By Becca Klaver
This is the second piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece.
Something happened to cheesy in 2011
and this has a lot to do with the saxophone
The Varsity online reports:
“Last year in an interview with Exclaim,
Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, right after
the band’s critically lauded Halcyon Digest was released,
predicted that in 2011 everyone would have
a saxophone on their record because,
‘Saxophones are just cool.’”
You can hear it on Destroyer’s Kaputt
You can see it on Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory”
And while everyone wants to say
Kenny G
it’s actually Lou Reed or the Stones
it’s actually Clarence Clemons, ailing
it’s the heart of rock and roll
The first time I watched “The Edge of Glory” video
I didn’t “like” or “dislike” [click here]
But I thought it was incredibly cheesy
cheesy in a way that made me want to look away
embarrassed for The Haus of Gaga
for firing the original director, Joseph Kahn
for losing the mermaid theme, the Brooklyn Bridge,
the “Couture Doctors” in scrubs and black gloves (“think Dr. 90210”)
the “Puerto Rican or Dominican type badass”
“willing to kiss Lady Gaga” (“think Enrique Iglesias”)
the military men holding M16 rifles
“The Edge of Glory”
is cheesy the way saxophones are cheesy
the way Rent and West Side Story are cheesy
the way 80s MTV looks cheesy
the way early Lady Gaga videos were cheesy
(“Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)”
was released
only two years earlier to the day
remember we are on
Pop Time
and we race and race but never catch up)
Cheesiness is meant to make you look away
so were alien prosthetics meant to
as were giant shoulderpads
and meat dresses
Gaga-Gaze makes you look away
stunned or embarrassed
and then look back again
only to find
she’s raced on to the next thing
On the same day
“The Edge of Glory” video premiered
Gaga’s meat dress—
after visiting a taxidermist
who put it in a meat locker
and treated it with chemicals—
traveled to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
where it is in a glass case
with canisters that soak up the humidity
and soak up the glutens
There are gels to “control the environment”
They’ve painted it redder
to make it look more meaty
less jerky
There are methods of preservation
and resurrection
known only to animal stuffers
and Hollywood hustlers
and The Haus of Gaga
If the 90s are back
(let’s not say “back,”
let’s say “reclaimed”
or “polished off”)
if the 90s are polished off
then irony should be, too
but irony came down with the white dust
10 years ago
and doesn’t dare
be so cavalier, so arrogant again
(Conan crashes to basic cable,
Chandler’s pilots flop and flop)
If the 90s have been reclaimed
then at the very least cheesy
should be
out of the question,
which is why
63% of voters have clicked “dislike”
for “Edge of Glory”
They look away look away look away
as they are meant to—
You can tell that’s studio-lot New York, not real New York.
Backbends? Spinning around a lamppost? Thrusting against the rail?
How can she dance like that?
Why is her lip-synching so off?
Seriously, an old black guy with a saxophone on a stoop?
Turns out everybody’s always lip-synching
and those spin moves are quotations
That guy, my dear, is a legend
and half of New Yorks are filmed
and manufactured in Los Angeles
This isn’t the 80s in the 90s
This is the 80s in 2011
We are the tweens of a new century
and our bodies are changing
and we are urgent
Is that smoke or steam?
Reference and
reputation and
reality
lose their power
when expectations are
raised
to mythological proportions
If “Born This Way” was goddess myth
and “Judas” Christian myth
and the mer-myth of “Edge of Glory” was scrapped
what are we left with?
“The Edge of Glory” sounds like
an intense love song
but there is no lover
only a man on a stoop playing a saxophone
There is a moment (4:47)
when Gaga lies on her back on the sidewalk
at the bottom of the stoop
and points to Clarence as she sings “you”
But there is nothing sexy about her point
She could be pointing at the saxophone
And maybe she is
Music as lover, très Gaga—
Because of Music
Fame becomes Monster and maybe eventually
becomes Glory
But what is Glory?
The Glory Monster must be
The Fame Monster’s benevolent twin
Glory is what swirls around Fame
what shapes it
arriving before or after or out-of-time
Music without all the trappings
Something simpler, closer to home
All the adulation without all the flashbulbs
of “Paparazzi”
“The Edge of Glory” is all this, too
And it is cheesy to bask in one’s own Glory
It is nearly absurd
when one already makes the most money
and garners the most Google hits
It is certainly absurd
to bask in one’s own Glory
while one’s apartment may be on fire
and it’s the middle of the night
and no one else is around
and that’s a saxophone, not an M16
Where is the danger in “Edge of Glory”?
She doesn’t need saving
She just wants to dance
Lady Gaga is 25
The most famous girl in her 20s
Now that Britney and Christina and Paris
are all turning 30 this year
like me
And if “Edge of Glory”
is Gaga’s quarterlife crisis
then let it be
Let it be the cheesy bad dream of a fire
and an escape and a saxophone and a stoop
Let it be the knowledge that an edge
is a verge
and a cliff
Let her gaze wander back to the videos
that played on TV in 1986
when Stefani was born
that way, Gagaesque
Let it wander straight into
the mytho-futuristic
And let our gaze turn away, turn away
from something so simple and cheesy
and glorious
we can barely watch
Coda
for saxophone
I wrote this poem, printed it out,
went to a beer garden in another borough
& didn’t look at it once all night,
not even in the bathroom.
There was a stage on a cement platform
in the middle of the huge yard,
empty save for smokers & shortcutters.
When I came home & learned
Clarence Clemons had died
the fame and glory and danger
seemed all his.
Lady Gaga, clairvoyant or not,
got it right
with only two days’ retrospect
(we are on Pop Time, come hither,
go hence, but quickly).
Cheesy becomes poignant just like that.
You go out, you come home.
This song started with a prediction
and ends with a prophecy.
Now kids in their 20s
far from Asbury Park
will know Clarence Clemons
and what he was doing on that stoop.
Ghosting into the future.
This is the myth of Lady Gaga as sibyl,
in which she of all people
gets out of the spotlight and,
writes Heraclitus,
with frenzied mouth
uttering things
not to be laughed at,
unadorned and unperfumed,
yet reaches to a thousand years
with her voice
The saxophone, the bagpipes
spirit blowing through the reeds
5,109,428 views
hangin’ on a moment with you
Author Bio:
Becca Klaver is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she studied screenwriting, English, Gender Studies, and Spanish, and of Columbia College Chicago, where she received an MFA in Poetry. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University. With Arielle Greenberg, she is editing a collection of contemporary poems for teenage girls, a project inspired by an article they co-wrote entitled “Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets – a Professor and Graduate Student – Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence” (College Literature 36.4; to be reprinted in Critical Insights: Sylvia Plath [Salem Press, 2011]). She is also the author of a collection of poems, LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), and a chapbook, Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009). Klaver is co-founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, and has taught literature, writing, and editing in a variety of traditional and nontraditional settings.
Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter. Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.
