Song Incarnate

By Cheryl Helm

This is the seventh piece in our series on “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

As best I can tell, most people seem to dislike “The Edge of Glory” video because it doesn’t have a story-line. That’s because they’re looking for it in the wrong place. The story-line is not in the video. Rather, it is in Gaga’s body. For the first time in her video career, Gaga has created something organic, in which the music and the visual are one. She is both the song and the singer. She becomes the Song Incarnate, music made flesh.

Watch her move.

Soundtracked by a pulse and choral heart monitor (which indicates that the song is driven by the flesh, is synonymous with the body), a hand extends around the corner of a building on a street billowing with white fog gently bloodied by the backlights. A hand appears at the window, sliding back a white curtain backlit in red and warm white. The woman becomes shadow behind a veil, a woman striking a sultry pose on a street corner. In the window, she is form obscured by the glare. She leans hipshot against the stoop as the beat bleeds into the song. As the song takes its beat from a heart’s pulse, Gaga takes form as the music swells – they are together in a symbiotic relationship, body and song dependent upon each other for existence.

This the moment when you realize that this video is going to be something very different and you’re not sure you like it. It feels uncomfortably intimate, as if you’re actually seeing Gaga, the woman behind the glitz and gimmickry and a dozen dancers. Gaga as she is, in her element, at home, on the streets of New York City. The Street, complete with Street Musician.

This is the Woman Behind the Curtain.

Gaga has become such an iconic figure in short films brimming with eye candy, stuffed full of content and replete with dozens of visual and cultural quotes, with each release launching a veritable scavenger hunt by some of the most innovative, freethinking art critics and cultural analysts (yes, I’m talking about you, Gaga Stigmata). Consequently, we’re just not used to seeing her so unembellished, unaccompanied, and seemingly unrehearsed.  And this time, that’s all we get. Just Gaga. Just the Song. As epicenter of the performance, which is why there is so little to distract us from the song itself. That’s not accidental. It’s intentional.

There is a story-line, but it’s visceral, told in the ancient language of music wedded to flesh: Gaga is both storyteller in the singing of it, and the story itself in the way she tells it through her body. The medium is the message and Gaga is both.

The video is set in Gaga’s artistic, as well as physical, birthplace. This is her life. This is who the fuck she is, and where she came from, embodied in a glorious song about the glorious feelings of winning at Life, even if you are near the end of it. In reality, the Edge of Glory is not a complicated state. It’s an elemental state, whether you’re standing at the edge of love, a momentous career or geographic shift, or the very edge of life itself, and you’re about to throw yourself into the embrace of your future, your destiny. It’s something that can only be experienced, not explained.

Gaga embodies that elemental joy and passion and sense of freedom, and honors its simplicity. She does it mostly with her body, which aside from a few hair flips, playful head tosses, and sultry Vogue expressions, is relatively unencumbered by the poses learned on the runway and in front of the fashion cameras. Also unobscured by elaborate sets, eye-popping costumery, and head-scratching manifestos and religious metaphors.

Watch her move.

As she saunters toward the camera from the corner, she’s completely in her body in a way we don’t normally see her. The shoulder movements are organic, and her walk is more sashay than casual runway strut. Still holding the camera’s gaze, she walks backward, drawing you toward the corner, then turns with a head-toss and walks away with natural swag, tossing a look over her shoulder just to see if we’re following. She’s animated by the song, unfettered by anything but the need to move to the music. It’s physical and it’s visceral because she wants us to feel the music the way she does in that moment.

And that’s what we see. Gaga dances in a way we rarely see her, except in candids shot at after parties. This is Gaga dancing before The Fame. It’s the dance of the Street, the dance of the Club, the dance of Burlesque and the heavy-metal Go Go. She’s utterly physical in a way we’ve not seen before. She makes love to the bricks and mortar, to the front stoop, to the rain-slicked walk, to the streets of New York City itself. She’s in her element, she’s in her body, and in her body is the song, the lyric, the momentum, and the bone-deep memory of being on the Edge of her own glory. She makes her body the message of the song. She is the story-line. She is the joy and liberation and euphoria when there’s nothing behind and only a leap of faith ahead, with only a song to carry you forward.

She is at her most spontaneous as she dances to Clarence Clemons’ deep-roots sax solo. There is nothing to distract her, nothing to do but dance. And dance she does. Moving as the music, not as a choreographer, tells her body to move, and in her body are the memories of seminal moments in her musical history: movements she may have seen in the old school music videos of her childhood, movements she claims for herself because she owns the emotions that created them. She is at her most free and most joyous in this section of the video. You can almost see her heart and soul take wing and soar. She is entirely herself and no one else. She is Gaga before we knew her, the historical Gaga before the onslaught of her public Fame. She is Gaga as private person before the private/public joint venture persona whose life she art-directs in every moment of visibility.

Much has been made (on the basis of very few actual facts) of the fact that this was not the original concept for the video. There were nod-and-a-wink hints about “something fishy,” rumors of mermaids, photos of a subway set and what looked like a surgical suite, and clearly something typically-Gaga and complex was being planned. This plan came to a screeching halt after one day of shooting. Some have called the resulting video “boring” and “crappy,” and blamed it on being a hasty, slapped together project. I can’t think of anything more insulting to Gaga’s innate talent and prodigious ability to create something out of nothing, time and time again.

In scrapping the original, elaborate, high concept for “The Edge of Glory,” Gaga tapped into her deepest musical and artistic instincts and memories. The necessity of doing it quickly called up something deep in her artistic soul and she honored it  –  “honored her vomit,” committed to it, married herself to it. Spontaneity is part of Gaga’s creative process. There are many behind-the-scenes stories about her tendency to change her mind about something and throw the entire company into disarray as they rush to make manifest her last-minute vision.

Case in point: the costumes for the 2011 Grammy performance of “Born This Way.” The Fresno Beehive cited an AP fashion story (no longer available unfortunately) that quoted Gaga as saying:

“You know I plan months in advance, but unfortunately I always change my mind at the last minute. Actually the outfits for the Grammys we made two days before and all the material came from a trucking company in Fresno.”

She does this, not because she has the power or authority to make such expensive and likely panic-inducing decisions, but because her most singular article of artistic faith is to honor the product of her inspired moments.

“The creative process is approximately 15 minutes of vomiting my creative ideas, in the forms of melodies, usually, or chord progressions and melodies and some sort of a theme lyric idea. It all happens in approximately 15 minutes of this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings. And then I spend days, weeks, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is that you honor your vomit. You have to honor your vomit. You have to honor those 15 minutes.” [Gagavision 43]

She never seems to labor long over the creation of a project. For example, she said she wrote the title track, “Born This Way,” in about ten minutes. But then she spent the better part of a year stroking it, tweaking it, together with every other song on the record. “I licked and touched and kissed and made love to every single note and melody and lyric on that album,” she told US Weekly.

But as she herself has noted, there’s a period of artistic pregnancy between conception and birth. And the newborn is always as flawless and perfect as she wants it to be, with very few exceptions, usually circumstantial. “The Edge of Glory” video appears to be one of those unforced exceptions. It’s not perfect in the way her previous videos have been. Its conceptual and constructive seams are showing. You know you’re seeing a set and not New York itself. You know the steam rising from the drains is machine-generated, and the video is making an statement about the “who and what” of the Gaga we first see. She is visibly lip synching, and we all know how she feels about that. Which is the most emphatic clue that the way this video looks is deliberate and not accidental, not merely slapped together at the last moment. And it’s done for a purpose.

It is precisely this unpolished imagery coming at us that makes the video seem unnervingly personal and intimate and spontaneous. Even her approach to the camera is intimate. She’s allowing herself to be shown instead of commandeering the lens and giving you the feeling that she’s watching you watch her. There’s none of that sentiment here. Rather than performing her characteristic videographic Show and Tell, she seems to simply say, “See me. Watch me. Here I am.”

What the video lacks in long, deep deliberation is more than compensated by its spontaneity, which is precisely what gives music its raw power and emotion. Rejecting elaborate and complicated symbolic discourse, Gaga created something elegant in its simplicity, pure in its intentions, and deeply tethered to her own instincts and influences.

Culturally, in doing what can fairly be labeled as retro inasmuch as “The Edge of Glory” is an old-fashioned honest-to-God music video, Gaga has shown us again what is good, even great, about our musical heritage that need not be archived or abandoned simply because newer forms exist. The ways in which music is packaged, presented, and experienced are part and parcel of the cultural heritage of the music itself. In “The Edge of Glory,” Gaga clearly rejects the notion that her frequent use of complex short-film presentations for some songs should preclude her embrace of the ancestral roots of music videography for other songs.

In this case, the video is both medium and message. Her use of classic music videography was meant to honor the musical heritage of an art form that can be made relevant today. Her choice of incorporating saxophone into “The Edge of Glory” was meant to honor her musical heritage. Featuring Clarence Clemons as the ONLY other person in the video was meant to honor the musical heritage that he embodied.

In the glory days of MTV, music videos were all about the song, nothing more. Little was done or allowed to detract from the power of the music. That may seen like ancient history but sometimes, a song deserves nothing less than to be let alone, unfettered, free of artifice and complexity and cinematic angst, the kind of song that should be all that you see and hear. “The Edge of Glory” is exactly such a song. TEOG is exactly the right kind of video to honor it.

And lest we forget, one of Lady Gaga’s most iconic, epic performances consisted of standing still and striking fixed poses, mostly in silhouette, on a fixed platform (the Monster Ball’s opening, “Dance in the Dark”). And another of her most poignant and beloved performances was created spontaneously in less than 48 hours after throwing out a full-scale production number at the last moment (2010 Brit Awards).

Sometimes less is more, and simplicity can be the most elegant art form of all. It says everything by saying almost nothing at all.

Author Bio:

Cheryl Helm is an unapologetically unreconstructed hippie and devoutly politically incorrect. She sold her soul to rock n roll in the 50s, bought her first good electric guitar from Patti Smith's husband in Detroit, and never looked back. She writes poetry, prose, L-Word fan fiction, essays, editorials, music criticism, and some things she can’t quite define. She’s been published in obscure feminist literary journals, alternative presses, newspapers, Creem Magazine, and blogs, leaving behind digital traces like glitter.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Tribute to the Big Man

By Cheryl Helm

Clarence “Big Man” Clemons passed into his Glory on June 18, 2011, taking with him a musical voice that lived large, loved large, and infused rock n roll with outsized and passionate soulfulness. Like so many musicians, Clarence spoke and sang through his instrument, and oh! – the songs he sang! the stories he told! Just as brassy as his saxophone, Clarence was Street, and his was the song of the Road: the music that travels on two feet, sits on a stoop, pours out from the doors of storefront bars with crackerjack stages where booze and music wash away the poverty, and scrub it down to a Shine. His was the voice of dirt yards and tire swings, brick tenement row houses with asphalt lawns crumbling in the heat, the sweaty sweltering heat of summer wherever she goes.

With every song he brought the grit of the road, the soulful moan of the midnight train, the road song of urban gypsies and rock n roll vagabonds, bluesy troubadours and dancing troupes, the rumbling diesel rhythm of the tour bus, tires clicking their tongues over the concrete miles and lonely nights unspooling and playing out behind.

Steeped in gospel as a child, Clarence was gifted with an alto sax and music lessons at the age of 9, played in high school jazz band, and attended college on music and football scholarships. If not for bad knees, he might have had a career in the NFL, and he certainly had the talent to become a great jazz musician. But the seminal music of the 50s and 60s, embodied in the honking saxophone style of R&B legend King Curtis, inspired his momentous shift from baritone to tenor sax, and set his feet on the determined path to rock n roll and his musical destiny. He became the face as well as the musical soul of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, anchoring anthemic Jersey rock n roll to its authentic black roots in jump blues, jive, doo wop, R&B, and soul.

His physical presence in flashy dress and his bantering stage-play with Springsteen carried as much weight as his signature instrumental solos, filled with urban yearning and visceral deliverance from the sorrows of the day. Without Clarence, who could imagine that “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road,” “Jungleland” or “Dancing in the Dark” could have risen above the basic elements of composition to become the truly epic songs that moved a generation to laugh and cry, dance and sing, live and love. There’s not a single Springsteen song of great sentiment that does not have The Big Man’s musical fingerprints all over it.

Though he’s best known for his work with Springsteen, his much larger legend was built over the years, song by song, album by album, in his solo work, his studio sessions work, and on stage with legends like Jackson Browne, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, his own lesser-known Red Bank Rockers, and many more artists, gifting each project with his distinctive playing style and his passion for life and music forged in those moments of musical truth and heritage.

His final project was on Lady Gaga’s album, Born This Way, where he contributed sax solos for two songs, “Hair” and “The Edge of Glory” (both of great personal significance to Gaga), and gave his last live performance on American Idol. The day before his death, he appeared in the video for “The Edge of Glory,” Gaga’s first truly classic music video.

Having rejected a high-end fantasy concept at the last minute, Gaga chose instead to produce a pure, stripped down, deeply personal solo performance that premiered to much controversy and carping. Her instinctive commitment to making THIS video THIS way for THIS song now seems poignantly prophetic. Clarence was the visual as well as musical anchor for the video. He was the Street in Gaga’s New York City. His solo was the Edge and Glory that she danced to with utter abandonment and joy, giving flesh and blood to the voice of his saxophone. His last pulsing notes punctuated her final sashay and strut into the New York night. The video was authentically Gaga, on the edge of her glory to come, authentically Clarence, literally “on the edge of something final we call life,” authentically the heart and soul of rock n roll dreams made flesh.

I’m so very grateful to have these last artistic moments with Clarence, to embrace his final song to us. And a message no one could have foreseen when this video was made.

With his passing, I fear that we’ve lost a great deal more than simply a legendary man, a legendary artist. We’ve lost the tether that ties contemporary music to its deep historical and cultural roots. I look out over a rather bleak musical landscape, where saxophones are dismissed as “cheesy” and a generation has a musical memory that doesn’t go much farther back than Madonna, a landscape where music can be created by machine, in bits and bytes, in mechanistic manipulations of voice until nothing human remains…no soul is required and isn’t even necessarily desirable.

But the Street is still here, always and everywhere, and I imagine that tonight, on a thousand stoops and porches, on rusting skeletons of urban fire escapes, on the shoebox stages in a hundred dimly lit bars, thousands of new voices are being raised, to celebrate his Glory, and put passionate flesh and blood to the dance of the life he lived, the life he loved, and the life he played for us all those long years.

If we owe Clarence Clemons anything at all, we owe him the respect to pick up his blazing torch and carry it forward into the next decades where music with heart and soul still matters, still lives and breathes, still dances on rainy streets and fire escapes, still loves in the full heat of summer, and still lives in the fullness of its own authenticity and history.

Rest well in your Glory, Big Man.

Author Bio:

Cheryl Helm is an unapologetically unreconstructed hippie and devoutly politically incorrect. She sold her soul to rock n roll in the 50s, bought her first good electric guitar from Patti Smith's husband in Detroit, and never looked back. She writes poetry, prose, L-Word fan fiction, essays, editorials, music criticism, and some things she can’t quite define. She’s been published in obscure feminist literary journals, alternative presses, newspapers, Creem Magazine, and blogs, leaving behind digital traces like glitter.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Marketing Mother Monster

By Cheryl Helm

When Lady Gaga announced her deal with Zynga to create her own virtual playground (GagaVille) within Facebook’s popular Farmville game, there was a great deal of muttering about whether (a) she’s jumped the shark or (b) she’s sold out and has become just another commercialized pop product. My reaction was, “It’s hard to go off the reservation if you were never on the reservation to begin with.” In fact, Gaga has a pretty solid track record in circumventing the conventional marketing machinery of the music business when it comes to sharing and distributing her work, summarizing her philosophy in the interview with GoogleTalk:

“I don’t want to be a part of the machine. I want the machine to be part of me.”

The music business machine has a long history of mass-producing pop stars and teen idols who were, indeed, packaged and sold. Pop music early on acquired the cachet of a corporate product much like the Hollywood studio system (and built on that model), manipulating pop singers like puppets: choosing their clothes, styling their appearance, selecting their songs, managing their public appearances and performances, and handling all the advertising, including photo shoots and trade media ad campaigns. Disney was one of the earliest, and, one of the most (in)famous, pop-star factories and continues to be one today. It began in the late fifties when Disney figured out a way to capitalize on the rock-n-roll craze and still protect its brand as good, clean, wholesome fun (as a counterweight to the perceived sleaze and satanic temptation of rock n roll). Their formula was quite simple: find respectable, pretty and handsome white teenagers who could sing well enough not to inflict pain, and dance well enough to perform simple dance routines. Then record some bloodless, but virtuous, insipid pop songs and ta-da: Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. The brand was Disney, and the product was a morally upstanding teenage role model and a sure-fire moneymaker until s/he was no longer so cute, or thin, or pliable.

There are certainly conventions to be observed in how a pop star is imaged and promoted – much like any brand. Photo shoots are utilized to create and enhance the star’s image, and to appeal to consumers to buy their records and attend their concerts. Brand endorsements are lucrative but even more importantly, they reinforce the pop star and hir music as products to be consumed. So in terms of music marketing and promotion, there is a reservation and most pop stars are on it.

And then there’s Gaga.

From the beginning, she was her own creator and her own advertiser. “Just Dance” got airplay because she promoted it herself, tirelessly and ceaselessly. The Fame succeeded because she was touring and campaigning for it before the first single even dropped. With precious little help from the music industry, she created her own brand, and the product is Gaga: her art, her vision, her passion, her conviction.

So it’s hardly surprising that most of Gaga’s promotional efforts are self-defined, self-controlled, and seldom conform to the industry models. That is, her promotional efforts are often art forms in and of themselves, part of her life’s grand performance, and/or what she perceives as her vocation to help bring about social justice for all. Even her records are largely promotional rather than end products; the real product is Gaga herself, on stage where she can be experienced, not consumed. In most of her promotional efforts, there is not a firm separation between the promotional activity and her performance project.

How does she do it?

Leveraging technology has always been part and parcel of Gaga’s aesthetic. She uses technology the way a painter uses watercolors, oils, acrylics, fabric, multimedia collages – as a medium for expressing and conveying her artistic visions, of which music is only one dimension, albeit the most important one. In other words, technology is only one palette, one of many avenues for both creating and sharing her work with her audiences. Her earliest shows were distinguished by the use of avant-garde films as interludes that also conveyed some element of her performance project, and also by such props as the now-famous GaGa glasses constructed with iPod LED screens to articulate part of her artistic message. The deployment of such technology has only become more extensive as her show has grown into a full-scale spectacular extravaganza.

Gaga uses social media to an unprecedented degree, and no other living artist has been as successful as she in employing Twitter and Facebook to build and support a growing fanbase that is fiercely loyal and willing to promote all her ventures. While other pop stars (Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber et al.) have followed suit, they tend to use Twitter as a virtual billboard to hawk their wares – asking their fans to buy products, attend performances, etc. Gaga simply announces that a new release is forthcoming, or an interview or performance has been scheduled, and her fans take on the responsibility of promoting it.

This type of viral marketing by word-of-mouth allows Gaga to completely control the content of her marketing AND builds a greater sense of unity, a sense of “us-ness” or “we-ness” that many of her fans don’t experience in their daily lives. Her fan base is built upon an army of disaffected, bullied, rejected, ridiculed, and socially-isolated people who are cut off from the normal experience of belonging within their peer groups. Her fans have embraced Gaga so avidly because she is one of them, an outsider who is still socially isolated from the mainstream music community and who is subject to a barrage of hateful comments on every media site that posts a story about her. Even though she has reached the heights of artistic achievement in pop music (and her trajectory is *still* climbing), she’s still the odd girl out, she’s still the misfit. Her fans know exactly how that feels and embrace her for it, creating a place where SHE belongs, in a spirit of love and acceptance.

Because in Gaga’s case there is mutual identification between the star and her fan base, her marketing efforts are driven by a desire to serve the community of “little monsters” as much as they are propelled by the need to sell her music, her art, her vision. GagaVille is an excellent example. With GagaVille, she has created a virtual playground for her fans and other users of Farmville who may not be familiar with her music – a place where her fans can create a virtual world of their own and populate it with elements that are personally meaningful. GagaVille reinforces the sense of community within the Gaga fan base as more users join the game, become neighbors, and share and exchange rewards and goods.

With its initial launch, Gaga used GagaVille to distribute exclusive content (songs from Born This Way), but the site has a limited shelf life, through May 26, 2011. However, given her passion for social justice, it’s quite possible that she may choose to extend GagaVille and use it in the future as a way to encourage her fans to become more active in fighting for equality, for their own rights and the rights of others. The potential for GagaVille to become a medium for motivating political and social activism is certainly there.

Additionally, by pre-releasing songs from Born This Way on GagaVille, Gaga managed to cut most leakers off at the knees, and thus did not experience the creative death of a thousand leaks – she employed GagaVille to release and distribute her songs before leakers could steal and post them. Although the album did eventually leak, one day before Gaga was to stream the entire record to fans in the UK through Metro (where she also, by the way, served for one day as a guest editor, a position she used as a platform to promote her educational program about bullying), the net effect has been to drastically undercut the leaking subculture that spoiled the rollout of her previous album, The Fame Monster.

Her latest promotional venture with Starbucks is, at first glance, a much more commercial campaign. Beginning May 19, 2011 and continuing through June 7, 2011, Starbucks is conducting a scavenger hunt featuring Lady Gaga. Store customers scan QR codes to obtain clues to use in the seven-round game, which involves math, logic, and reading skills, as well as pop-culture knowledge to decipher the clues. The game is designed to encourage group play, much as GagaVille is. The first players to solve all the clues in each round receive Starbucks merchandise and Lady Gaga promotional items. Much like Fuse TV takeovers featuring Gaga for a day (and for the Born This Way roll-out, an entire week), Gaga took over Starbucks’ digital network for a day on May 23, 2011, allowing visitors to stream the entire Born This Way album, obtain a digital download of “The Edge of Glory,” and view an exclusive video by Gaga.

Obviously the chief benefit to Gaga in this business deal is to promote sales and airplay for her album and its current single. The album was played in all Starbucks stores on May 23, 2011 (a first for the corporation), and is among the albums sold in the stores. But this deal also achieves an important social goal for Gaga by providing another technology-based means for her monsters to visit and participate as a group by discussing the clues and messages, which further fosters a sense of community among her fans.

In creating and advancing her project, Gaga also differs dramatically from her peers in the area of product endorsement. This technique in and of itself is not unique to Gaga; many pop stars are used as front women (and men) to market everything from clothing to perfume. But Gaga’s choice of what products to endorse, and her involvement in the creation or purpose of those products, are often strikingly different from her colleagues.

Corporations will often hire celebrities as “Creative Directors” to market a product that the celebrity has no actual involvement in creating. Their role is strictly that of a figurehead, putting a familiar face and name on the product. But not Gaga. In her own fashion, Gaga has inverted and reversed the role of such celebrity endorsement deals by creating her own product line (The Grey Line) for Polaroid. When Gaga accepted the position of “Creative Director” for Polaroid, she dove right in to the entire design process.

Together with the Haus of Gaga, she designed a pair of camera sunglasses that could record video or still photos and display them onscreen, a product that recalled her famous iPod glasses from The Fame era. Thus her own performance project bleeds into the design of a new product that is clearly directed, first and foremost, at her own fan base. You can be sure that in next year’s tour, she will look out into the audience and see hundreds, if not thousands, of Polaroid camera glasses displaying messages and images that are significant to her fans. And with this new product, her fans can create and literally reflect their own personal visions, media, and messages to Gaga and the world. This is creative empowerment at its best.

She also redesigned the iconic Polaroid camera for the digital age and incorporated inkless technology into the printing process. She rounded out her product line with a Bluetooth digital printer that can print images from the camera glasses, the Polaroid camera, and a cell phone. These products reflect Gaga’s personal and aesthetic commitment to sustain, re-imagine, reinvent, and reinvigorate iconic pop culture by recreating something that is both ever so familiar and yet so forward-looking at the same time. And it puts the power to create directly into the hands of her fan base.

The conventional marketing model for fragrances – another major product line often endorsed by celebrities – has been turned on its head with Gaga’s involvement in developing her own fragrance for Coty. While it’s likely that celebrities have some say in the fragrances developed for the product lines they endorse, Gaga chose the essential ingredient herself: the molecular structure of her own blood. Talk about bleeding one’s aesthetic into a product! This revelation certainly perpetuates Gaga’s reputation as a quirky, eccentric star who never trods a predictable path if she can avoid it.

It also explains a rather cryptic remark made during her ShowStudio interview in May 2010. Asked what was the nerdiest thing she’d ever done, she giggled and said that she and her Haus were trying to discover the effects of the smell of blood on people. Now we know why. And again, Gaga is creating something both unique and deeply personal directed toward her fans. It’s not just a fragrance for your skin. It’s the essence of Gaga herself….the ultimate bonding between star and audience.

Gaga’s passion for humanitarian and social justice causes is well-known, so her willingness to serve as spokesperson for the MAC Viva Glam products to raise funds for AIDS prevention and treatment is a natural extension of her personal commitment to such causes. In addition to using the products herself, she’s made several personal appearances to promote the cause that the products fund. In an interview on Good Morning America, she leveraged her fashion aesthetic by wearing a Mugler latex outfit, which she said was “condom inspired” because she wanted to talk about the issue of safe sex.

She also created a short video with Nick Knight for MAC Viva Glam that is itself a work of art. It features the Viva Glam products, uses a non-verbal message to promote safe sex, AND foreshadows several elements of the video for “Born This Way,” which was released some time later.

Viva Mac Lotus

"BTW" Lotus Spirals

Left: Viva Mac, Right: "BTW"

Spilt/mirrored-image face

Left: Viva Mac, Right: "BTW"

Backbends

Top: Viva Mac, Bottom: "BTW"

Stripteases

Once again, Gaga managed to blend her performance project with the endorsement of a commercial product line that promotes her own social and humanitarian values. Much like her music videos, Gaga uses every marketing opportunity to articulate some element of her overall aesthetic, to build layers of cultural references and commentary, and to nurture her community of fans – to intensify the personal bonds and create a larger, deeper sense of belonging and identity, a sense of us-ness that liberates them from their social isolation, out of which is born a new sense of freedom and creativity. She is nurturing the next generation of artists and designers, and the next generation of political activists and leaders who will change the world, one (commercial) project at a time.

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The Manifesto of Little Scholars

In a recent episode of the television comedy *Community*, a disgruntled professor, having been challenged by Abed on his reading of the 1984-92 series *Who's the Boss?", exclaimed, "I am not a fan, I am not a groupie; I am an academic!"  This is a sentiment that many of us who study Lady Gaga can relate to and it is a question we must constantly struggle with. We spend time watching YouTube videos, collecting information, and writing articles on our findings in a timely manner. Our work happens in the interstices of other projects, be it Russian literature or Byzantine icons. Our interest is seen as an obsession by most. Our colleagues and advisors suggest we purge such interests from our professional lives so as to be taken seriously -- and in a tight job market this is not to be taken lightly. Our work therefore takes place in the in-betweens: on trains, weekends, vacations, or dissertation-writing breaks.

Our work happens always on the go, researching and collaborating via social media. We must follow @LadyGaga, @formichetti, @ladystarlightny, etc on Twitter for research purposes, and watch YouTube videos on our iPhones. Our discussions necessarily exist somewhere between gossip and scholarship. The cover for Born This Way album is a perfect metaphor for our methods; it exists outside the studio, in the DIY world of photoshop and blogs. Just as Gaga designed the "Judas" record cover on Word and took a picture of it on her Blackberry, we craft our understandings on Facebook and write introductions on our iPhones. Why? Because, pop-culture will never be lowbrow, because we were born this way.

Roland

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From "Alejandro" to "Born This Way," Dirge to Liberation

By Cheryl Helm

The following piece is the sixth in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Eight months ago, Lady Gaga released “Alejandro” to great hoopla over its religious imagery, and over its (apparent) similarities to Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” (musically) and “Vogue” (choreographically). Now she’s gifted us with “Born This Way,” a film with far more expansive religious imagery, and whose main controversies are the graphic birth scenes and inevitable debate over whether the song is a Madonna knockoff of “Express Yourself” (musically) and “Vogue” (the spoken/rapped lyrics).

“Born This Way” is not a narrative sequel to “Alejandro” (as “Telephone” follows the narrative line of “Paparazzi”). Rather, when compared with “Alejandro,” “Born This Way” reveals major conceptual pivots in Gaga’s aesthetic, and dramatic evolution in her approaches to certain themes. The most notable evolutions between the two videos are found in Gaga’s depiction of female power figure(s) and protagonists, in the progression from a closed gay community to an open inclusive community, and in a seeming shift away from the treatment of religion solely as a means of social and political oppression to a more catholic spirituality as a source of solace and strength.

Compare, for example, how the communities of the two films are shot and introduced. “Alejandro” is shot in cold low lighting, which matches its tonal darkness that stems from being a grievously sad story set in a bleak militant dystopia where solace in any form is in very short supply. Soldiers march bearing emblems of the Holocaust and its horrific human toll, which, as we well know, was justified by institutionalized racism and homophobia.

In contrast, “Born This Way” is shot in warm low-light that simulates birthing environments. The dancers are seen kneeling, in preparation for their births into full-grown offspring of the Eternal Mother. It is as joyous and celebratory as “Alejandro” is sorrowful and elegiac. While “Born this Way” is a liberation birth dance, “Alejandro” is a dirge, and an angry one at that.

“Born This Way” is strikingly different from “Alejandro” in tone and subtext, but a more careful examination of common elements and character types reveals them to be companion pieces that signify a change in Gaga’s overall project.

Institutional Religion vs. Popular Spirituality

An important distinction between “Alejandro” and “Born This Way” lies Gaga’s depiction of religion and faith. To the extent that “Alejandro” is, in part, about faith and freedom, it is both springboard and study in contrast to the philosophy behind “Born This Way.” Whereas the faith of “Alejandro” serves as sanctuary, escape, and justification for oppression, the faith of “Born This Way” functions as respite, solace, and a catalyst for liberation. The faith of “Alejandro” deals in stasis and death; “Born This Way,” in life and rebirth.

“Alejandro” presents faith in the context of a specific religious institution, which is rigid, controlling, and oppressive. It is faith in doctrine; it is a faith in which the light of divinity has gone out. The iconography in “Alejandro” is explicitly Christian, and of the Catholic variety. Crosses, crucifixes, rosaries, and nuns serve up an abundance of controversy. This Christian imagery is accompanied by symbols of oppression. For instance, a helmeted soldier and Gaga-as-nun are strung up like puppets, signifying that religious faith is a kind of bondage (and not the fun kind) – a sardonic twist in a film laden with lots of sex but no pleasure.

In contrast, “Born This Way” depicts faith as affirmative – something that can be called upon as a source of strength and comfort. More importantly, perhaps, the faith here is independent of any explicit religion or doctrine. The video contains a plethora of religious/spiritual images, however they are nondenominational: eastern and esoteric imagery abound while the cross is used only sparingly. From the upright and inverted triangles replete in both political and esoteric meaning, to the Eternal Mother’s lotuses, butterflies, and Third Eye chakra, “Born this Way” signals a shift away from religion (e.g. the Catholic Church) to a more universal, dare we say “catholic” (katholikos) expression of faith. Lyrically, Gaga invokes God explicitly (God makes no mistakes) and implicitly (Capital HIM), not as a basis for oppression but a spiritual affirmation of one’s own inherent divinity.

Two Faces of Liberation

The driving narratives of both “Alejandro” and “Born This Way” is a quest for acceptance liberation, but from opening to closing shots, those quests take place in very different worlds, and seek opposing kinds of freedom. These differences are largely functions of Gaga’s evolving artistic/political intentions and messages in the two videos.

“Alejandro” was created in the context of the debate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Although the video never overtly addresses the issue, it is nonetheless an impassioned plea for the abolition of policies, regulations, and laws that discriminate against LGBTQ people. Institutional liberation requires the rejection of religious influence behind every homophobic law and policy. On the surface it appears to be a denial of faith, but what it really requires is a change in the way people exercise their faith.

“Born This Way” is the Gospel of Gaga, which advocates for self-actualized liberation: self-acceptance, self-respect, self-empowerment. To achieve it requires no institutional acquiescence, no defeat of personal opponents or bullies (in fact, there’s not a hint of any adversarial personal or institutional relationships). It is an act of faith to embrace ourselves with full belief that we are exactly as we were meant to be, whether we consider ourselves to be divinely created or not. It is an article of faith to say, “I am beautiful, I am perfect in my own way,” and walk by that faith, live by it.

What Gaga seeks in “Alejandro” is escape, not self-liberation. She uses religion to avoid dealing with her grief and her frustrated relationships. In “Born This Way” Gaga seeks to find and express the liberation that is already hers by birthright. The Gaga of “Alejandro” desperately looks outside herself for freedom in other people and things, and uses sex to force her way to acceptance by a group that doesn’t really want her. The Gaga of “Born This Way” seeks her freedom within, and shares the quest and celebration of this freedom with kindred folk.

The Goddess/Queen Archetype

“Born This Way” begins with a Creation Myth, a Gaga Genesis tale. The Eternal Mother is a figure of Light, giver of life, protector of her young. We first see the back of her head, bearing a face that evokes both Metropolis as well as the faces on her offspring. The opening sequence accompanying the narrative is among the most visually powerful in Gaga’s oeuvre, particularly the skyward turn toward G.O.A.T., where constellations form a pair of ovaries. There, the Eternal Mother is the womb, and the vaginal birth canal is an amber-lit translucent ramp. She is attended by a midwife, and flanked on both sides by dancers in soft shadows. Note the recurrent appearance of the letter “V” visually framed in different ways, which reinforces time and again that “No, I don’t have a penis. I have a vagina. Now watch me put it to work.”

Her nature is procreative. She is chained to her birthing throne, her hoof-like feet raised in stirrups, but is otherwise not confined or restricted. At the birth of evil, she herself is torn in two, the Evil Mother sitting atop a lightning bolt ziggurat, birthing twin skeletal figures and an AK-47 (I’ll see your machine gun bra, and raise you a rapid-fire monster gun). Her corollary in “Alejandro,” the cyborg queen, trains an army of soldiers; the Evil Mother gives birth to the weapons with which to equip this army. While the army is not explicitly defined as evil, the birthing of their weapons is an act that promotes death instead of life. Rather than retaliate, the Eternal Mother wonders, “How can I protect such perfection without evil?” This is the essential nature and the moral challenge she passes on to her children.

The Dark Queen of “Alejandro” is as menacing and lustful as the Eternal Mother is protective and nurturing. She is an insectile cyborg vampire who exists in darkness and who rules a dystopia redolent with militarism.

She lusts after Alejandro’s barb-wired heart, stroking her red lips as the heart passes by in a funeral procession. This lust takes on added meaning as she opens her mouth and flashes gold fangs. She hides her eyes behind steampunk goggles, sardonically opening each lens one at a time to sing “she won’t look at you.” She’s malevolent and uncomfortably seductive, even though she never participates directly in the rampant sexual performances.

She is attended by a sleeping armed soldier and a high-ranking officer who peers over her shoulder as she reviews the troops. Under her watchful gaze, the soldiers perform their martial drills and Spartan training against the backdrop of a screen where images of war and violence are projected. The training exercises militarize sexuality and sexualize militarism. The eroticism is muted by their aggression and violent movements as the soldiers circle, embrace, shove, choke, and slam each other to the ground. These are the Cyborg Queen’s offspring. But she’s not birthing a new type of humanity; she’s overseeing the training of an all-too-familiar master race of soldiers.

The Innocent Starchild vs. The Nun

In a vast nursery of gestating heads in translucent wombs, one Starchild has already begun to mature and take complete form. She is the new race in its infancy. Her wide-eyed look and playful nature speak of virginal innocence and oneness with oneself. She has not yet had to fight the battles for self-acceptance and respect that her older siblings are engaged in. She’s just a baby. She still remembers who and what she is. She is spiritual by her very nature. Like her Eternal Mother, she’s a creature of Light.

In contrast, the nun of “Alejandro” represents the grieving woman who buried Alejandro’s love. She flees to religion for solace, not only from her grief, but also from other unfulfilling relationships that require more than she wants to give (“Don’t want to talk, don‘t want to touch, just smoke my cigarette and hush”). Dressed in passionate red, she ingests rosary as an act of communion, and prays for release from the love/attraction of these men.

When she is dressed in pure white and bearing St Peter’s Crosses (papal symbol of humility), she seems to have achieved the spiritual release and wisdom sought by her red novice. She also appears free of the lust that drives Gaga to bed and dominate the soldier in the barracks. But lust is imposed on her by the soldiers: they surround and force her into a violent group grope in which she eventually sacrifices her religious purity for not-entirely-mutual sexual desire. In a clearly wry moment during the orgy/rape scene, however, the white nun’s cross over her crotch is revealed to be an arrow pointing to her vagina, as if to say…no no, gay boys, it goes in HERE! It’s also a sight gag: See, I have a vagina. No penis.

The Essential Gagas

To perform the central character in both videos, Gaga literally strips herself down to the essentials. In “Alejandro,” director Steven Klein forced her to cut her hair and appear without makeup, to make her feel more vulnerable in keeping with her character. In the barracks scene, she wears only a nude set of Calvin Klein underwear, silk hose, and pumps with a sensibly high heel of perhaps four inches. Her eyebrows are bleached and she wears virtually no makeup except for dark lipstick, giving her a pale, ethereal, fragile look. Even at her most sexually aggressive, she seems almost doll-like, the kind you would take home, put up on your shelf, and dust occasionally.

The Gaga of “Born This Way” is also minimally costumed and makeup. Most shocking is that Gaga gives up shoes and stockings altogether. She dances barefoot, wearing only a half-sole dance shoe for added stability and traction. In stark contrast, this Gaga is fierce and muscular, both physically and emotionally. This is not some porcelain doll, this is a strong woman fighting for her freedom from prejudice and condemnation, and celebrating her liberation.

The Pas de deux

In “Alejandro,” Gaga seeks to gain acceptance within the group of soldiers through sexual domination. The scene is highly sexual, yet not erotic: desperation and frustration characterize the mood.

None of the characters in this scene derive any kind of pleasure or even sexual release. Gaga’s partner responds to her advances with violent aggression bordering on rape. Both force themselves into this sexual pas de deux, and neither is satisfied by it.

In “Born This Way” Gaga partners with model Rick Genest (Rico), aka Zombie Boy, in a playful, joyful pas de deux. Using one of her favorite motifs, the mirrored performance, Gaga’s makeup mimics Rico’s whole-body tattoos, and she wears a matching Mugler tuxedo (which may reference her male alter-ego, Jo Calderone, instead of Madonna as some surmise). Alternately coltish and fiercely passionate, Gaga uses Rico as partner and sometimes prop, while he remains largely impassive as one would expect a non-hungry zombie to do.

The Dance

Gaga’s relationship to the dance company is quite different in the two films. In “Born This Way,” she celebrates and embraces them in relationships that are non-sexual; they share a common origin, quest, and struggle. This company is as diverse with respect to race, gender, class and fashion as is the human family at large, reinforcing “Born This Way” as anthem and ode to inclusivity.

More importantly, Gaga is the featured dancer, and dances solo throughout the video. BTW has been called Gaga’s liberation album, and this is certainly reflected in her movement, and her fiercely joyous personae.

In “Alexandro,” Gaga’s relationship to the company is fraught with desperate attempts to engage them either as sex partners or as comrades. Gaga has described this as trying to have the same kind of relationship with gay men as they have with each other, but they don’t want her. The dance revolves around the company, not around her. Compared to the rich diversity of “Born This Way,” the dancers in “Alejandro” are homogenous with respect to race (and possibly, gender) and fashion. This homogeneity visually reinforces the film’s German subtext and connection to fascism, which cannot wholly be separated from the notion of a master race that is exclusive by its very definition.

Group Hugs, Gropes and Orgies

“Born This Way” features a number of group scenes in which Gaga lies in a tangle of bodies, touching and being touched, stroking and being stroked.

In some scenes, they lie in amniotic fluid/Mugler latex goo, recalling their common origin as the Eternal Mother’s children. These scenes are highly sensual but not explicitly sexual.

The orgy scene in “Alejandro” is violent and blatantly sexual. The soldier/dancers surround the nun in white, grab her, push her, shove her, toss her, hoist her in the air and throw her down to couple with a soldier on the floor.

In its own queer way, this scene is related to a rite of passage by which Gaga earns acceptance as a soldier. In a decidedly Fosse-inspired ensemble dance, she sheds her Liza with a Z vest, and dons a bra with machine guns attached.

In the end, she gains acceptance not by becoming more herself, but by becoming more like them. It’s not liberation; it’s surrender and resignation. In the closing shot, the red nun’s features dissolve, as if her embrace of religion has consumed her from within.

Implications

The trajectory from “Alejandro” to “Born This Way” signals something of a quantum leap for Gaga musically and narratively. There’s a clear progression in how she creatively, politically, and spiritually portrays female power. Does this reflect a shift in Gaga’s interpretation and/or depiction of a more conventionally recognizable feminist philosophy? More likely, it is a deeper reflection of how she has long defined her personal and artistic mission statement:

“Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we’re taught to view women, and my work is both visually and musically a rejection of those things. But more importantly, it is a quest.”

Showstudio.com, In Camera with Lady Gaga, May 2010

Rather than adopting a more recognizable feminist stance, her depiction of the female in “Born This Way” signals a broadening of her visual and musical vocabulary as she pursues her own quest for defining and empowering her own femaleness.

There’s also a clear shift in how she has chosen to shape her stance on LGBTQ equality. The militancy of “Alejandro” clearly stems from its ties to the policy of DADT, which was repealed not long before “Born This Way” was filmed. The song itself was written months before this political watershed, and we all surely know there are battles yet to come for equality on all fronts (marriage, adoption rights, etc.). It is unlikely that Gaga will abandon her strong political activism and advocacy on these issues, but she is striking at the heart of how we become victims of legalized bigotry and social bullying in the first place. Our oppression begins with believing that we are as others define us. When we accept that we are inherently less than because of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, etc., oppression is easy, whether it is institutional or social.

“Born This Way” also lacks the open attack on religious institutions (specifically the Catholic Church) that foster homophobia and misogyny, and that drive the legal codification of these prejudices. Instead, once again, she broadens her visual and lyrical vocabularies of faith and spirituality to make them as inclusive as the narration of the song itself. No doubt, she will continue to personally and artistically confront religious institutions that promote bigotry, but what she has done in “Born This Way” is to enrich the soil of spiritual alternatives in which this generation can grow and thrive without needing the approval of church or state.

Ultimately, with “Born This Way,” Gaga has shifted the frontline of activism. She has taken the battle away from a focus on outside forces and opponents, and instead towards a deep inward embrace of our inherent self-worth that needs no approval or institutional acceptance, thereby strengthening us both personally and in community. Considering the physical, visual, and musical energy of “Born This Way,” it is clear that the artist has experienced some kind of major leap forward on all fronts. A Hallelujah moment.

Author Bio:

Cheryl Helm is an old transgressive hippie, devoutly politically incorrect to all corners. She sold her soul to rock and roll in the 50s, picked up her first good electric guitar from Patti Smith’s husband (Fred “Sonic” Smith, RIP) in the late 60s, and never looked back. “Rock n roll, bitches, do or die,” as Gaga says. She’s written poetry, prose, the L-Word fan fiction, essays, editorials, music criticism, and some things she can’t quite define. She’s written alone and with others, published in obscure ancient feminist literary journals no one ever heard of, as well as alternative presses, newspapers, Creem Magazine in its glory days, blogs, fan forums, leaving digital traces behind like glitter.

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