The Fame/Monster.

However, with her sophomore album Born This Way, Lady Gaga problematizes the notion of performative identity by moving toward the flesh, the meat(dress), the immanent muck and essential ether of being. Her most recent fashion (especially the prosthetic shoulder and cheek bones), her 2011 Grammy performance, and the video for “Born This Way” further complicate her earlier explorations with performative identity: in the Born This Way era, Lady Gaga explores a new type of identity – both natural (essential) and constructed (performative) simultaneously.

In a recent Billboard interview, Lady Gaga discusses these notions of birth in relation to a constructed identity: “[Birth] is a process of living and it’s also not ultimately a goal. It’s something ever-changing. My bones have changed in my face and in my shoulders because I am now able to reveal to the universe that when I was wearing shoulder pads or when I was wearing jackets that looked like I was wearing shoulder pads, it was really just my bones underneath. My fashion is part of who I am, and though I was not born with these clothes on, I was born this way.” Lady Gaga views fashion and the human body as cut from the same cloth: as we witnessed in “Anatomy of Change,” “fashion is essential – become part of the essence of the human body.” And fashion, like life, is something that takes intentionality and, most importantly, choice. Gaga’s goal is to empower her fans to choose to consciously become, or to choose to become conscious of the seemingly limitless potentials of who they can be. Fashion is one important way to harness this evolving identity. As Gaga also said in that same Billboard interview: “[Fashion] is part of who I am. My creativity is in my blood and in my bones as I said, and it takes time to become myself every morning.” In a very real sense, Gaga has become her clothes, just as her clothes become her. It is in this play that one’s fluctuating identity is birthed and re-born, over and over. But it takes will and consciousness: one cannot be blind and born, at least not into Gaga’s new race.

Lady Gaga’s new looks have influences that are both alien/unnatural (her new bone structure, her sharply whittled fingernails, the latex) and organic (the amniotic hair-coloring at the Grammys). Though Gaga is dealing heavily with the theme of evolution with this new album, there is no survival of the fittest here, but rather the survival of the freak. The freaks, Gaga says, will become “a new race of beings within the race of humanity…one with no prejudice.” The song “Born This Way” proclaims: “I was born to survive.” Gaga (and it may be relevant to note that gaga is often one of the first things that a baby says upon speaking) sees birth – something usually viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime experience – as something that is an “ever-changing process.”

Lady Gaga is the lie that was “born this way.”

She puts performative identity in the space of essential identity; her creation of her identity becomes how she was born.

All these notions come to a beautiful crescendo in the recently released video for “Born This Way.” The video opens with a new manifesto – “Manifesto of Mother Monster” – which Lady Gaga reads while the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo plays in the backtrack:

On G.O.A.T, a Government-Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom. But on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place, the birth of evil. And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

In this manifesto, Lady Gaga re-envisions and problematizes the notion of birth – as an infinite process of becoming, not as a singular moment of having become. As with the “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” which redefines the lie as truth and the image as reality, “Manifesto of Mother Monster” redefines birth as eternal, infinite, monstrous, and free – that is, one can choose to be born into whatever being one wishes. One is put in control of his or her own birth. 

The video features split-screen images of Lady Gaga giving birth to multiple versions of herself: both good and evil, alive and dead, nearly naked and fully dressed, Michael Jackson and Madonna. This hybridity is monstrous – it defies borders. In typical Gaga fashion, the video pays homage to much from the aesthetic arsenals of high and pop cultures: the expressionist paintings of Francis Bacon, the work of Salvador Dali and other surrealists, James Cameron’s Aliens, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the choreography of Alvin Ailey, and Madonna’s video for “Express Yourself,” to name a few. Given the theme of the video – Born This Way – Gaga’s use of these visual cultural quotations implies that she is unequivocally the offspring of these cultural giants, born in their images, created from their influences. This reflects what she said in a recent interview for Vogue:

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to – from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono – but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

Gaga as an artist perpetually messes with our notion of decades, eras, even time itself. For all her talk of “the mitosis of the future,” she is heavily informed by the past. She was born this way – organically fashioned from the cloth of the performer. These are the new identity politics of Born This Way: not just performative identity, but never-ending performative, infinite, and, above all, free births.

The video’s most interesting symbol of this performative birth is Gaga’s vagina, which houses the space where mirrors meet. Considering Gaga’s play with reflective performance and mimesis throughout The Fame era, the placement of the mirror at the vagina quite physically brings performative identity into the space of biological and essential identity. Mother Monster gives birth to little monsters; or, following the two manifestos, Mother Monster infinitely births “the spiritual holograms of who we perceive ourselves to be.”

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2011: Gagalations

By Meghan Blalock

When Alvin Ailey’s Revelations debuted in 1960, it swiftly became one of the most widely known pieces of modern dance. The original piece, inspired by what Ailey called “blood memories” from his childhood in Texas, was more than an hour long, choreographed to both traditional and modern spirituals so as to depict the spiritual journey from slavery to freedom through faith. The styles of dance in Revelations are eclectic, ranging from more classical ballet postures (deep plies, arabesques, Chaînés, and pirouettes), to the innovative use of back-lit silhouettes, boxed elbows, and bladed hands that would become Ailey’s signatures. Eventually whittled down to just around thirty minutes, the piece has inspired dancers and creators for more than fifty years – including Lady Gaga’s most recent foray into pop culture, “Born This Way.”

From her claims that the song came to her through “immaculate conception” to her innumerable references to the song as “bad kids going to church in a big way,” Gaga hasn’t exactly tried to conceal the fact that she thinks “Born This Way” (and her subsequent album, to be released in May) is spiritual in nature; even the song’s lyrics refer to “capital H-i-m” and backing vocals murmur “church” over and over again. Gaga has presented “Born This Way” as the modern-day spiritual meant to free the tormented from their binds; namely, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, women, and those among us who are “beige,” just to name a few. Here, I will argue that with her Grammy performance, Gaga has reaffirmed this intention by directly paying homage to Revelations.

The final version of Revelations, and the one still performed today, is comprised of three movements. The first, “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” is an homage to traditional slave spirituals. It depicts the incredible sorrow of slave life: dancers stick together in close formations and look to the sky, reaching with open hands and using their entire bodies to stretch upward, signifying that they are asking God and their faith for strength and guidance. The entire movement is minimally lit, in yellow or earth tones. The second movement, “Take Me To The Water,” is a more joyous piece that depicts the dancers’ pilgrimage to a river where they will baptize and purify themselves. This movement symbolizes their first taste of freedom from the sorrow and pain of their enslaved existences. The last movement, “Move, Members, Move!”, is a celebration of life after the dancers have achieved freedom, set to modern-day spirituals like “Rock-a My Soul.” It is also the movement from which Lady Gaga and her co-creators took the most (though not the exclusive) inspiration for her Grammy performance.

“Move, Members, Move!” opens with a trio of male dancers before a single female dancer takes the stage. Wearing a yellow dress and hat, and carrying a fan, she begins dancing in front of a red backdrop with – dare I say it – an egg-shaped halo of light to her right. Soon she is joined by other women in the same dresses, donning the same hats, and they dance in unison. The choreography here is nothing short of triumphant, with stomping feet, swinging arms, and levels that mirror the rises and falls of the music. The fact that Gaga was inspired by these visuals is fairly obvious.

Gaga’s latex top and skirt mimics the long dresses worn by the women in Revelations. Her dancers emerge in similar outfits, suggesting that she sees them as her equals, as her fellow freed slaves. The jacket she wears during part of her performance is similar to the button-front dresses worn in some stagings of Ailey’s ballet. The yellow hat is nearly identical to the one worn by the freed slave women in Revelations. The modernization of the costumes – the use of latex, minimalist at that – reflects Gaga’s own aesthetic and emphasizes that this performance is not Revelations – it’s Revelations for the 21st  century.

The visuals – the costuming, staging, and lighting – are not the only aspects of Gaga’s “Born This Way” performance that directly reference Ailey’s ballet. The choreography is strongly reminiscent of Revelations’ trademark movements, especially those found in “Pilgrim of Sorrow.”

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The formation of Ailey’s dancers here – huddled closely together, with one central figure in the front – clearly influence the ending formation of Gaga’s “Born This Way” performance. The motions of her and her dancers’ bodies – all moving together in unison – are taken directly from Ailey’s  choreography. The dancers replicate Ailey’s classic open-palmed, spread-finger reach to the sky (shown below), done in such low lighting that the performers’ faces aren’t even visible. While Ailey’s dancers go into deep plies and lean their torsos and open hands toward the ground, Gaga and her dancers go into deep plies and lean their torsos while grasping on to each other.

They then come back up and reach for the sky again, finishing the performance in the classic Ailey pose, but with a twist – instead of spead-finger palms reaching toward the sky, they reach with monster paws, at which point the lights are finally brought up and their faces made visible.

While the choreography during the group formation is a clear homage to “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” it seems that much of the choreography leading up to the performance’s conclusion is taken from the third section of Revelations, “Move, Members, Move!”

As Gaga emerges from the vessel and later during the synchronized choreography that begins the chorus of the song (beginning with “I’m beautiful in my way”), much of BTW’s choregoraphy reflects the ballet technique, wide second-position plies, and reverent stomping that characterizes the third section of Revelations. Right before Gaga breaks into her “rap” portion of the song, during which she encourages us to be “queens,” whether we are “broke or evergreen,” all the dancers form a single file behind her, which the dancers in Revelations do as well, to do eight counts of tendues, traditional ballet warmups. After her break at the organ (which, by the way, was a tangent into Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as well as an homage to a fortune teller head who lives inside a crystal ball at the Disney Haunted Mansion), Gaga heads back down to the stage to join her dancers, who promptly start removing their clothing – their slave garb, if you will – as she puts her jacket back on. While Ailey’s dancers remain clothed, and in fact get progressively more so from the beginning of the ballet to the end, it’s no mystery by this point that Gaga is not only paying homage to Revelations – she’s turning it on its head.

Ailey’s dancers progress from barely clothed in skin-hugging leotards to wearing full church regalia with hats, flowing dresses, and fans; Gaga’s dancers progress from full latex dresses to nothing but nude-colored underwear. Ailey’s sections progress from slavery to freedom achieved through spirituality; Gaga’s choreography suggests a regression from the third section back to the first. In order to understand why Gaga and her creative director, Laurieann Gibson, chose to do this, we should look at the meanings of the performances in the contexts of their debuts.

Revelations debuted in January 1960, at the height of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Eight years before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still actively speaking, and sit-ins were happening regularly. It was still four years before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, which would ban discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in employment practices and public accommodations, but the sense of imminent change was in the air. It was inescapable, one and the same with the zeitgeist. Ailey was no doubt inspired by this feeling, and elements of the ballet – including its build from sorrow to triumph – illustrate that he was likely in the throes of profound hopefulness for racial equality. Also, it’s important to note that Revelations debuted at the 92Y in New York City, undoubtedly in front of a liberal audience who shared this hopefulness.

“Born This Way” premiered in February 2011, just a couple months after Congress’ official repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law banning homosexuals from being open in the military, and one of the most blatant examples of government-supported discrimination still on the books. Gaga’s performance came after a seemingly never-ending deluge of headlines reporting teen suicides over bullying on account of their homosexuality. And while Gaga likely sees that we are definitely in the midst of a huge movement to abolish discrimination against people based on gender issues – women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, queers – perhaps she also sees that we have a long way to go. And unlike Ailey, she and the Haus were not performing in front of a small group who (likely) share their beliefs; they were performing on national television, most certainly in front of people who do not share the beliefs espoused in “Born This Way.” So while her performance progresses in reverse order from Ailey’s, it is not so much a statement of regression from freedom to slavery as it is a way to flip Ailey’s purpose on its head: Ailey was expressing his hopefulness about achieving racial equality to a room of sympathetic viewers, while Gaga actually aims to create a new race that is entirely free of discrimination. She does so by visually creating a new species of people with protruding facial and shoulder bones. Ailey aimed at racial equality and the triumph it would bring; Gaga aims at a race of equality and the togetherness it will create. This is her revelation.

“Born This Way,” both the song and the debut performance at the Grammys, is certainly a joyful hymn: the song concludes as a Church-like spiritual, with Gaga’s voice layered on top of itself, and clapping to mimic a choir. But Gaga’s homage to Revelations (established by BTW’s choreography, costuming, and lighting) also reverses certain elements of Ailey’s ballet, and therefore functions as a challenge to monsters to band together, establish a nondiscriminant race, and show the rest of the world that being yourself is the true path to spiritual freedom – so the entire world can join the choir.

Author Bio:
Meghan Blalock is a writer living in New York City. She writes for Gotham magazine, and has also written pieces for the local music blog Sound System NYC, The Rumpus, Southern Living, Gaga Stigmata, Woman's Day, and other publications. Her poetry has also been published in amphibi.us. Her work is viewable here and here.


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I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! - "Born This Way" Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion

By Roland Betancourt, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks

Meghan Vicks: Let’s begin with our thoughts about the song “Born This Way.” How does the song’s form work with, or against, the song’s message? In what ways does the song follow in the tradition of “celebrate yourself” anthems past, and in what ways does it break from that tradition? How does the song compare to Lady Gaga’s music from The Fame and The Fame Monster, and what does it indicate about the direction of Gaga’s project? I’m sure we’ll come up with more points and questions to analyze regarding the song, but for now let’s start here.

Eddie McCaffray: What I noticed immediately about the song were the lyrics - they make a point of saying exactly what it is people are accepting about themselves and others. There’s a long tradition of anthemic love-yourself songs that, for better or for worse, don’t make any explicit reference to anything of which someone might be intolerant. That’s fine, but for me it comes off as an attempt to cash in on all the good press and good vibes of such a song without risking the alienation of any potential part of a fan base. But this song isn’t like that - it makes references to God’s acceptance, to a “different lover,” and turns the LGBT(A) roll-call into a real litany. In a similar manner, when Gaga says “black, white, or beige” she’s departing from the cliche (which is to sing something like “black, white, or blue”) and taking the issue of race seriously. There’s room for joy and power and celebration, but there isn’t room for levity. It’s stunning that she could fit “. . . gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered . . .” into an up-tempo club-banger, and it’s wonderful that she wrote a song about tolerance that intolerant people can’t sing.

Besides that, I think the pretty-simple nature of the song sort of goes along with the simplicity of the message. It has a pounding beat and some very fun synth stylings flowered around it, but musically as well as lyrically the song is about just one thing. I also like the implications of “there ain’t no other way”; there’s a somewhat-understated note of militancy in the song. The song isn’t afraid of making very clear just what it expects people to accept, and it isn’t afraid of saying that intolerance is not an option.

And, finally, the intro seems like she is extending a hand to the religious community. “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-i-m,” as some have suggested, is a nod to Christians. The song isn’t about attacking anything besides intolerance, and if your religion can pass that very basic litmus test, then this is an anthem for you to celebrate your identity with as well - there are people out there who have their sights set on organized religion, people who aren’t treating it fairly just like some members of some organized religions aren’t treating others fairly. That’s not ok with this song either.

Meghan Vicks: Immediately upon the song’s release, Twitter exploded with people drawing comparisons between Madonna’s “Express Yourself”/“Vogue” and “Born This Way,” and many criticized Gaga for copying Madonna. While I don’t think that the song is an exact copy or blend of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” I do think that Gaga is purposely taking cues from Madonna (as she is always taking cues from those that came before her), and placing vocal and lyrical nods to her throughout “Born This Way.” That Gaga adopts and adapts what her predecessors have done is no secret; in a recent interview with Vogue she said,

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to - from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono - but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

She was born this way - from a genealogy of musicians, artists, and performers; significantly, she was cut - organically fashioned - from the cloth of the performer. “Born This Way” is no different; it’s also a product, or the offspring, of a long genealogy of anthemic, empowering songs that call on people to express themselves, love themselves, be themselves. So with “Born This Way,” Gaga’s rewriting Madonna’s message for a more radical agenda. As Gaga sings in the song’s opening lines, “My momma told me when I was young that we’re all superstars,” so Madonna sang nearly two decades earlier, “You’re a superstar, yes that’s what you are!” Madonna, of course, is a type of mother figure for all pop-starlets; when Gaga sings “we’re all superstars,” she’s singing as one of a generation who grew up listening to Madonna’s message from “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” In a way, given the song’s message, it absolutely needed to sound a bit like Madonna’s; but, given the 21st century context, it needed to be more straightforward (as Eddie talks about above) and also way more radical.

Musically, the song combines disco with a solid rock beat, which I read as a merging of the gay culture with the mainstream. If we think about “Born This Way” as a gay anthem, then the musical composition of the song is pretty brilliant: Gaga has taken heavily from the arsenal of gay club music and created a rock song. Or, she’s turned a rock song into a disco ball fixture. It’s a very glittery rock song! Or tough-as-nails disco. In either case, musically “Born This Way” is a type of oxymoron that makes hetero-rock just as queer as disco, and homo-disco just as mainstream as rock. It’s an incredibly interesting musical vehicle in which to house the message of her song: that we’re all equally beautiful - black, white, beige, gay, straight, transgender … 

Roland Betancourt: Well, I think that in this song we are seeing a definite shift in the trajectory of Gaga’s work. I do not want to sound like there is some strict evolutionary model or a chronology that I wish to impose on Gaga, but there have been definite patterns in her work. I believe many of us can recall the early Gaga period, where she relied heavily on her collaborations with Space Cowboy. This was the period that was inaugurated by “Just Dance” and witnessed songs/videos such as “Poker Face” and “Love Game.” We then had a change with “Paparazzi” that has lasted much into the present, however, I would say that after the “Alejandro” music video things began to shift - mainly aesthetically and visually. “Born This Way” places this shift into the musical realm and ties in directly to the thematic issues that have been developing in her work about homosexuality and gay rights.

What is of first note is what Meghan is referring to as the Twitter-comparisons to Madonna, which I would also refer to as a more widespread outcry to the song. Looking at Gaga’s history though, we find “Just Dance” to have many similar parallels to “Born This Way.” In many ways, “Just Dance” serves as the jumping dance song that everyone wants to sing along and dance to, but not the song that you particularly see as revolutionary. Nevertheless, in “Born This Way” we encounter lyrics that are antithetical to the inconsiderate hedonism of “Just Dance.” I think the brilliant part of “Born This Way” is that she’s produced a song that we are already tired of hearing. The comparisons being made to Madonna, for example, may seem valid at first, but every time I have compared the songs they don’t really seem to be there. Sure there are some similarities that seem to be riffs on one another, as Meghan suggests above, but the song actually has less similarities than it would seem. Gaga has produced an uncanny song in the Freudian notion of the term, where it seems all too familiar yet also wholly foreign.


Eddie McCaffray: And what’s so great about the foreign-lodged-within-the-familiar is that it provokes rediscovery of the world - if not in Freud, in Heidegger and Shklovsky. To keep this concept in line with the aesthetic of “Born This Way,” only a continual process of self-(re)creation will keep one meaningful to oneself. Accepting the categories and patterns offered by the world in a simple rote mimesis - the primary risk of conformism - renders one a simple colony of that world. But Gaga’s play with and reappropriation of all manner of cultural symbols, combined with this message of radical (self-)acceptance, calls Little Monsters to keep themselves uncanny, to maintain the tight-rope walk of foreign and familiar within their own plastic souls. 

Meghan Vicks: How did the first performance of “Born This Way” affect and/or reflect the song’s message? 

Eddie McCaffray: Let’s take it at face value: she was born this way, on stage, in front of fans and in the middle of pop-culture pomp-and-circumstance, surrounded by elite dancers, in a crazy costume, singing a huge pop song, out of a giant plastic glowing egg/womb. As has been dealt with at length before, Gaga is created by fame, born in the spectacle that she does not assume but which she becomes - the spectacle isn’t something of which she is a prerequisite, it’s what makes her possible. She can only hide in plain view.

This is an idea that she discussed in her Sixty Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper just before the Grammys. Honesty is important to her personally and as a part of her relationship to the people who look up to her, enjoy her music, and so on. At the same time, who can live on camera all the time? As Cooper says, her costumes are “not only attention-getting, but attention-directing.” Gaga tells him that she “art-directs” every moment of her life in order to combine honesty, privacy, and constant total exposure. This is a central part of her project in general and the message of this song in particular: in the modern world, it is impossible to hide. We are all constantly skewered by a myriad of controlling gazes. Resistance is futile. Rather, self-expression - the active, conscious, joyful engagement with these gazes - is the escape from the downsides of such a life. In creating ourselves, especially in creating ourselves in the ambitious, powerful, faux-self-confident way that a rock star might, we create breathing room, cracks and crannies in our personas in which to live. This is beyond “fake it till you make it”; faking it is making it. As in her Grammy appearance, performance is present at the birth of Lady Gaga and all her Little Monsters. It is the egg, Lady Gaga the product.

Roland Betancourt: I have often been attracted to Gaga’s work in the manner that it reflects on the medium, which is a self-reflexivity that has been very important to contemporary art historians in the past 30 years - perhaps less so today. My article on Jo Calderone for the upcoming Gaga Stigmata book reflects on these issues. In particular, I have been fascinated by the place of the viral in Gaga’s work, but a notion of virality that exceeds its traditional discussion and looks more to the body of the artist. “Born This Way” ends with an interesting line, “Same DNA, but I was born this way.” This presents a complex issue. Same DNA as whom? Contemporary society sees DNA as a very essential building block and we constantly attempt to construct identities by virtue of it. Often we have stories in the news regarding the emergence of DNA evidence that absolves prisoners of crimes or identifies lost relatives. We like to constitute our fundamental identities on this biological code, and our daily identities on viral, binary-coded images - via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. This co-mingling of essences suggest that Gaga shares a certain coded identity with someone, but differs in nurture - she was birthed in a different manner.

The fact that her performance included a birthing from an egg before an audience, as Eddie has just pointed out, plays with the very notion that I addressed when discussing Jo Calderone and which Meghan discussed in her “Anatomy of Change” essay. Gaga’s birth is a performative visual act - I mean that in both senses of the word “performative.” Yet at the same time she partakes an essence with someone, perhaps her fans, perhaps other misfits, other outcast monsters, or perhaps even humanity?

Her “organ” - perhaps one big visual pun! - was surrounded by faces on globes and haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets. It reminds me of the instruments used to replace a cell nucleus in the cloning process - an image that for a period of time was prolific in the news following the cloning fears of the late 1990s.

There was a sense of some sort of laboratory-musical setting, a place where, through the dispersal of song, a viral reproduction could occur. Where others, through sound, could be infected or cloned as Lady Gaga - same DNA, different births. 

To play with the Madonna references (both the singer and the Virgin Mary), Gaga said in a recent interview for the upcoming Vogue, “I wrote [‘Born This Way’] in 10 fucking minutes … And it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” Her use of the term “immaculate conception” is quite loaded. On the one hand it points to Madonna’s own work and supports the notions of a Mother-Daughter/Madonna-Gaga relationship that Meghan has set forth. On the other hand, it cites the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit in the flesh of the Virgin through the performative speech act of the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel. Recalling Gaga’s Alexander McQueen 2010 VMA dress, one sees an image of an annunciation on it.

Specifically, it is the image of the Angel Gabriel holding the Latin text of the Annunciation on a sheet of parchment that visually manifests the oral pronouncement of Gabriel that enacts the incarnation. The image being used is the Renaissance Annunciation by Stephan Lochner for the Altar of the Three Magi in Cologne.

But in Gaga’s dress, as far as I can tell, the Virgin is absent. The direct object of the annunciation is missing, placing Gaga in the role of the receptacle for the body of Christ. It is her flesh from which shall be molded the salvation of humanity, and most importantly, this process occurs through sound, through proclamation. It was later that night, while wearing the meat dress, that Gaga sang a portion of “Born This Way” for the first time and thanked God and the gays. When asked who she thanked more, God or the gays, she replied, “I thank them both equally, because they made one another.” Certainly, what we find here is this notion of co-creation and co-constitution that Gaga has defined as so crucial to the fame. Nevertheless, as a good Catholic school girl, Gaga surely knows the opening of the Gospel of John that posits the relationship between God and the Logos (the Utterance/Word/Verb: aka Christ) as co-existing and co-eternal with God. Therefore, she posits the gays as a communal force, one that is bound by a suffering on behalf of mankind, as if bearing the brunt of their sins and treacheries. Is this not the type of idea that the song advocates? A notion of community, unity, and power that comes through the fire of abuse? “Don’t be a drag - just be a queen.”

All these trends, notions of DNA, and Immaculate Conception, however, focus on the central notion of conception and birth, the idea of self-production and performance, which is seen as the crucial and fundamental postulate of 1990s self-esteem/identity-politics rhetoric. The idea of “being yourself” and, as some may want to compare, “Expressing Yourself.” Nevertheless, I would argue that Gaga’s focus goes directly to the issue of the performance itself. Just as the Virgin served as a model for Christian artists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because she presented the body from which the image of God was formed, the material substance, so Gaga plays a similar ontological role. It is in the closing lines of the song, regarding DNA, that the stripped dancers unite and dance entwined and form the “monster paw” that Gaga proclaims at the beginning of the song.

The idea of self-creation is seen here within a rhetoric of the self and community that is radically different from the “individual” of the 1990s, which was structured on this unique, quasi-isolated “I.” Many of us were fed the myth that you could exist as a quasi-island of self-defined identity. In Gaga, however, the message seems to be the same, but the rhetoric presents the notion of a dividual - a person that exists within a community, linked through networks and self-images. What this song and the Grammy performance re-iterate within Gaga’s corpus is that the identity politics of the past have been radically shifted, and that the self is constituted within a network of images, just as Gaga defines herself within the networked images of pop-culture. What we wish to attack in Gaga through comparison merely stresses the radical shift in how the eye/I is constituted via one another in contemporary society. 

Eddie McCaffray: Right! Maybe you could argue that the kind of identity Lady Gaga invokes is a kind that is inextricably tied to the hyper-media post-pop world in which we live. She’s a twisted reflection, an unsanctioned amalgamation, a satirical-partisan-celebrant; she doesn’t articulate a unique inner code, but bends the world back on itself in a distortion that remains essentially her own because of the act of its creation. Not expression but refraction.

Meghan Vicks: You guys are absolutely brilliant, but I need to talk about Gaga’s shoes and shoulders (this is so fucking typical: the men talk about science and religion, the women talk about clothes!). Did you see her shoes!? I haven’t yet been able to find a picture that shows a closeup, but her shoes were amazing. They were nude, and they looked like they were an organic part of her body - as if her legs had flippin’ sprouted stilettos! And her ankle bones protruded just as her shoulder bones did. It looked like she had reshaped, or regrown, her body in such a way that she now rocks shoulder pads that actually are her shoulders. As I wrote about earlier, the line between fashion and the body has blurred to such an extent that the distinctions between the two no longer exist: her shoulders have become her shoulder pads, and her feet have become her heels.

As Eddie talks about above, she’s corporeally born this [visual, performative] way: in fashion, on the stage, through a performance. The shoulder pads, in particular, are incredibly important in the scope of Gaga’s oeuvre. When she designed the blue outfit that she wore for “Poker Face,” she explained, “I knew I wanted it to be futuristic, so I thought shoulder pads cause that’s my thing. But I wanted it to be a new shoulder pad.” Hyperbolic shoulder pads have been a staple of Gaga’s work, so much so that they’ve evolved to become a part of Gaga’s body. They also, as Gaga indicates, signify something futuristic; in the case of the “Born This Way” performance, Gaga is reborn among a new race of humans (see the horns protruding from the cheekbones, the forehead, and the shoulders) who are are organically made from flesh and fashion, and reality and spectacle.

But for a song and a message that is so futuristic, the performance and the costuming feels very primordial and organic - not as space-age or typically futuristic as Gaga singing “Poker Face” with her video glasses, for instance, or as Gaga’s fire-shooting bra. And the performance is not nearly as hyper-consciously aware of its own performativity as much of Gaga’s earlier work is. So it is futuristic in a paradoxical way that calls to mind origins, beginnings, and birth.

We’re still dealing with monsters, though. Absolutely beautiful from one angle, and grotesque from another. As Roland and I were discussing on the phone earlier today, the bone structure that Gaga is playing with is aesthetically gorgeous from the frontal perspective, and monstrous from the profile. Look at Gaga’s face in these posters for Born This Way that have been plastered all over NYC:

 

From the front, Gaga has the desired bone structure of a model: incredibly high cheek bones, cat-eyes, arched brows, very thin. But from the side, the aesthetically beautiful becomes grotesque:

But the grotesque is always figured positively in Gaga’s aesthetic that embraces freaks, monsters, and queers. So again, as “Born This Way” is both disco and rock (sparkly rock, hard-core disco), so the costuming is beautifully monstrous. She’s turned the monster into a model, and vice versa.

Other points to consider and analyze:

• The gospel-esque outro of “Born This Way”
• “Born This Way” choreography
• Gaga’s hair during the performance
• Gaga, the Mother Monster, who hatches from an egg
• Gaga’s entrance on the Red Carpet in an egg, incubating
• Other topics of the Sixty Minutes interview: quotes, clothes, coffee-slurping, fake diamond
• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor quote during the performance (Gaga’s organ solo)
• Gaga's shout-out to Whitney Houston as inspiration for Born This Way
• Gaga's hat!

Dear Readers!

Please add your thoughts, analyses, and questions to the comments below. Let’s make (another) discussion, little monsters!