Part of Yüyi’s World

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

The following is the fourth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

Yüyi the Mermaid was introduced to the public imagination when choreographer Laurieann Gibson leaked a faint notion of the concept for Lady Gaga’s music video “The Edge of Glory”: “I just know that we’ll be feeling very fishy.” The ichthyologic teaser was enough to spark speculation that Gaga would be appearing as a mermaid in her next video. Of course, even after a performance on the French talk show Le Grand Journal where she first unveiled her aquatic alter ego, Gaga remained bipedal throughout “The Edge of Glory” video. The hype surrounding Gaga’s mermaid guise laid out on an operating table and hacked by couture doctors was never brought to fruition. Nevertheless, the specter of Yüyi still lurked and continued to develop via tweets, live performances, and, finally, an appearance in the “Yoü and I” music video.

She perfectly summates Lady Gaga’s project thus far, combining the spectacle of The Fame, the demonic metaphor of The Fame Monster, and the dichotomy of living halfway between reality and fantasy of Born This Way. She’s not a sultry siren floating through the crystal clear waters of a blue lagoon; she’s a grotesque aberration, a welding of woman and fish, inelegantly lying on a slab, carting herself around stage in a wheelchair, or writhing in a filthy bathtub. Her tail is a squamous stub, a black latex taper with an overgrown, misshapen flipper, or a braid of scales concluding in a filiform fin. A squamous bra fuses her breasts together and erases her nipples. In exploring the creation, both literally and figuratively, of Yüyi, she bears more relation to P.T. Barnum’s strange Feejee mermaid than Disney’s beautiful Ariel (The Little Mermaid [1989]) or Daryl Hannah’s sexy Madison (Splash [1987]).

Barnum’s sideshow creation, touted as an authentic mermaid, was nothing more than a hoax (as sideshows often are), the creature in question being the taxidermied upper-body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish, dipped in papier-mâché for good measure. Meant to lure ignorant consumers and spectators into the show for their patronage, Barnum exploited mythology and disfigurement in the name of commerce. Scholar Stephen T. Asma, in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, relates Barnum’s hoax to our contemporary cultural condition of ostracizing those who do not fit in with archetypical social structures, be they gender, sexuality, aesthetic representation, or biological functions. He says,

In Barnum-style hucksterism, we have completely fabricated monsters, such as the Feejee Mermaid, but also real disabled or abnormal individuals who were cloaked in fabricated exotic narratives. Often those fabricated narratives had implicit (and explicit) moral and political significance (Asma, 140).

In applying this theory to Yüyi and extending it to Lady Gaga overall, her transgressive nature and embracement of “the freak” typify the moral and political significance of abnormal individuals, and, in a way, reject the strictures and labels placed upon them (Corona, 2). The utilization of the wheelchair, while initially purely functional, bonds the creature specifically with handicapped individuals and even sufferers of Sirenomelia. Naturally this is nothing new, as many performers have exploited transgressive performance tactics to comment on mainstream society. However, none of these performers have over 12 Million followers on Twitter, music videos with over 1 Billion views, and constant attention in a 24/7 news cycle. Why has someone who so vigorously performs the monstrous, who impersonates men and mermaids, become so popular?

As Asma suggests, “Monsters were intrinsically exciting but also extrinsically useful in giving audiences a sense of relief and possibly even gratitude about their own station in life” (Asma, 140). This may account for Gaga’s initial rise to fame, when she did not yet tout life-affirming messages of acceptance, but rather bled on stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while singing about celebrity voyeurs. She made the celebrity an exciting spectacle, a freak at which all normal people could gawk. She still does that, although the shiny sequined shell of The Fame has cracked and given way to a new pop organism that headlines a new race instead of a new trend.

In this exploration of Yüyi as a biological extension of Gaga’s persona, it’s clear that it comes to a pinnacle through bestial intercourse. While the iconography of the mermaid is explicitly sexualized, even in Gaga’s incarnation, there is a logical dissonance with the creature as an object of desire. They may be alluring, seductive, and provocative, but mermaids in effect neutralize sexual activity, as it is impossible for coitus to occur between man and fish. This doesn’t stop Yüyi’s human lover from having sex with her, of course, adding to the confusion and blatant disregard for boundaries Lady Gaga engenders.

Gaga’s lover, portrayed by Taylor Kinney, dominates her to the point where he becomes her master. He administers oxygen to her via a mask and pours water over her in life-sustaining acts. He keeps her immobile, trapped in an aluminum tub in the middle of a barn in the landlocked state of Nebraska. Is this her savior? As Gaga tweeted, Yüyi is “a reincarnation of my birth+artistic spirit. In incubation, awaiting a human lover to save her…” Where was Yüyi incubating? Within Gaga’s creative unconscious? Within a barn in Nebraska? And how does her lover save her? There is no doubt Gaga is feeding into the cultural mythology of the mermaid figure, mirroring Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the little maiden of the sea who barters her voice in order to attain companionship and humanity. For Anderson’s character, of course, the story ends in heartbreak: she does not marry her prince and consequently dissolves into sea foam. Yüyi is a bit more Disneyfied, ultimately forming a union with her lover, her creator, her Dr. Frankenstein, both in their final embrace in the bathtub and the wedding scene, where Gaga sports teal blush, tying her to Yüyi.  

Just like Jo Calderone and the Lady herself, Yüyi draws upon precedents established in mythology, literature, music, and film. Originating in Assyrian legend circa 1000 BC, the mermaid has existed as a staple of crypto-zoological lore. The image has been continually re-appropriated by popular culture, and in her own way Yüyi pays homage to many of the depictions of mermaids that preceded her.

Her second performance of Yüyi in Sydney sparked mild controversy when Bette Midler reacted by tweeting, “Dear @ladygaga Ive [sic] been doing singing mermaid in a wheelchair since 1980-You can keep the meat dress and the firecracker tits-mermaid’s mine.” Midler was referring to her own alter ego Delores Delago (which, interestingly, means “Pain of the Lake”), a mermaid in a wheelchair act that she has performed since 1979 in several of her shows. The “fight” fizzled out as quickly as any trivial news story, and it would come as no surprise that Gaga would stage a re-performance of a cult figure. Surprisingly, though, Lady Gaga responded to the controversy a few days after the Divine Miss M’s tirade, pleading ignorance to Access Hollywood:

I didn’t know that she’d done [it], but I do now and I think it’s great…Obviously I feel connected to women in theater and women from the past … Maybe we’re just cut from the same cloth. I couldn’t hop around in that tail so I just stuck myself in a wheelchair.

That seems like a reasonable enough explanation, although considering the uniqueness of the staging, it might provoke further inquiry into whether she was truly ignorant of the character. Ultimately the research would be fruitless since authorial intent does not have supremacy over readings, and since Yüyi in practice confounds logic to begin with. She has little thematic development, she has inexplicable sex with humans, she has no clear demeanor attached to her monstrous flesh.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Yüyi: she exists primarily as a visual representation of the female monster. Lady Gaga’s creation of the mermaid figure inextricably binds woman and monster, a relationship that has permeated the arts and philosophy for centuries. One of the most infamous demons featured in the Christian Canon is Lilith, a monstrous female associated with storms, illness, and death (Isaiah 34:14). While only mentioned tangentially in the Scriptures, Lilith is a figure prominently displayed among many cultural mythologies, dating back to ancient Sumerian tradition. While historically Eve is credited as the first woman created by God, there is evidence that suggests there was another before her (Genesis 1:27). The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text, states that God created Lilith from the earth, as He did with Adam, before the creation of Eve. When Lilith refused to become subservient to Adam, as she believed them to be equals cut from the same cloth, God sent three angels to retrieve her and then created Eve from Adam’s rib. While both stories have receded into mere folklore, the exploration of the two females in Christianity prompts an interesting dialogue regarding the association between demons and the female sex.

Marie-Hélene Huet draws from Aristotelian theory to suggest, “The monster and the woman…find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity” (Huet, 85). Just as, she writes, demons are engendered due to the power of a mother’s imagination during pregnancy, usurping the place of the father as progenitor, Eve is deformed when she is birthed from Adam’s body (Huet, 85). She is dissimilar from man. Eve is not, however, dubbed a “demon” as Lilith was, in spite of the fact that Lilith was not the distorted offspring of a human. This concept of the monstrous birth repeatedly factors into Lady Gaga’s self-creation, alter egos, and her femininity and feminism. Especially in “The Edge of Glory” video, while sans Yüyi, Gaga displays her embracement of perhaps mythology’s most famous female monster, Medusa, in her bearing of Versace’s emblem.

Huet continues in her discussion of the monstrous imagination by examining the etymology of the word “monster,” deciding that it stems from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to show, to display.” She claims, “This tradition confirmed the idea that monsters were signs sent by God, messages showing his will or his wrath…” (Huet, 87). Demonic imagery acts as a reminder to faithful Christians of the dangers of sin and defying God’s word. This idea stems from the story of Original Sin, in which Eve plights humanity for her disobedience to God’s strictures, cementing the connection of the woman and the demon. The theory that the word “monster,” now inextricably bound with Gaga’s narrative, comes from a verb expressing the action of presentation and exposure illustrates how she uses spectacle as a tool in uncovering the monstrous aspects of the human psyche, exposing them to literally millions of people in hopes to reveal the lie and make it true.

Yüyi exists as a metaphor, manifesting all facets of her personality, in an attempt to make “this complex + incomprehensible force to be true” through acceptance of all personas, elements and processes of being, the incomprehensible force being the cultural phenomenon of Lady Gaga, a continuing effort designed to marry reality and fantasy and exist simultaneously in both.

Works Cited

Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Corona, Victor P. Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga. Journal of Popular Culture 44(2): 1-19.

Huet, Marie-Hélene. Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

The New Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Susan Jones. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

“The Story of Lilith,” JewishChristianLit.com, http://jewishchristianlit.com//Topics/Lilith/alphabet.html

Author Bio:

Alexander Cavaluzzo (@AleksandrJohn) is a Fashion-Sexual and unpaid laborer at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. He graduated with a BS in Art History from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is an MA candidate in the Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On the occasional nights when he is drunk on Jameson, he blogs at alexandercavaluzzo.tumblr.com. His lifelong dream is to become the intelligent version of Camille Paglia.

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Manifesting Love: "Born This Way" and Surrealist Art

By Willow Sharkey

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

Lady Gaga’s single “Born This Way” emerges into a world where questions of who may love whom are far from settled. Indeed, cultural anxieties regarding ambiguous gender identity, or any sort of otherness that falls outside clearly defined binaries, continue to so pervade the social body that the bullying of queer youth has become a sad emblem of recent history. “Born This Way,” then, is a deliberately queer anthem, ostensibly made to joyfully empower every “othered” being.

The word love repeatedly punctuates the lyrics of “Born This Way,” underscoring several different sites where love may operate. Gaga proclaims that it doesn’t matter if one loves an intimate partner or God, tells listeners to love themselves and their friends, says that she loves her life and this record, and that love requires faith. How love is incarnated is not of importance, rather the expression of love is paramount, integral to liberation; it also requires bravery, vigilance, and commitment.

 

Joan Miró, Love, (1925)

By highlighting an array of sites where love may be realized, “Born This Way” complicates the expression of love in mainstream pop music. It doesn’t celebrate typical boy-girl love and longing; rather, it aims to affirm self-love, and to so deal with the roots of social fissures and violence. The video pushes this complication further: the joyful anthem turns into a meditation on why affirmations of love are necessary. It posits that love exists and is created always in opposition to something else (evil). If Gaga is the mother monster who loves all the monsters she has birthed, she feels a mother’s love for her many creations – this new race whose very otherness is beauty. Yet she also feels protective of her fragile, newborn race. To be loving is also to be protective, and out of this instinct is born the impulse toward violence. The loving mother, advocating for and giving form to a species free of prejudice, harbors still the kernels of emotion that give life to violence. The opening sequence of narration positions goodness and evil as inextricably linked within the self, to be continually grappled with. While “Born This Way” redefines the outsider as beautiful, it does not absolve Gaga or her beautiful monsters of impulses that lead to violence. Instead, the video challenges all to continually make a difficult choice: the choice to love.

Salvador Dalí, The Accommodations of Desires, (1929)

Lady Gaga often directs her viewers’ understanding of her projects through cultural references and quotations; in turn, these cultural references complicate the meaning of her own work. For instance, Gaga evokes Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the video for “Telephone” to signify how the ephemeral pop commodity is both horrific and seductive, dumb and powerful, delicious and empty. This time, Gaga cites Salvador Dalí and other artists associated with Surrealism as influences on “Born This Way,” and so deliberately directs us to her thematic concerns. Appropriately, this points us to consider the complications to be found within notions of love and bodily desire, and how these complications may answer to a cultural moment ripe with fear and violence. The Surrealists sought to champion and embody the values of love and desire in their works, which they felt to be under attack. We may not share the intense threat of censorship and social inequality that functioned in the early twentieth century, but total equality remains out of reach, and so contemplations of love continue to be vital to art as humanist enterprise.

Max Ernst, Men Shall Know Nothing of This, (1923)

The Surrealists’ explorations of love and desire were intimately influenced by psychoanalysis. But Surrealists departed from Freud’s conception of desire, predicated as it was on a model of “illness” and “cure.” What Freud thought of as perversion in need of cure the Surrealists theorized as simply one potential element of human experience. Max Ernst’s painting Men Shall Know Nothing of This (seen above), often held as a masterpiece of the Surrealist movement, is said to have been inspired by Freud’s study of the delusions of Daniel Paul Schreber, whom Freud diagnosed as a paranoiac. Specifically, Freud identified Schreber’s fantasy of becoming a woman as a “castration complex.” In the painting, the central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber’s hermaphroditic desires. Ernst’s inscription on the back of the piece notes that in the rendering of the legs as symmetrical, “the two sexes balance one another.” 

Thus, Ernst made room for the desires of Schreber to be something other than madness. His “delusions,” could instead signify “balance.” Gaga’s mother monster imagery – on the one hand, a writhing evil body twisting in excruciating pain, and on the other hand, a perfected image of split-screen symmetry, which together comprise an intermingling of supposed oppositions – brings to mind Ernst’s project: a sensitive meditation upon finding the humanity in those that Freud’s psychoanalysis would deem the insane other, on finding the balance within imbalance, the love in pain, the human in what has been designated inhuman. All this is a project of love.

In an experimental literary piece written by Surrealists Marcelle Ferry and André Breton, the two writers pose and answer a series of questions that demonstrate and rejoice in absurdity:

M. What is solitude?

B. It is the queen sitting at the base of the throne...

M. What is debauchery?

B. It is the place in a meadow where the grass suddenly becomes thicker. It can be seen from a long way off.”

- From “The 1934 Dialogue”

Just as the surrealists used techniques of displacement and dream logic to unsettle the reader’s relationship to “the real” – a conception of the world increasingly troubled by the chaos of modernity – so Gaga’s video for “Born This Way” employs a fragmentary narrative to unhinge the viewer’s conceptions of how the video’s narrative is to unfold, thereby unleashing the viewer into an elaborate dream fantasia, working to expand conceptions of what constitutes a “normal” experience.

 

Exquisite Corpse, (1934)

In a work from the same year – the drawing Exquisite Corpse (above) – Valentine Hugo, Paul Éluard, André Breton, and Nusch Éluard playfully approached fears about the limitations and possibilities of the human body. Gaga’s precise, gestural dance with the tattooed model Zombie Boy seems to echo and dramatize the sentiment of this piece: fear and longing intermingle in human encounters, decay is inevitable, loving play is the ward against the downsides of the complex human experience. Both the drawing and Gaga’s mirroring of and intimations with Zombie Boy make the monster body, something our bodies will no doubt become as their decay is inevitable – less of a curiosity to be feared and more of a form endowed with charm, to be embraced. The corpse – indicator of the fearsome unknown, the abject, lifelessness, a dead object or “thing” – is made into an exquisite subject, holder of agency, movement, life, capable of loving and being loved.

Gaga’s first visual representation of “Born This Way” was her Grammy performance in February 2011, during which she emerged from an egg-like capsule on stage. Aesthetically, this image seems to have derived from Salvador Dalí’s often used motif of new lives hatching out of eggs, such as in his sculpture “Birth of the New Man,” or painting “Geopolitical Child Watches the Birth of the New Man.” The sculpture itself is marked with the phrase “the new man has to free himself from the past.”

Salvador Dali, Birth of the New Man, (1943)

The beginning of Gaga’s visual expression of “Born This Way” depicts her being birthed, freeing herself from the past. However, by frequently relying upon an excavation of the visuals of the past, Gaga also reinvents the past for new purposes. Moving from the Grammy performance to the video, Gaga shifts from being birthed to giving birth, from being freed to freeing – at once inextricably bound to past, and attempting to liberate herself and others from its strictures and mistakes. The process is a painful one: the choice to love in the face of hardship is difficult.

 

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, (1973)

The final image of the “Born This Way” video is Gaga’s face, in her zombie make-up, situated within a pink triangle, blowing a big pink bubblegum bubble, which seems about to pop. The monstrous face is reminiscent of the work of another artist Gaga has cited as an influence for the video, the painter Francis Bacon, and his dark self-portraits, which, though often read as horrific, he claimed to “not find disturbing.” By referencing Bacon’s presentation of a modified face as an monstrous and anxious, yet still human representation of a body, Gaga once again cites a dynamic process, this one concerned with how pathologized or stigmatized objects may become subjects.

Moving from the agonizing beginnings of life to the inevitabilities of corporeal decay, Gaga consistently grounds “Born This Way” in a tension of bodily pain. But the several gestures she makes to intermingle the pleasures and healing qualities of love with the certainties of pain and opposition manage to make “Born This Way” an expression of the dialectical: the past exists in the present, intimacy is expressed publicly, absurdity resides in the everyday. Binaries are not reified, they co-exist. By evoking the complex imagery of Surrealism, Gaga creates anything but a simplistic take on the powers of love and desire – love is transformative, imaginative, and continually born, a dream always to be realized, expressed, and affirming of life and the varieties of experience. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” manifests, or gives birth, to contemplating love again and again.

Author Bio:

Willow Sharkey is an Art History graduate student at California State University, Chico. She’s interested in performance/time based art, and all things pop culture. You can read more of her writings at www.willowsharkey.com.

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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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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!