On Plastic: The Endless Garment

By Laurence Ross

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

Imagine (if possible) a woman dressed in an endless garment, one that is woven of everything the magazine of Fashion says, for this garment without end is proffered through a text which is itself unending … This endless garment has a double dimension: on the one hand, it grows deeper through the different systems which make up its utterance; on the other hand, it extends itself, like all discourse, along the chain of words.

– Roland Barthes, The Fashion System

It’s not meant to be an answer … it’s meant to be a perfuse number of questions.
– Lady Gaga

Despite the fact that Jonas Åkerlund did not direct “Yoü and I,” the video seems like the third chapter in a continuing narrative that the Åkerlund-produced videos “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” began. There is Lady Gaga’s glamour-infused romance (the result of which is death), Lady Gaga’s release from jail (the result of which is death), and then Lady Gaga’s escape to/return to Nebraska (the result of which is death). Yes, there is a repeated (rebirthed) theme, but there is also a (funereal) procession, a narrative extension on the discourse. Gaga leaves one man for another, moves from one prison to another, transitions from one state to the next. Gaga is continually killing one version of herself so that the next may be born, which implies two paradoxical sides of Gaga: one that wishes to live and one that wishes to die. “Yoü and I” simultaneously exhibits the separation (Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone) and the synthesis (Yüyi) of these two (seemingly) opposing sides of Gaga’s self. There is the Gaga who wants to be with the lover, submissive and secluded in the Nebraska barn, and the Gaga who wants to be the spectacle, the pop star, the one with agency.

I’ll Follow You Until You Love Me:

Lady Gaga stalks in her stilettos and her Chanel pants past the cornstalks. She stalks toward the one she loves, the one she had left. (“It’s been two years since I let you go.”) She is adorned in funeral garb that echoes her final outfit in “Telephone.” (A video at the end of which she says, “Now let’s go far, far away from here.”) She drops a dark flower to the dirt, because a flower, in the strictest sense, is not what she is offering. (Though, as I have suggested before, there is a Steinian aspect to Gaga’s project/narrative: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”)

When Gaga arrives in Nebraska, she still seems dressed for the part of the spectacle. Her Chanel and her stilettos stand in stark contrast to her rural surroundings. She is not, however, dressed in the makeshift, more avant-garde attire of the previous two videos. In comparison to fashion adorned with grotesque ruffles and Mickey Mouse print or fashion constructed from caution tape and flags, Chanel is quite tame. As Barthes points out in The Language of Fashion, “There is however a price to pay for the Chanel style: a certain forgetting of the body which we would say takes refuge, is absorbed in the social ‘distinction’ of clothing” (108). In wearing Chanel, the figure (the spectacle) of Gaga becomes less prominent. Gaga’s choice of fashion – away from the makeshift and toward the readymade – brings Gaga one stilettoed-step closer to the generic available to us all.

In the opening scene, Lady Gaga is also once again portrayed as part cyborg, with her exposed mechanic arm and a metal chin above a (heavy) metal voice box. Gaga has played the cyborg before, in her gold-plated attire of “Paparazzi” and with her robotic stutterings – both vocal and physical – in “Telephone,” though in those lavish and urban settings, she is clearly meant to be the centerpiece of those theaters. When Gaga arrives in Nebraska, however, she arrives alone.

Just as there is a price to pay for Chanel, there is a price to pay for Nebraska. A price that Gaga now seems willing to pay. (“But this photo of us, it don’t have a price.”) No backup dancers, no entourage, no spectators. Gaga, as spectacle, as pop star, is already fading away. (“I’ll be a girl backstage at your show.”) Even in the video’s opening shot, she is a blur, a wisp, a haze. In entering Nebraska, in pursuing her lover in Nebraska, Gaga ceases to pursue the stage. The flashing cameras and screaming crowds are replaced by the naked sun and the whistling wind.

We’re Plastic But We Still Have Fun:

In “Yoü and I,” Gaga is ready to give up the spectacle of herself. As Gaga uses her one arm to forcibly raise the other (opening her arms to be embraced?), she sings, “I’d give anything again to be your baby doll.” A doll to be played with, manipulated, and dressed up like any number of plastic toys, a doll to be experimented with. And as Barthes writes in his essay on plastic, “Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic … is in essence the stuff of alchemy” (Plastic 97). Gaga, in the video, seems initially torn by the idea of the doll, even as she sings of her desire to become one. Gaga struggles with the notion of the doll just as Gaga both embraces and rejects the actual doll she is offered by the menacing ice-cream truck driver.

But it is once inside the barn that the real transformations begin. Gaga transfers her agency as a performer to the lover: Gaga becomes the one performed upon. The lover sprays and injects (“Silicone, saline, poison, inject me.”) The first redesign turns Gaga into a being that resembles a yellow canary, a songbird/showbird/jailbird bound and retrained by her captor/curator/lover. “Fashion (as we conceive it today) rests on a violent sensation of time. Every year fashion destroys that which it has just been admiring, it adores that which it is about to destroy” (Language of Fashion 106). Gaga-as-canary is caged, pinned down, in the process of being domesticated. (The harness, the hairpin glasses.) The domesticated canary is the canary that needs to be bred, that needs to be engineered by an engineer.

The triangular shape of the shoulder pads the lover engineers recalls the memory of yet another jail suit – the black-and-white striped ensemble Gaga wears at the beginning of “Telephone” as she is placed behind bars. And the long collar constricting her neck recalls yet another constriction – the neck brace Gaga wears in “Paparazzi” after falling from the balcony. Here, in the laboratory of the lover, Gaga is not the creator, but the created; she is not the visionary, but the vision; she is not the artist, but the art.

In the process of change, of becoming domesticated, Gaga becomes less and less human. In a way, less and less alive. (“Dress me, I’m your mannequin.”) The dark-haired intermediary figure Gaga becomes between her canary form and Yüyi is the most lifeless of the three, and, in a way, the most artificial. “At the sight of each terminal form … the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma. This is because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels” (Plastic 97). Her movements in this intermediary form, despite the absence of any visible cybernetics, are quite mechanical, her eyes often vapid. She seems, in her floral-coated attire, as severed from life as the flower Lady Gaga drops to the dirt in the beginning of the video. There is nothing left here of the pop star, the spectacle as agent. (“So put your dreams up for Nebraska.”) Nearly all of her human skin is masked, her legs now sheathed in boots and stockings that foreshadow the mermaid’s tail.

Gaga’s final transformation into Yüyi, however, presents us with an unexpected shift. Yes, on the one hand she is literally legless, immobilized, contained within a large bucket, and reliant on the lover to breathe, which is perhaps the epitome of a lack of agency. But on the other hand, Lady Gaga has transformed into a mermaid, a fairytale figure of myth. Once one is in the world of Faerie, the rules of our world, the “real” world, cease to exist.

Gaga may no longer be human and her breasts may now resemble plastic more than flesh, but there is a freedom granted by this transformation. “And as the movement here is almost infinite, transforming the original crystals into a multitude of more and more startling objects, plastic is, all told, a spectacle to be deciphered: the very spectacle of its end-products” (Plastic 97). By muting the initial spectacle of herself and allowing herself to be molded, Gaga gains a mutability that allows her to become the spectacle once again. Once one enters the world of Faerie, one can become anything.

We Are the Crowd:

In comparison to Yüyi who stands out (without legs) as spectacle, the Gaga who dances in the barn is merely one of a larger crowd. The Gaga performing choreography, while perhaps striving for spectacle, ultimately fails. Barthes, in his essay on the striptease, writes, “The dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have been seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it hides nudity, and smothers the spectacle under a glaze of superfluous yet essential gestures” (Striptease 85-86). The aura of the striptease in these scenes is first generated by the costumes in which Gaga and the rest of the dancers perform (clad in bondage straps and Gaga with cuffs dangling from her hips) and is solidified by the ritual gesture of pole dancing.

Gaga is multiplied in these dance scenes by the rest of the dancers who replicate all of her movements and serve to distract the spectator from Gaga herself. (This distraction stands in direct opposition to “The Edge of Glory” video, in which the stage was Gaga’s and Gaga’s alone.) The camera angles in these dance sequences do not follow and focus on Gaga in the ways we would expect. At one point the camera abruptly tilts and Gaga is out of the frame, the focus instead on the dancers above her head. Gaga may be wearing her aquamarine wig in these dance scenes, but these are the scenes in “Yoü and I” in which Gaga as spectacle is the most obscured, the most diffuse, and the most generic.

Gaga does eventually lose all of her clothing, though it is not on the dance floor. By the time Gaga becomes Yüyi, she is not wearing any garment at all. Or, perhaps, she has (for the moment) become the garment, the accessory to the lover. There is a scene where the lover and Yüyi appear to be having sex, though whether or not they are actually having sex is questionable. (At least sex in the heteronormative, penetrative sense of the act.) The very fact that Gaga is decidedly not human in this form raises the question, is such sex even physically possible? “Feathers, furs and gloves go on pervading the woman with their magical virtue even once removed, and give her something like the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell … the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from human use” (Striptease 85). It is also feasible that at the end of “Yoü and I,” the lover no longer desires sex in the traditional sense. He is no longer naked, but wears rain boots (adapting to her circumstance) and shorts. He is no longer standing above or hovering over her, but curled almost in the fetal position at her side. The scene shifts from one that is overtly pornographic in its intention to one that is much more tame. In this scene, one in which both parties appear to be content, it seems compromises have been made on the behalf of each. Gaga as Yüyi not only regains herself as spectacle, she regains her agency in the relationship. The lover still holds Yüyi at the end of the video, though this hold is no longer a restraining one. The hold is now one of mutual embrace, as Yüyi is also holding him.

This scene of the mutual embrace represents the ultimate synthesis of the two disparate yet co-existing sides of Gaga – the Gaga the lover and Gaga the spectacle. In her song “Fashion,” Gaga sings: “You are who you wear, it’s true.” And if this statement is indeed a truth, then Gaga is her truest self in this scene as Yüyi. As Yüyi, Gaga is wearing nothing (and no one) but herself.

Yellow Dance and We Turn:

There is one more Gaga presented in the video who is arguably the most lifeless – the Gaga in the wedding dress. This Gaga wears the pallid face of a dead woman, her cheeks not rouged but drown in blue. In the context of the spectacle, death is, perhaps, our final show. There is our viewing, and, if we are lucky, the ray of sun(spot)light that pierces the forest canopy to shine on our glass coffin. There is our final application of make-up, our final moment on the stage before we are born forever out of sight by our pallbearers. The Gaga in the wedding dress, the most traditionally domesticated vision of Gaga we are given, is presented as a symbol of death: the corpse. But this Gaga-as-corpse is animate, not lifeless. One life (New York) is given up for another (Nebraska). Though she is filmed in the final scene with a ghostly transparency, the expression she wears on her face seems not so grave. These scenes seem more like a dream than a reality, and in the final scene, the dream (the wedding dress) overlaps the reality (the Nebraska barn). One dream (the pop star) is given up for another (the lover). And if we are merely (and perhaps endlessly) swapping dream for dream, dress for dress, does it matter which we choose?

Barthes concludes his essay on plastic with this thought: “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas” (Plastic 99). Lady Gaga, in placing herself in the generic, domesticated role of the bride, shows that whether she chooses to be the pop star or the lover (or anything else for that matter), she can remain our spectacle. As Yüyi, embodying the conflicting sides of herself, Gaga shows that it is possible for us to have our frosted cake and eat it too. That it is possible for domesticity and agency to co-exist. That Lady Gaga can be (and is) both the artist and the art. And that, in a plastic world, if Lady Gaga can become our spectacle, we have the capacity of spectacle as well.

Bibliography:

Åkerlund Jonas, Dir., Telephone. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2010. Film.

Åkerlund Jonas, Dir., Paparazzi. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2009. Film.

Barthes, Roland. “The Fashion System.” Trans. Matthew Ward. London: The Trinity Press, 1985. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “The Language of Fashion.” Trans. Andy Stafford. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “Mythologies.” Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Print.

Formichetti, Nicola. “Yoü And I / LADY GAGA / FASHION CREDITS!!!!!.” NICOLA FORMICHETTI’S BLOG!!. 16 Aug. 2011. Web.

Lady Gaga. “Dance in the Dark.” The Fame Monster. Interscope Records, 2009. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Fashion.” Confessions of a Shopaholic. Hollywood Records, 2009. CD.

Lady Gaga. Interview by Sway. MTV. 18 Aug. 2011. Television.

Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Boston: Four Seas, 1922. Print.

Yoü and I. Dir. Haus of Gaga and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Writer Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a novel, Also, I’m Dying, in which characters deliver performances of crisis, education, anarchy, vanity, husband, wife, child, and alcoholism, among other things.

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Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical “I”

By Eddie McCaffray

Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder

Ever since Lady Gaga sang, “He’s got me like nobody […] she’s got me like nobody” in “Poker Face,” she has been playing with fluid grammatical identities. Accordingly, this essay will consider Lady Gaga’s lyrical use of the first-person singular pronoun, and, more broadly, the role of the narrator in her songs. As have many songwriters before her, including some she cites as influences, Lady Gaga often writes songs that function as the narrative or manifesto of some fictionalized narrating personality. Bruce Springsteen, one such influence, is well-known for writing character songs, wherein the speaker is specified enough to have a particular financial and/or romantic situation, personal past, or philosophical outlook; this character is then acted out by Springsteen’s song. Thus, though these narrators are only occasionally named, they do have distinct sensibilities as artistic creations separate from both the song and singer herself. Such a narrator may be fairly specific, such as in “Paparazzi,” or less so, as in “Government Hooker.” But in both songs, the “I” of the lyrics is not really intended to be understood as Lady Gaga herself, but as another persona Gaga sings through.

However, Lady Gaga plays with this trope beyond simply employing it – she steals rather than borrows. In several of her songs, the “I”, the narrator, is not simply one character, created to sing a particular song, but instead is inhabited by dual or multiple fictionalized speakers sharing that always-singular “I”. For example, as discussed previously by myself and others, “Judas” presents a narrative wherein it is difficult to tell just who is speaking to whom, or about whom. And, to heighten the anxiety caused by this narrative uncertainty, Gaga’s songs often threaten power relations in the same move. Not knowing if Jesus is betraying Judas or if Judas is betraying Jesus is worrisome not only because it makes identity uncertain (who’s who?), but also because those two identities traditionally have an established and meaningful relationship – one which includes and encourages certain assumptions about power, legitimacy, and morality; this very relationship is destabilized and made uncertain as well. The same is clearly true of the stalker/superstar relationship in “Paparazzi,” and of the client/hooker one in “Government Hooker.”

I suspect, and will argue, that this uncertainty – both in its basic perspectival-narrative aspect, and in its (gender, power) “trouble” aspect – is directly linked to Gaga’s performative project. Beauty, or power, achieved through performance, are in the “I” of the beholder, in its quality as the subject. And it is just by blurring, through art-ificial performative identity, the line between beholder and beholden (subject and object) that power, beauty, and identity are made available or attainable for an individual who had previously been objectified into passivity and exploitation.

Is “individual” really the right word for a constantly-unfolding, transient-yet-destined, process that will always be constituted by the limits of subject and object?

Is there a grammar of the new race of Mother Monster?

Three-in-one “I”?

We will start with the most explicit, to my mind, example of this perspectival-narrative uncertainty: the “Judas” song and video. As I discussed in an earlier piece for GS, “Judas” presents lyrical and narrative uncertainty about whether Jesus, Judas, or some woman (Mary Magdalene?) is singing. Consider the verse:

When he calls to me, I am ready

I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs

Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain

Even after three times he betrays me.

In the first of these four lines, Gaga sings from the perspective of either an apostle or Mary Magdalene, called to or summoned by Jesus. Here, the narrator could even be Judas himself; this lyric could reference Judas in the middle of coming to give Jesus the betraying kiss, responding to Jesus’s salutation as written in the Gospel of Luke: “Judas, are you betraying the son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:47-48) Similarly, the next line suggests (relatively unambiguously) Mary Magdalene, who washed Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. The pledge of forgiveness could be Jesus speaking of Peter, who was prophesized to and did in fact deny his relationship to Jesus three times on the night of the crucifixion (as is suggested by the fourth line). It could also, perhaps, indicate Jesus’ forgiveness of the Judas kiss. These uncertainties are compounded by the chorus of the song – which suggests Jesus still loving Judas, despite his betrayal, in addition to a pining ex-lover – as well as those that appear in the other lyrics.

Thus the narrator in “Judas” must switch many times, often in the space of single line, and usually not between two possible identities but between two clusters of possible identities: from “Judas-or-Mary” in the first line to “Mary” in the second to “Jilted-Lover-or-Jesus” in the third and fourth. And the likely addressees (the likely objects) change as well! Does the singer transform from one to the other to the other to the other in order to become whatever is necessary for holding the listener’s attention? To maintain the authoritative, power-position before the verb? Has performance trumped identity – first by being the identity of the performer and then by fulfilling its role all too well? What does such a narrative voice suggest about Gaga’s whole project of fame? That the performer and audience are one? An endless chain of performers performing for performers?

Let us expand and explain this idea by studying the “Paparazzi” song and video. As Ayah Rifai suggests in her November 2010 essay for Gaga Stigmata, the pop superstar of “Paparazzi” in fact seeks the love of fans, is desperate to receive what they are desperate to give. When the stalker and stalkee, paparazza and popstar, are so closely adapted to one other, who holds the power? Who is disciplining whom? Whose discourse constitutes which object? The superstar and the paparazza need each other, and the stalker is the inversion of the superstar – not the best performer but the best fan. The desperate search to express oneself is in fact a desperate search for the attention of others. The most intimate possession, the self, interacts symbiotically – not exploitatively – with the most foreign phenomenon, the power of the Other.

“Promise I'll be kind”

Perhaps this is best exemplified simply by the desperate, romantic vocal performance Gaga gives to “Paparazzi.” Though sung from the perspective of a paparazza, the song is invariably (of course) performed by the pop star. Its desperate professions of love and devotion cannot help but bleed beyond the lines of the fictive, narrating stalker persona; Gaga’s love of fame leads to her love of photographers, of stalkers, and that shows in her vocal and live performances. In these performances of the song, Gaga often dies – the pop star martyring herself for the sake of her death-obsessed “fans”? So desperate to give them what they so desperately need that she will die – and live again? In the extreme intimacy of such a symbiosis, is the distinction between performer and audience somewhat arbitrary?

Rifai writes, “In this interpretation, the paparazzi unwittingly function as disciplinarians who cleverly keep stars in line – and perhaps even transform them into seemingly ‘docile bodies’ – because they document them from the moment they step outdoors to the moment they return home.” While I do agree with this reading, it seems to me that equally present in Gaga’s project is the idea that the performer (the object, the stalkee) does have agency. We know all the clichés about record executives manufacturing the fame and success of performers, but doesn’t this overblown cynicism more or less miss the undeniable participation of the superstar? In the paparazzi-superstar symbiosis, being watched becomes as active, as needed, as watching. The active voice of “he watches” is usurped by the passive of “she is being watched.” In highlighting the power of the viewer’s view, the power of the viewed’s performance should not be forgotten: the ability to become what(ever) others want is still an ability, an action, an agency, and undoubtedly a creative and powerful one. 

Slime Dress; Fluid Body

This trouble of perspective – this “who is objectifying whom?” and the change in power-dynamics such grammatical uncertainty causes – is further illustrated by the inversion of the human relations carried out in these narrative shifts. Because Judas, Jesus, and Mary sequentially pass through the same “I,” it is impossible to establish the power-to-act of any one exclusively. Sometimes Judas precedes the verb and occupies the subject position, acting upon Jesus (“I’ll bring him down, bring him down down”), and other times their position is reversed (“forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain”). The absence of a single power-vector, of a monarchical subject, is revealed. In such a multi-polar world, the whizzing of activity overwhelms the nodal sobjects – “nodal” because they now occupy a relative, rather than privileged, position; and “sobject” being a neologism denoting what is left after the subject/object distinction has been deconstructed. Action/verb overshadows both subject and object: being conditioned not by doers and objects, but conditioning them. The thematic subjects of these songs become their grammatical verbs: sacrifice, betrayal, and love in “Judas”; longing, obsession, performance, observation in “Paparazzi”; fucking as well as simply being (anything, everything) in “Government Hooker”; and acting (without permission or condition) in “Scheiße.”

Thus the verbal theme of “Judas” communicates a feeling of anguished backsliding ever attendant on desperate aspirations – whether the speaker is someone remembering an addictive, abusive relationship they are not yet over or Jesus clinging to his wayward disciple, it is the action of reaching above while dragging behind that lingers above all uncertainty: “Jesus is my virtue, while Judas is the demon I cling to.” Similarly the fluid identities of “Paparazzi” lead to an endless loop in which longing longingly regards longing: the paparazzi obsessively pursue the star, who obsessively pursues fame, represented in the figure of the paparazza. The photographers struggle to take pictures of the star struggling to be photographed. These songs are not about narrators but about actions: anguished backsliding and longing. And these are, after all, two rather similar actions. The painful backsliding in “Judas” complements the insatiable longing of “Paparazzi.” Just as the narrator of “Judas” is torn between what she knows is good for her and what she knows is bad for her, the narrator of “Paparazzi” can never conclusively achieve that for which she longs. Fame exists only in being hounded by photographers and stalkers; the invasive torture that has killed Gaga in so many performances is what the superstar pursues. She responds to desire, to interest, both of which are endless (and endlessly variable) appetites – she is condemned, has condemned herself, to transform forever. The singer of “Judas” desires something (Jesus, virtue) that her nature (which clings to Judas) precludes. She is caught between the initiation and completion of an action, just as the singer of “Paparazzi” is denied satisfaction: her goal, longing, is the antithesis of satisfaction!  In the end, the symbiosis of performative identity dissolves the subject and the object into verbs, making a universe where completion, satisfaction, and rest are impossible because there is only timeless action.

This trope – the paradoxical, transformative nature of performative identity – appears in the song “Government Hooker” from her recent album Born This Way. The song highlights the alternation between power and exploitation inherent in performative identity. Gaga sings “I can be anything, I’ll be your everything/Just touch me baby, (‘cause I don’t want to be sad)” – with the last line sung in a metallic male voice utterly at odds with the female pop voice that delivers the first three lines. Beyond the question of who is speaking (of who is subject and who is object), these two voices comprise a single, coherent, interwoven narrative: one of desire mutating and multiplying to satisfy itself. The distinction between the client and hooker is secondary to their mutual performance, their speaking, their reality, which is one of cooperation: the hooker becomes whatever is necessary for the client. Thtthis simple lyric also suggests that the hooker has her own agenda – after all, she gives a command to the client when she says “just touch me,” she reveals her agency, and any prostitute does have an agenda. He or she is exploited; but at the same time a prostitute demands and receives of her client just as her client does of her (money). Perhaps this suggests that it is a trick of history, of situation, and not one of fundamental reality, that certain roles or professions are weak, amoral, and victimized.

“Put your hands on me”

Two commonly-appearing verses in the song further suggest the power of the hooker and, more fundamentally, the unity of hooker-client, the problematization of the subject/object distinction: “As long as I’m your hooker!” and “Yeah, you’re my hooker!” (conspicuously not sung in a mechanical and masculine voice, but in that of the feminine narrator). These suggest, first, that the hooker functions as such contingently and temporarily: “As long as I’m your hooker” implies the corollary that all the promises and offers of the song end when the “I” is no longer “your hooker” – which is thus at least theoretically possible. Again, it is important to distinguish between the reality of prostitution in society and the ontological relationship here metaphorized as prostitution: Gaga’s performativity in this area is more a critique of Cartesian dualism and the panoptic power of the gaze that it produces than it is a statement on the social reality of prostitution.

“As long as I’m your hooker”

With this in mind, it is clear that these two verses suggest the agency of the hooker regarding the client, even going so far as to reverse the relationship, thereby removing the distinction between the prostitute and her client. Following a display of Freudian versatility – “I could be girl (unless you want to be man) / I could be sex (Unless you want to hold hands) / I could be everything, I could be anything, I could be Mom (unless you want to be Dad)” – Gaga closes the song with a triumphant, feminine, hooker-voice in chorus with the mechanical, masculine, client-voice: “I wanna fuck Government Hooker (back up and turn around) / Stop shitin’ me Government Hooker (put your hands on the ground!) . . . (Get down!)” The song transforms by its end from a tale of object-exploitation at the hands of the subject (client exploits prostitute) to a mutual celebration of their power over one another, and an enaction of their unity. Both exercise and enjoy power and submission alternately, simultaneously, and complimentarily. As the identities of the two are “reduced” to actions or verbs, their symbiosis is revealed.

This metaphysical statement of empowerment expressed as grammatical trouble takes on a similar form in the song “Yoü and I,” a rocker ballad written by Lady Gaga about her (now ex-) boyfriend Lüc Carl. Much of the verses are sung by Gaga as Gaga: “It’s been a long time since I came around . . .” But in the lead-in to the chorus, and in the chorus itself, Gaga quickly blends speaking as herself, speaking as Lüc, and speaking as Lüc speaking as Gaga. When she sings, “He said, ‘sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on / sit back down on the couch where we made love the first time and you said to me: ‘something about this place. . .’’” the chorus to follow has transformed into her quotation of Lüc’s quotation of her. With this in play, does Gaga have a stronger claim than Lüc himself to the narrator, to be the character of the character song? The title certainly fails to establish just who is “you” and who is “I,” instead making the narrative identity totally ambiguous with the simple use of supposedly-reliable pronouns. Who can claim to be the “you” or the “I,” though both terms claim specificity? Both are in irresolvable play. The song professes the love of Gaga for Lüc by professing Lüc’s love for Gaga. This revealed reciprocity leads to union – not coincidentally metaphorized by a joyous love.

“You taste like whiskey when you kiss me, oh!”

This continued, extended play goes so far as to suggest that the actor may be a feature – perhaps a secondary one – of action. Subject is not the prerequisite or creator of action, but a feature of its (grammatical) voice. This makes sense in an aesthetics where action has become the character of a character-song. If we are what we do (what we perform?), Gaga is a superstar and a stalker and a paparazza; she is Jesus, Judas, and Mary; also hooker and client; politician and activist; Lüc and Gaga. I believe that such a metaphysics is at the heart of her fame project and her entire performance art project. As Rifai and Gaga herself have suggested, her work must be understood as a whole: music, videos, performances, interviews, every costume . . . And this work – her persona that encompasses such contradictions of power and exploitation – undermines discrimination at its most basic level, by accepting the other as the other, by ascribing agency to the object as the object. It does not seek that agency by demonstrating that the object is really a subject or demanding that it become one, not by unifying all people under a single theoretical concept of “human” that remains at bottom a straight white man, but by ascribing rights, ascribing agency and creativity to the object without demanding that the object becomes something different, without qualification or any justification besides the assumption that every thing should – does – have agency, and is equal despite manifold perceptible differences. In response to the flat assertion that a hooker, as a grammatical object, could never have agency, Gaga’s metaphysics offer a flat assertion that a hooker obviously is the origin as well as the target of power; thus not that the hooker is a subject, but that an object shares the claim of the subject to agency. The object has an equal right to “I”.

Finally, the song “Scheiße” functions as a commentary on this entire principle. The song, when read as addressed to shit, (“I’ll take you out tonight, do whatever you like / Scheiße Scheiße be mine, Scheiße be mine”), becomes a pining, hopeless love song, very similar in this way to “Judas” and “Paparazzi.” Gaga is pleading to be worthy of her shit – her messy (by)product, her action, and its outcome. As in “Government Hooker,” in “Scheiße” a desperate polymorphous perversity is employed to entice and earn her own activity: “I’ll . . . do whatever you like . . .” Performance, transformation, and creativity seek desperately to seduce themselves by means of themselves.

Scheiße be mine

But Gaga also wishes that her action didn’t require this qualification – that her verbs did not require a subject. This regret contrasts interestingly with the desire to be worthy: Gaga uses the same word (“shit” or “Scheiße”) to mean her creations (foremost of which is herself) that she worships, and the limitations and qualifications that limit her ability to create, to be. What she is grappling with here is the fundamental unfreedom of existence: if you create something, you become unfree to not have created it. In terms of performative identity, you can be anything, but once you are, you are no longer free to be something else. The desire or impetus to create means that one is never without condition – desire to create is a condition that creation always requires! Gaga might sing “I wish I could be strong without the Scheiße, yea,” but strength requires at least something to bear. The perfect freedom offered by performative identity is, considered from a different perspective, perfect unfreedom: you must enact yourself, you cannot enact another. The “shit” Gaga produces – herself – limits the potentiality that she wants to be to a mere actuality; achieving one possibility extinguishes all others.

Gaga’s mediation on this paradoxical, existential freedom-unfreedom is expressed as a feminist message: “Love is objectified by what men say is right / … blonde high-heeled feminists enlisting femmes for this, express your woman kind / fight for your rights.” Gaga recognizes that the grammatical privileging of subject over object operates as a blueprint for various forms of discrimination – in this case, sexism. Being a strong female means acting without qualification (“If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) – of occupying the role of assumed efficacy that has so often been gendered masculine. So she makes the taking of this space (“When I’m on a mission, I rebuke my condition / If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) the condition and goal of gender liberation. It could be the goal of any emancipatory or anti-discrimination movement, combating exploitation by combating objectification at its most fundamental level.

This feminist aspect is best exemplified in the line “I don’t speak German but I can if you like.” Here Gaga attaches overcoming herself (speaking German even though she can’t speak German) to the condition of a man’s desire. As long as the traditional grammar remains the basis of power and agency, she can only overcome herself, grow, be strong, accomplish, act, through either the fiat or the imitation of masculinity. Instead of the self-expression of performance being guided by Gaga herself – by her project of becoming worthy of her shit – that expression, that creation is guided by the desires of men: by the shit of others. It may not be possible, on a fundamental, ontological level to escape the conditions inherent in existence; but Gaga does see a way for womankind to escape the conditions imposed by patriarchy. A new grammar, a new verbal perspective, to express the power of the object as well as of the subject.

Thus I argue that the narrative play of Lady Gaga’s lyrics offers both a re-imaging of the character-song form and a key to understanding not only the meaning of her songs but the nature of her entire artistic project. The grammatical troubling of this voice expresses the theme of performative identity and the radical agency to which it leads. It is at once philosophical and emancipatory, artistic and political; it is itself a paradox, a unity achieved not despite contradiction, but by means of it.

Perhaps this is a meaning of the third eye Gaga wears on her chin as Mother Monster in the video for “Born This Way”: her two eyes have been inverted and deconstructed into one. Does this eye have sobjective vision – seeing and also seeing its own seeing? Does it unify power and submission in one perceptive act? Can it see what is without losing sight of what might be?

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.

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Gaga in Oz: Hearing The Woman Behind the Camera in Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi"

By Ayah Rifai [i]

Whenever I watch a Lady Gaga music video, I cannot help but recall Richard Wagner. But what could a twenty-first-century shock-and-awe pop icon possibly have in common with a nineteenth-century German operatic composer? I believe that what distinguishes Lady Gaga (née Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) from all other artists on the pop music scene today are her aspirations for a modern day Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, a term that Wagner coined to describe a work in which drama, music, poetry, and material art would be synthesized and united to create a new and complete art form. In a 2008 interview with DJ Ron Slomowicz from The New York Times Company, Gaga describes how she conceives her artwork as a “whole package”:

I don’t write records and then decide what the video will look like. I instantaneously write things at the same time so it’s a complete vision, the song, and the visual, the way that I would perform it on the stage. It’s something that all comes to me at once. So when I say I make the music for the dress, the dress is a bit of a metaphor for “I make the music for everything,” for the entire performance vision.  (Slomowicz 2008) 

As a brazenly outspoken woman with outrageous costumes and gender-bending performances, Gaga has recently become the subject of much scholarly attention – and rightfully so. Her songs, such as “Telephone,” “Bad Romance,” and “Alejandro,” have been eagerly analyzed under the umbrellas of cultural studies, film studies, and queer studies, to name a few. Indeed, numerous writers have discussed to a fascinating and highly-illuminating degree the imprint her spectacles and persona are leaving on our zeitgeist. Yet, writers’ critical reflections seem to venture only into half of Gaga’s artistic vision or “package,” leaving out what I consider to be the root of what that she does: the music.

In this essay, I seek to bridge the lacuna by shedding some light on the oft-neglected musical aspects of her “total artwork.” My analysis will consider various dimensions of “Paparazzi,” a 2009 hit from the 2008 album The Fame, which is usually relegated to the periphery of writers’ critical lenses when compared to Gaga’s more recent songs. Applying Michel Foucault’s theories of surveillance and power, I will demonstrate how “Paparazzi” contributes to Gaga’s strategy of legitimizing her fame before it has actually occurred. In the second half of my essay, I will examine how Gaga projects her feelings about the problematic yet symbiotic relationship that celebrities maintain with the unrelenting paparazzi through the video’s music and visuals, and how this ties in with her ultimate mission to garner fame.

The (Balcony) Fall from Grace       

Before delving into the music, it behooves us to recount the video of “Paparazzi” in order to contextualize the musical analysis. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the full-length version of the video is an approximately eight-minute mini-movie starring Gaga the celebrity and her boyfriend, played by the Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård. The scene opens in Gaga’s seaside mansion with someone playing melodic fragments and minor chords on a piano.[ii] This detail lends the scenic atmosphere a sense of intimacy, as the piano often recalls bourgeois homes. But within seconds, the viewer discerns that this feeling of comfort and privacy is to be shattered. As Gaga and her boyfriend move to the balcony while kissing and embracing, a stealthy photographer begins taking pictures of the couple. In the background, the piano chords become louder, more unstable, and more tumultuous, reflecting Gaga’s unease and foreshadowing her impending downfall. When Gaga realizes that her boyfriend has set her up to the tabloids, she struggles to escape his embrace only to be thrown over the balcony, falling in slow motion.[iii]

Gaga is next shown lying on the pavement in a pool of her own heavily stylized blood, with the paparazzi swarming around her. The image of our poor starlet’s accident is carefully arranged and aestheticized – an artistic detail that will shape how we view all subsequent female victims in the video. As the paparazzi, exclaiming “Beautiful! Beautiful!,” shamelessly snap pictures of her seemingly lifeless body tabloid headlines flash on the screen that read, “Lady Gaga Hits Rock Bottom,” and “Lady No More Gaga.” Their actions in this segment reveal the paparazzi’s eagerness to photograph tragedy – where a star’s death represents the ultimate shot – while their words reflect the media’s general tendency to abandon a star when she no longer conforms to society’s standards of able-bodied beauty.

The following scene reveals a disabled Gaga getting out of a limousine with the aid of her hired help. Gaga dances in a wheelchair and then on crutches with her troupe of butlers and maids, while donning a metallic garment and helmet that vividly recall the cyborg-like outfit seen in George Michael’s 1992 “Too Funky” music video.

Gaga in “Paparazzi,” dancing on crutches in a cyborg-like outfit.

A runway model’s outfit in George Michael’s “Too Funky” music video, indubitably the source of inspiration for Gaga’s costume.

This video features Michael videotaping models as they strut down a runway to the beat of his tune by the same name. As we will see, “Too Funky” offers more than a mere visual quotation for Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” for it reveals the ways in which an ostensibly behind-the-scenes George Michael is really in control of the women’s images, mediating them to us, the viewers.  Gaga’s dance is at once graceful and awkward, with her abrupt, robotic moves, lending her an inhuman aura. Here, Gaga shows that her relationship with haute couture runs deep, even to the extent that the implements designed to aid her disfigured body are high fashion.

As various scenes in the mansion flash before us, we see dead models in full makeup lying on the ground, including a maid who bleeds gold, another who has hanged herself, and yet another woman in the garden with her body eerily contorted and wrapped in plastic.

These scenes are sinister, yet aesthetically pleasing and surreal, for the women’s images are captured in a way that beautifies their deaths and makes them disturbingly delightful sights to behold, thereby elevating their deaths to the status of high fashion or art. Gaga is perhaps critiquing the glorification of female deaths in pop culture and the violence perpetrated against women in general, whose depictions have become increasingly fashionable in the media. The erotic portrayal of these murdered women brings to mind, for example, an ad that I stumbled across several years ago for the video game Hitman: Blood Money. The ad depicts a lingerie-clad, presumably dead woman who has been shot in the head and placed amid crimson, fluid-like silk. This commercial resonates with the visuals employed in “Paparazzi,” where post-mortem females are made to look visually appealing.

An advertisement for the video game Hitman: Blood Money.

Note the ad’s caption: “Beautifully Executed.”

The climax of this mini-movie occurs in the scene where Gaga and her boyfriend are sitting in a tea room. The Swede accessorizes his ensemble with an eye patch, which brings to mind the ancient Hammurabian law of “an eye for an eye,” as Gaga plans on punishing him for the nearly homicidal act he committed against her. Gaga, meanwhile, is dressed in a yellow, Minnie Mouse-like unitard with circular glasses. A close-up of this outfit reveals that the pattern is comprised of repeated pictures of Gaga wearing a World War II helmet with mouse ears appended to the top. This image, with its repetitive pattern, recalls the Holocaust survivors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus suggesting that Gaga is, by analogy, a survivor of larger scale female victimization.

This detail recasts the light in which we might interpret the deceased women as victims of a larger female genocide, in turn rendering Gaga’s murder of her Swede a sort of revenge for the many women who have been wronged. This interpretation also establishes a thematic connection with the “Telephone” murders in Gaga’s subsequent video. In any case, the surface image of innocence and twee that Gaga’s Mini Mouse costume evokes contrasts dramatically with a more detailed examination of that outfit.

Gaga discretely slips poison into her boyfriend’s drink. Two seconds later, he collapses dead on the sofa, and Gaga has thus been avenged. She calls 9-1-1 and says, “I just killed my boyfriend” with an anime-like smirk on her face. Then the plot comes full circle: as the authorities snap away at Gaga’s deceased boyfriend, she makes her way to a car and gazes lovingly at the paparazzi surrounding her. The images of the previous female victims – beautifully captured in all of their aesthetic gore in the daylight – now juxtaposed with that of the unglamorous and un-gory death of the boyfriend during the night lend the video quite a haunting sensationalism.[iv] Next, images of newspapers flash by reading the following headlines: “She’s Back!!!,” “She’s Innocent,” and “We Love Her Again,” this time highlighting the fickleness and strange devotion (and bad journalism, since she clearly confessed to the crime) of the paparazzi. The final scene shows Gaga posing raunchily for mug shots in jail in another cyborg-inspired outfit, thus concluding where the video for “Telephone” begins.

Through the Looking Glass – But Whose?

What intrigues me about “Paparazzi” the song is how Gaga the star and the vocal persona she portrays are two separate characters. Upon closer examination of the lyrics, the listener discerns that Gaga is not singing from her point of view, but rather from the perspective of a paparazza.  What is particularly striking about the perspective from which Gaga sings in “Paparazzi” is that it seems polarized with her artistic persona presented in the video, yielding a paradoxically empathetic portrayal of paparazzi at first blush. Here, Gaga vividly places herself in the shoes of an ostensibly real person, albeit a person with no individual identity because this nameless paparazza is generally bunched together with a group of many other paparazzi. In other words, Gaga claims to be speaking from an “emic” (insider, paparazzi) standpoint rather than from the more predictable “etic” (outsider, star) perspective, which brings me to my next query: What could possibly compel Gaga to write a song that seemingly empathizes with the very people who presumably torture and stalk her 24-7, waiting for the chance to slander her or to get that lucrative picture?

Michel Foucault might help us clarify why Gaga would devote a song to the merciless paparazzi. Foucault theorizes that the exercise of disciplinary power relies on a mechanism of coercion by means of observation, where those in power are the observers and those upon whom power is exercised are the observed. This form of disciplinary power works to create a knowable people, making them the object of surveillance and control. As such, he posits that oppression depends on supervision (here, oppression might be the surveillance enacted by paparazzi), where increased visibility leads to more control of the person under observation. Furthermore, he argues that through this system of coerced observation, the observed begin to view themselves paranoiacally through their observers’ eyes.  According to Foucault, this mechanism of coercion also contributes to the creation of  “docile bodies”:

What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that acted upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was also being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies […]Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies.

Applying these insights to “Paparazzi,” then, Gaga would have us believe that the reason she is able to present such an empathetic song about the paparazzi from an “emic” perspective is because she has been watched and hounded by them so closely and persistently since her rise to fame that she has begun to see herself through their eyes. In this interpretation, the paparazzi unwittingly function as disciplinarians who cleverly keep stars in line – and perhaps even transform them into seemingly “docile bodies” – because they document them from the moment they step outdoors to the moment they return home. The structures of power and domination certainly include A-listers and high-profile celebrities, and those who follow stars around qualify as one of society’s many disciplinarians in the twenty-first century version of Foucault’s concept of “disciplinary punishment.” To be sure, paparazzi often possess the power to elevate or ruin a star’s career.

In the lyrics to “Paparazzi,” Gaga gives the impression that she has begun to identify closely with her so-called torturers, as if she understands what it is like to be one of them. Gaga appears to be trapped in a metaphorical prison whose captors are her admiring observers, recalling Foucault’s Panopticon, a prison wherein a single guard with a privileged central perspective is able to view all prisoners, but each prisoner is only able to view the central guard. What could be a closer contemporary version of this Panopticon than the paparazzi, who document every moment of a star’s life but are themselves largely invisible, not subject to the same probing observation? In short, the paparazzi enact Foucault’s “disciplinary gaze”: the stealthy surveillance (Foucault’s “eyes that must see without being seen”), the creation and preservation of a visible and knowable people, and even the photographer, our modern day Panopticon guard.

Panopticon

Yet something is amiss here, as Gaga’s perspective of an “authentic” paparazza remains unconvincing – Gaga is hardly a “docile body” without agency, nor is she as victimized as she makes herself out to be. Her portrayal of the paparazza character is not that empathetic. Although the persona Gaga lyrically develops may seem realistic in some respects, she is also a fairly empty character devoid of individuality and agency. In fact, Gaga’s is a rather unfortunate depiction of a woman standing on the outside, longingly looking in on a celebrity’s extravagant life. Furthermore, the lyrical perspective is undermined by the video’s lack of any singular or memorable depictions of a paparazzo or paparazza. Indeed, in the video, Gaga performs her traditional role of the glamorous celebrity and not the paparazza, from whose perspective she sings.

Gaga has provided some food for thought with regards to the ways we might interpret  “Paparazzi.” In one interview, she asserts that the song’s video “explores ideas about the sort of hyperbolic situations that people will go to in order to be famous. Most specifically, pornography and murder” (Lamb 2009). Ironically enough, one could apply this idea to Gaga as well, since she projects herself into this hyperbolic and surreal world in the video specifically so that she can acquire further fame. In another interview, Gaga describes the meaning behind “Paparazzi” as follows:

[It] is about a few different things – it’s about my struggles, do I want fame or do I want love? It’s also about wooing the paparazzi to fall in love with me. It’s about the media whoring, if you will, watching ersatzes make fools of themselves to their station. It’s a love song for the cameras, but it’s also a love song about fame or love – can you have both, or can you only have one? (Slomowicz)

Gaga’s use of “love” in this quotation works on two levels. In the first sentence, she counterbalances fame and love, where love might mean the possibility of a private romantic relationship unmediated and untarnished by the paparazzi, and fame would presumably preclude such a relationship. In the second sentence, however, she describes the love and adoration of the paparazzi, who help perpetuate and maintain her fame. This double definition of love underscores the dramatic tension in “Paparazzi”: What kind of love does Gaga want, fame (and paparazzi/fan love) or romantic love?

This quote also gives us something from which to work with regard to the music. If we focus strictly on the ideas presented to us at the surface level of the song and video, then Gaga’s message is thus twofold. On the one hand, she is acknowledging the symbiotic relationship that exists between stars and their devoted paparazzi: while the paparazzi hound a star and possess the ability to bring her down with one incriminating picture, they are also responsible for elevating that celebrity’s star status. This symbiosis is evidenced in the way Gaga initially reacts to the paparazzi at the onset of her video versus the manner in which she embraces them towards the end. It is also overtly reflected in the tabloids’ opposing headlines of Gaga at the beginning and at the end of the video.

On the other hand, Gaga relays a separate story about having to choose between fame and love. Whereas this emotional tug-of-war is enacted in the video through Gaga’s own actions – having to choose between a relationship (love) and her career (fame) – the music portrays these vacillating sentiments from the perspective of the vocal persona, a paparazza. A closer look at the music will illuminate how Gaga reflects her problematic relationship with the paparazzi, as well as how she sonically negotiates her indecisiveness.

Snap, Snap to That Shit on the Radio

One subtle way in which Gaga reflects both the relationship between celebrities and their paparazzi, and the artifice involved in fame, is through her choice of timbres that characterize the music. At the start of the video, as Gaga is shown plummeting from the balcony to the ground in slow motion, a synthesizer sonority enters emulating Gaga’s heartbeat; moments later, the listener is inundated with the sound of paparazzi anxiously snapping away at their cameras. The snaps and clicks combined with the pulsating heartbeat create their own distinct rhythmic pattern, and persist until they meld seamlessly into the song’s ostinato bass line – a slightly simpler version of the initial rhythm. Thus, we can say that the beat propelling the entire song grew out of both Gaga's heartbeat and the snapping and clicking of the paparazzi, a resonance that is at once organic and fabricated – an important dichotomy in this video.

Example 1: Introductory pattern becoming the song’s ostinato rhythm

After Gaga steps out of her limousine, another timbre is introduced to the musical texture upon Gaga’s utterance of “We are the crowd. We’re c-comin’ out…” – that of a synthesized robotic- metallic sound that brings to mind the noise of machinery. This metallic timbre is visually enforced by Gaga’s cyborg-like costume.

It is also interesting to note that Gaga perpetuates the sound of cameras clicking through her deliberate and machine-like vocal iteration of “c-comin’ out” (much like the calculated repetition of “Wha-wha-what did you say” and “T-t-t-telephone” in her next song “Telephone”), where she could have easily substituted “we’re c-comin’ out” with “and we’re comin’ out” and still have preserved the verse’s meter. Seconds later, a final timbre is introduced to the multi-layer electronic texture beginning with the words, “It so magical. We’d be so fantastico.” This final timbre vividly recalls the eerie, ethereal sound of a theremin – an electronic instrument used in many old science fiction movies to signify the bizarre and alien. The resulting overall electronic texture engulfs the listener’s sonic space so fully that it practically eclipses the chords underlying the music.[v]

Furthermore, with Gaga’s mechanical, abrupt, and contortionistic movements, the choreography in this segment reinforces the artificial soundscape. Her use of overpowering machine-like/robotic timbres highlights the unnaturalness and plasticity of stars’ relationships with the tabloids, as well as the often-spurious nature of fame. Had she opted for an acoustic accompaniment in the song (e.g., a piano and a drum kit), the resulting timbres and overall texture would have significantly undermined the nexus between the music and the lyrics’ message.

We can thus thematically link Gaga’s evocations of non-humanity (e.g. the cyborg, the robot, the artificial) to her overarching agenda. In order to attain ultimate fame, Gaga must eschew her privacy, humanity, and realness as Stefani. This sacrifice is vividly realized in both the visuals and the music, as Gaga is transformed into a robot-like being in the video with the rhythmic pulsing of the camera shutter opening and closing, metaphorically becoming her life’s blood, propelling the music forward from beginning to end.

Gaga also capitalizes on the form of the music to project her vocal persona’s vacillating sentiments. “Paparazzi” follows the standard form of a pop song:

(Brief introduction)

Verse 1

Chorus

Verse 2

Chorus

Bridge

Chorus (repeated twice)

Codetta/fade out

As it turns out, Gaga sings Verses 1 and 2 from the viewpoint of “fame,” as interpreted by her paparazza, and the chorus from the perspective of “love,” the paparazza’s meditation on her adoration for Gaga. As a paparazza, she is focused and ready to do her job in Verse 1: “Got my flash on it’s true. Need that picture of you.” She follows the rich and famous and perhaps aspires to emulate them: “Leather and jeans, garage glamorous / Not sure what it means, / but this photo of us, it don’t have a price. / Ready for those flashin’ lights.” The melody in both verses, however, is characterized by leaps of open fifths, which evoke, at least in my mind, the familiar sound that many cameras make as they are turned on – an interesting sonic detail.[vi] And the perfect fifth intervals are heard each time above octave leaps in both the metallic timbre and the unrelenting ostinato bass without substantial harmonic support, lending the music a static and almost lifeless quality, much like a machine’s.

When the chorus arrives, the sentiment shifts to one of adoration, devotion, and firm insistence: “I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me /…Baby, there’s no other superstar. You know that I’ll be your papa-paparazzi.” The repetitious iteration of the same pitches in the chorus melody and the more lyrical, step-wise motion (as opposed to the verse music, which features more leaps), underscore the paparazza’s insistence. The rhythm of the melody, meanwhile, is mostly characterized by repetitive eighth notes except for the highly syncopated rhythmic motif on the phrase “papa-paparazzi.”

This pattern is also cleverly physicalized during Gaga’s dance segment in Baroque navy blue and white costumes (approximately 4:41 in the video) with her syncopated arm gestures and thrashes.

In tandem with the nearly twofold iteration of the word “paparazzi,” this abrupt rhythmic pattern draws the listener’s ear to the song’s namesake while simultaneously evoking the repetitive shouts of paparazzi when they vie for stars’ attention.[vii] Lastly, the combination of unrelenting eighth notes and the mostly monotone harmonization beneath the melody evokes robotic speech, further underscoring Gaga’s inhumanity.

Example 2: The rhythmic motif of “papa-paparazzi”

In the second half of the chorus, where the melodic zenith occurs, our paparazza’s voice becomes more urgent while she begins to plead to her celebrity: “Promise I’ll be kind, but I won’t stop until that boy is mine /…chase you down until you love me.” The sense of loving urgency is intensified by the occurrence of the highest note in the song, an Eflat₅, on “promise,” and then by the octave leap down to the eighth note iterations of Eflat₄ immediately afterward on the phrase “but I won’t stop.” The narrator’s insistence is perhaps mirrored most strongly in my favorite moment of the song, the unsuspecting harmony that occurs below the melodic line of “Baby, you’ll be famous, chase you down until you love me.” The harmony sits on a mostly monotone Eflat₄, but then it ascends by step until it brushes up against the melody’s G and Aflat on “’til you,” thus creating a brief, yet delicious moment of back-to-back dissonance. This fleeting moment of dissonance ever so subtly and poignantly drives the paparazza’s emotional message home through its harmonic tension.

Example 3: Harmonization of part of the chorus

Our paparazza’s feelings swing back once again to support fame and success in Verse 2, whose words begin to border on a stalker mentality: “I’ll be your girl, backstage at your show. Velvet ropes and guitar, yeah, cause you’re my rock star. / In between the sets, eyeliner and cigarettes.” And when the narrator sings, “My lashes are dry, purple teardrops I cry. / It don’t have a price,” Gaga is encouraging us to imagine a stalker paparazza who hangs creepily on to every moment of Gaga’s life. In so doing, Gaga paints the picture of an emotionally-unstable paparazza who is not particularly flattering. 

After the chorus is repeated, we arrive at the bridge with its strange lyrics. In the corresponding film segment, Gaga is dancing in a costume made mostly out of roles of brown camera film, emphasizing the idea that Gaga the star is an image made by photographs and film.

Indeed, Gaga seems to penetrate the vocal persona for a brief instant when she sings, “Snap, snap to that shit on the radio,” followed by the imperative “Don’t stop for anyone.” It is as if she is coaxing her fellow paparazzi to be unrelenting with their duties, for Gaga unambiguously craves and courts this attention in real life. The melody is also characterized by the familiar leaps of fifths that defined the two verses, inviting us back into the world of stardom again. She concludes the bridge with the phrase, “We're plastic but we’ll still have fun.” The words send a poignant message, for Gaga is acknowledging the cyborg-like qualities of synthetic stardom counterposed against the lived reality of an individual who covets fame. In addition, the seemingly happy-go-lucky shouts on “still have fun” sound fake and mechanical, and Gaga’s overall nonchalant demeanor and choppy hand gestures in this segment mirror her detached tone of voice in the bridge.

The final way in which Gaga projects her ambiguous feelings is through the underlying harmonic structure of the music. More specifically, her irresolution is realized through the oscillation between the tonic key and its super-mediant key. The tonality of the song remains unclear in the video until Gaga steps out of her limousine, but at that moment, a C minor pedal chord is intoned on a synthesizer to establish the key of the song for the first time. Gaga draws on the stereotype that minor tonalities evoke sadness and major ones evoke joy in order to reflect her tumultuous thoughts. The entire first verse is grounded firmly in the C minor tonic key, with a brief occurrence of vi and iv. But when the chorus enters, we suddenly hear that we have arrived at the super-mediant key, Aflat Major, with no traditional preparation. Instead of giving us a conventional progression in the measures leading up to the chorus using III as an immediate secondary dominant chord (for example i, vi, iv, III [V/ vi], vi [the new key]), Gaga unexpectedly stops at the iv chord, F minor, and then travels directly from it to our new key in the chorus, Aflat major, via movement by thirds (coincidentally, a harmonic movement of which Wagner was fond). The key change even occurs in the middle of a sentence (“ ‘Cause you know that baby I...”), bisecting the contraction “I’m.” Alternatively, the iv chord in tonic would have worked beautifully as a pivot chord into the new key (i.e., using F minor, vi of Aflat Major), had it been followed by a few more chords and then a cadence to establish the new key, but that does not happen. Gaga thus undermines any feeling of a modulation by preceding the chorus only with a jazzy F minor₁₁ chord. Without a secondary dominant or a proper modulating sequence, we expect to stay in C minor, so what we hear during the chorus suddenly comes as a surprise to our ears. It is as if Gaga is deliberately trying to confuse us.

Example 4: Harmonic structure from end of verse to beginning of chorus

While this turn to the super-mediant could be labeled as a passing tonicization, Aflat Major solidly grounds itself in our hearing because it is then followed by V, vi, and then iv in that key from “I’m your biggest fan” to “papa-paparazzi” before the cycle repeats again from “Baby, there’s no other” to “papa-paparazzi.” And during the second half of the chorus (“Promise I’ll be kind… papa-paparazzi”), the same chord progression recurs. When Verse 2 begins, we find ourselves abruptly brought back to C minor, again with no prior preparation (Dflat Major is the last chord intoned in the chorus), only to venture back in to Aflat Major when the bittersweet chorus occurs again. As for the bridge, it is firmly set in C minor, but only for a brief moment before the chorus is iterated twice. The song ends differently depending on the format in which it is experienced: whereas the version of the song recorded for the album ends with four measures of a C minor pedal chord accompanied by the percussive rhythmic motif, the video of “Paparazzi” ends with a fade out of the chorus (in Aflat Major) before Gaga is taken to jail. Perhaps this “alternate ending” provided by the video is Gaga’s way of saying that she can have it both ways, fame and love.

Table 1: Chart of form, tonality, and corresponding emotions in “Paparazzi”

Form:	Introduction & Verse I	Chorus	Verse 2	Chorus	Bridge	Chorus (x2)	Video Codetta	Song Codetta
Key:	C minor	Aflat Major	C minor	Aflat Major	C minor	Aflat Major	Aflat Major	C minor
Emotion:	Fame	Love	Fame	Love	Fame	Love	Love	Fame

The key of each section corresponds to the two things weighing on the paparazza’s (and Gaga’s) mind in the narrative of each section: the concept of fame in the verses and the bridge (tonic C minor), and the thought of love in the choruses (Aflat Major). The oscillation between the two keys thus musically replicates the irresolution that Gaga’s persona describes. Furthermore, the choice to venture into the major mode – generally associated with hope and joy – is conveniently aligned with the paparazza’s proclamations of love and devotion, whereas the melancholic minor mode is chosen to underscore the problematic aspects of fame. Lingering on the super-mediant chord creates a great tension: both keys need each other to attain tonal closure. In an oddly similar way, celebrities and paparazzi also rely on each other to maintain their respective careers.

Gaga capitalizes on tonality’s tendencies and semiotic associations in order to sync our sonic experience of the music with her ambiguous feelings. The initial unexpected turn from C minor to Aflat Major without preparation or modulation, as well as the subsequent dizzying oscillations between the two keys that result from the song’s form, function to elicit specific responses from her listeners, enabling them to reproduce the relationship between Gaga and her ultimate fan, the devoted paparazza.

Beyond a Total Artwork

So which does Gaga end up choosing: fame or love? The music concludes in the home key of C minor, which is associated with fame, and the video ends with the death of Gaga’s boyfriend and the media’s renewed obsession with her. As much as Gaga attempts to sell herself in “Paparazzi” as a victim who begins to identify with her torturers as a result of coerced observation, the fact of the matter is Gaga is in control. Like The Man Behind the Curtain in The Wizard of Oz, Gaga smartly crafts our responses to and interpretations of her as famous by controlling the images and sonic messages of her, all while singing from an “out-of-control,” crazed paparazza perspective. In so doing, Gaga feeds her fans lyrics of an alleged outsider’s adoration. Fame was and remains the constitutive feature of Gaga’s identity, and she unapologetically seeks it, courts it, and requires it in order to persist. As Ella Bedard, a recent contributor to Gaga Stigmata, aptly notes, Gaga “is only insofar as she exists before the eyes of the public: as much as her audience is captivated by her performance, she is not only captivated but produced as a result of the devotion and constant attention from her fans.” (Bedard 2010)

Indeed, Gaga (or perhaps Stefani) seems to have always viewed herself through others’ eyes, and has sought to be observed – for she sold herself as a celebrity before actually having attained success in the pop arena. Her debut album, The Fame, was released in August of 2008 when Gaga was still a no-name artist, yet her songs center on the theme of what it is like to be rich and famous (e.g., “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” “The Fame,” “Money Honey,” and “Starstruck”). “Paparazzi” should therefore be viewed within this context, for Stefani, the woman behind the curtain, created Lady Gaga to be more glamorous than she could have reasonably been at the time in which this song was written. And, in playing the role of a super famous woman prior to becoming super famous, Gaga legitimized her fame before the fact. In light of this idea, it seems as though Gaga’s paparazza persona is merely a vehicle for her larger agenda: to construct Gaga as someone who is always already famous enough to be hounded by adoring paparazzi and devoted fans. Stefani’s famous alter ego, in many ways, has eclipsed the possibility of a more human identity; her art literally has become her life (ergo the choice of fame). In order to garner fame as Gaga, a larger-than-life fictitious persona, Stefani Germanotta sacrificed her realness and her humanity. In effect, she can have no private life, no love beyond the public’s probing eyes. As such, Gaga favors the love of the paparazzi, who help her attain fame, over the individual love interest, who would want to keep a relationship outside of the public’s eye. As Gaga herself said, “I put all my love into my music. It’s never going to wake up and tell me it doesn’t love me anymore. Truthfully, I’d rather sell records than have a boyfriend” (Hutchinson 2009).  Now that Gaga has a man in her life, though, it will be interesting to see if she maintains this mindset.

In “Paparazzi,” Gaga seems to question who maintains her image, but she is at the center of her own Panopticon. In true postmodern fashion, she reflexively imagines herself through the lenses of her adoring fans and preempts the fantastic images of herself that she would like them to reproduce, attempting to manipulate her “little monsters” into “docile bodies.” Through it all, she is in control at any given moment. As Gaga unabashedly demonstrates, she is like the prison guard, watching us watching her. Fame is the alpha and the omega for her, and when we fail to give her our attention, her persona will cease to exist. Therein lies the key to the meta-pop star Lady Gaga, whose Foucauldian reflexivity is part and parcel of her “whole package.” In this respect, she has managed to surpass Wagner’s wildest aspirations for a viable Gesamtkunstwerk: an examination of “Paparazzi” reveals clever details in the melody, form, tonality, lyrics, narrative, and timbre that ultimately work together to unite the music, the message, and the visual dimensions of the video into one fascinating artwork. And yet, this product synthesizes not just her music and visuals, but Gaga’s very existence, ultimately blurring the line between consumer and producer, observer and observed, and art and life, paving the way for an altogether new level of total artwork.

Gaga photographing her photographers.

                                   

Gaga in an outfit featuring a camera perched over her right shoulder, and black visors that recall 1990s virtual reality goggles.

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[i]           I would like to thank my good friend and fellow (ethno)musicologist Elizabeth de Martelly, who suggested this title to me, and whose insights and keen editorial skills played a significant role in shaping this essay.

[ii]           Incidentally, this “classical” opening is the first of Gaga’s four consecutive videos that feature an introductory melodic idea on a classical instrument. “Bad Romance” begins with a Baroque-like melody played on a synthesized harpsichord, “Telephone” opens with an F minor melody on the harp, and the music to “Alejandro” is prefaced by a plaintive B minor melody of Hungarian folk origin played on the violin, taken from the piece Csárdás for Violin and Piano by Italian composer Vittorio Monti. Why Gaga decided to open her songs in this classical manner--in the context of both her music and within the plot of each of the videos--is an intriguing detail worth further examination.

[iii]          I ascertain that her boyfriend was working with the tabloids because the first few shots of the couple are taken from an angle that is facing them (i.e., from within the mansion), leading the viewer to believe that the Swede may have let a photographer into the mansion previously (he even seems to make eye contact with the photographer at one point). Also notice beforehand how he strategically moves Gaga from the bed to the balcony and then promptly asks her if she trusts him, so as to not throw suspicion onto himself. Subsequent shots are taken from below the couple, just as Gaga is plummeting to the ground, therefore revealing that a swarm of paparazzi had already been stationed there in anticipation.

[iv]          This theme of unglamorous male deaths is perpetuated further in the sequel video “Telephone,” in which Beyoncé poisons her boyfriend’s food with the help of Gaga, the short-order cook, before poisoning the remainder of the diner’s customers.

[v]           From a phenomenological approach of perceiving “the sounds themselves,” my experience listening to the overall sonority produced by these timbres with headphones differs greatly from my experience of watching the video. With headphones on, I am bombarded by the multiplicity of electronic layers from different sonic spaces; this directional phenomenon is a consequence of the strategic distribution of various timbres to each side of the headphone in the recording process. The resulting experience evokes the sound of machinery even more vividly, while the uneven sonic distribution makes Gaga’s voice sound even less human to my ear, further heightening her message.

[vi]          I checked this detail just to be sure; a perfect fifth is, for the very least, the interval that my Canon Powershot™ A630 makes.

[vii]          It is interesting to note that Gaga uses the same rhythmic motif in the choruses of both “The Fame” and “Money Honey.” Perhaps it has become her “rich and famous” rhythmic pattern?

References

Bedard, Ella. “‘Can’t Read My Poker Face’: The Postmodern Aesthetic & Mimesis of Lady Gaga”. Gaga Stigmata. http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2010/08/cant-read-my-poker-face-postmodern.html. August 17, 2010.

Bellmann, Jonathan. “Csárdás.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06918.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books: New York, 1977.

Hutchinson, Jane. “Radio GaGa.” The Daily Telegraph. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/sunday-magazine/radio-gaga/story-e6frf039-1225737678506. June 21, 2009.

Lamb, Bill. “Lady GaGa – ‘Paparazzi.’” About.com. http://top40.about.com/od/singles/gr/ladygagapaparazzi.htm. July 6, 2009.

Slomowicz, Ron. “Lady Gaga Interview.” About.com. http://dancemusic.about.com/od/artistshomepages/a/LadyGagaInt_2.htm. June 10, 2008.

Author Bio:

Ayah Rifai is a clarinetist and musicologist who graduated from SUNY Stony Brook in 2009 with a Master's degree in Historical Musicology/ Music Theory. This is her first paper venture outside of the realm of Classical music, and writing about someone other than Brahms or Beethoven has been a refreshing and challenging experience for her. She is currently in her first year of music teaching at P.S. 264, The Bay Ridge Elementary School for the Arts, in Brooklyn, NY.