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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Agents Of Pop: “Of What Is Past, Or Passing, Or To Come”

By Laurence Ross

Britney’s first single, “Hold It Against Me,” off of her upcoming album Femme Fatale, initially seems to be yet another song about Britney trying to seduce yet another insipid guy. “If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” The lyric is so tired, so banal, that Britney is actually being sued for copyright infringement over its use (the “original” song in question produced over thirty years ago). But place those lyrics of Britney lusting on the dance floor within the context of Åkerlund’s video, and suddenly a song that I originally appreciated solely for its expected danceablity transforms under a much more complex concept.

Jonas Åkerlund, who directed the video for Britney’s “Hold It Against Me,” also directed Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” and, more recently, “Telephone.” While there are certainly similarities in Åkerlund’s latest representations of the two women, ultimately the videos for “Hold It Against Me” and “Telephone” take two prominent pop stars – and their respective songs about being in the club – and produce two widely divergent personal statements.

In the “Hold It Against Me” video, the perspective of the camera is pulled back so that the viewer can see the many spotlights Britney stands beneath. While Lady Gaga relishes in the spotlight of the camera regardless of the holder (see her indulgent performance as she poses and reposes for her mug shot at the end of the “Paparazzi” video, Åkerlund’s first Gaga production), Britney has felt trapped by this very same paparazzi. For a long time. A very long time. I’ve lost count of the songs she has sung about being tracked down and sought after (“Piece of Me”), the constant presence of the media’s circus (“Circus”), and putting on a face for the camera (“If U Seek Amy Tonight”) – all sung by Britney in anger at the constant media charade, which Lady Gaga, conversely, utilizes as a medium to construct her (many) identity(ies).

The opening scenes of “Hold It Against Me” focus on the body, as Britney and her menagerie of half-naked backup dancers clad in colorful briefs prepare for a photo shoot. The product to be advertised? Britney herself – her scent, bottled for all (which she sprays on herself, raising the question: Is Ahab, Ahab? Is Britney, Britney?). Think of this bottled scent as a type of DNA preservation, similar to a deposit at a sperm bank or freezing one’s eggs when the end of one’s youth is near; for Britney, the end certainly seems near (see the video’s opening sequence: the apocalyptic meteor that crash-lands on Earth).

This is a Britney more than a decade older than the Britney of Baby, One More Time. In short, Britney is aging. She has had two children, and look, Britney’s waist is wrapped in bullets, waging metaphoric warfare against her own body. Internet comments abound about how Britney’s dancing in this video is nothing compared to “the old Britney,” the Britney of Oops!… I Did It Again. But Åkerlund seems to emphasize not Britney’s lack of skill, but Britney’s lack of agency in the video’s initial dance sequences. Her arms are manipulated into motion by her own “backup” dancers as she applies her Make Up For Ever – a commodified representation of her desire for eternity.

Pop stars do not sing about their aging selves, their fading fame, their bodies as paltry – we do not want to see our pop stars in this light. How could we dance to such songs? How could we grope and grind with strangers in a crowded bar or make out with the strobe-lit person to our left if songs about growing old and talentless and decrepit were blaring through the sound system? We can handle songs about rejection and breakups and being lonely, because hey, we have been rejected and broken up with and we are lonely. These misfortunes may be the very reasons we are listening to pop songs in the first place, and (cue bubblegum optimism) these misfortunes of the pop star do not preclude – might even predict – a come back, a revival, a new lover, a new life. 

Writers, on the other hand, write about the end of their lives all the time and have been doing so for centuries. Some writers, like pop stars, are also concerned about their fame, their existence in the public’s consciousness even after they have died, but very few writers are prized for their bodies or bound by the expectation of pop stars to make us happy or, at the very least, hopeful. When it became apparent to me that Britney, in the video for “Hold it Against Me,” was singing about just these taboo concerns, concerns of the aging self, concerns that seem inherently anti-pop, I could not help but place the video and the song in a literary framework.

Think of “Hold It Against Me” in a Yeatsian context. Think of Sailing to Byzantium (1928), a poem written by an aging Yeats about his desire to not only leave his country where youth and sex are most valued, but also to travel back in time to a place where intellect trumped all. Britney feels that she is in “no country for old [wo]men” (Yeats 1.1.1). She does not have the youth or the body that she once had, though she is expected to live and perform to those youthful standards. Indeed, the world of pop seems eternally “caught in that sensual sound of music” (1.1.7) though each individual singer is “begotten, born, and dies” (1.1.6). Britney has become – or at least fears that she has become – a member of “Those dying generations” (1.1.3).

In contrast to Yeats, Britney does not praise “Monuments of unaging intellect” (1.1.8); she praises the body. It is, in fact, the object of desire, and the object of the song. To become bodiless does not interest Britney, though she may certainly feel “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal” (3.1.21-22). Britney wants to be eternal, though Britney is not concerned (as Yeats is) with the perpetuation of the soul. She is concerned with the perpetuation of the body. Both Yeats and Britney want to be freed from their bodies, but while Yeats wants to abandon his corporeal form forever, Britney looks backwards from her age, longing to be her younger self again.

Placed in Åkerlund’s video, the lyrics for “Hold It Against Me” take on new meaning. When Britney sings, “Wanna know just how you feel … If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” we are forced to ask the question: who is the you Britney is speaking about? Where is the scruffy-faced, gym-membered, tanning-bed enthusiast we are so accustomed to seeing as the object of her desire? Britney briefly searches the online dating site Plenty of Fish, momentarily hovers over a profile picture, and then forgets about him – gone with the click of a manicured fingernail. This man is irrelevant, hardly of interest to her, and never makes a physical appearance in the video. The you Britney desires, the you whose body she wants, is her former, physical self. The aged, post-apocalyptic Britney doesn’t want another guy to dance with for a three-minute song and then toss away; Britney wants Britney.

Lady Gaga, on the other hand, is not trapped by her own body. In the “Telephone” video, the opposite is true: she is jailed, her body is detained against her will, but she is not held back by her own body. Lady Gaga is not ashamed of this body, a fact made explicit as she presses her exposed crotch against the bars of her cell for her captors and cellmates to see. While Lady Gaga strives for autonomy through escape from obstacles that outside forces have exerted on her (the fall from fame she takes in “Paparazzi,” and the jail cell of “Telephone”), Britney struggles for autonomy by trying to free herself from herself. Britney is not content in her contemporary skin.

As “Hold It Against Me” progresses, we see a Britney that is composed of both flesh and metal – in effect, a cyborg. But Britney is not proudly relishing in Donna Haraway theory. Britney is not seeking to tear down society’s constricting and reductive notions of gender; in fact, she is grasping for that antiquated image. She is no postmodern feminist looking toward the future. Much in the same way Yeats was a Modern poet who frequently looked backward to a more Victorian aesthetic, Britney, in 2011, looks backward to her self in 1999. She is dressed as a groomless bride. She wears a wedding dress, housed in a digital tower of memory she seems wedded to, accessorized and stabilized with IVs of rainbow fluids and diamond-encrusted surgical tape. The Britneys of the Baby, One More Time album dance on the many monitors that surround and encase her. She pines for what has been lost.

This pining ultimately leads to the battle Britney has with her former self, which represents Britney’s attempt to reclaim her former body. Aged Britney (outfitted with the blue train) fights Young Britney (outfitted with the red train); she upper cuts, gut kicks, and finally strangles Young Britney to the point of collapse.

During the fight scene, Britney sings “Gimme something good. Don’t wanna wait, I want it now. Pop it like a hood and show me how you work it out.” Aged Britney wants her younger self; Aged Britney wants that body now; Aged Britney wants to pop the hood of Young Britney and see just how she ticks. Perhaps swap out a part or two. There is, in fact, a mutual collapse at the end of the fight scene, and for a moment it appears the Britneys have killed each other despite the fact that Aged Britney should clearly be the fight’s victor (she delivers many more blows than she receives). When the fight’s aftermath reveals a Red (Young) Britney standing in a pose of victory with her arms spread and a Blue (Aged) Britney grabbing her skull as if she has undergone some serious head trauma, we must reconcile these images with the fight itself, a fight in which Blue (Aged) Britney seemed indisputably the winner.

The conclusion? Indeed, the body of Blue Britney has undergone serious head trauma, and Aged Britney did win the fight. Aged Britney’s fight-prize? Her mind in Red (Young) Britney’s body. And vise versa.

Lady Gaga exhibits no such body issues in “Telephone.” Gaga, in the prison, prepares for a fight as she gives her hair a slick swipe with the comb. But she is preparing for self-defense – to protect her body, not to discard it. In fact, standing right next to Gaga in the jail cell is Gaga’s little sister. They stand with no animosity between them. There is no desire from Gaga for a younger self, nor a desire for self-inflicted harm. Gaga, along with Beyoncé, acquire self-actualization through the manipulation and elimination of those who stand in their way. “Stop telephoning me,” they sing. Stop trying to hold us down. We are not yours to own. We are free to be ourselves. It is only after both men (Gaga’s lover in “Paparazzi” and Beyoncé’s lover in “Telephone”) are out of the way (granted, poisoned and killed) that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are finally able to dance together, to dance together clad in stars and stripes, to dance together in the Land of the Free, a land of their making.

Even in prison, Lady Gaga maintains her agency. Even in prison, the prison itself is, in a way, not a prison. Lady Gaga walks into the courtyard draped in chains, but the key is right there on her chest. The chains, both physically enacting and symbolizing her imprisonment, are also rendered impotent by her access to their antidote. Lady Gaga uses her agency to obtain a cell phone, mobility behind bars, the means of her bailout/escape. The aesthetic here is one of mutability, where meaning is in constant flux.

Sometimes a telephone is a means of escape (Gaga’s text to Beyoncé) and sometimes a telephone is a jail cell (“Callin’ like a collector”). Sometimes a pussy is a cat (Gaga’s cabdriver cat suit) and sometimes a pussy is a vagina (Venus’s symbol zeroing in on the Pussy Wagon in the final shot of “Telephone”). Sometimes a sandwich is lunch and sometimes a sandwich is a bit of dance choreography and sometimes a sandwich is poison – that’s the Wonder (Bread), the Miracle (Whip) of it all. And Lady Gaga exerts this freedom, this agency, over and over again. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187), Stein tells us in her poem Sacred Emily (1922), a poem that creates a world where words and phrases are repeated to diminish meaning’s stability and to emphasize meaning’s permeability. And this world is the one Lady Gaga inhabits, a world where the meaning and identity of a person/place/thing are never stagnant, always changing. If Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” possesses Yeatsian echoes of a modernist looking backward in time, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” possesses Steinian echoes of a Modernist looking forward to the Post-Modern, the dissolving of boundaries, binaries, and steel bars.

In contrast, it is only after Britney has defeated the younger version of herself and taken her body that she regains some of the agency she had lost. The choreography no longer enacts a manipulated Britney, but a Britney manipulating. She raises her arms and her dancers follow, rising like puppets on strings. She is the conductor, the maestro, the master once again.

No more wreath of microphones framing Britney’s disembodied bust – an image distant from any physicality that seems human. No pair of red lips that exist alone in the otherwise dark void (a nod to Rocky Horror Picture Show, the humanoid, the trope of taking another’s bodily form). The double iris, with the eyelids literally pried open to exhibit the mutation, becomes single again as Britney settles into her repossessed youth.

To the left: Britney’s eye at the beginning of the video. To the right: her eye at the video’s end.

What follows is a type of celebratory funereal pyre in honor of her aged body’s consumption. Golden, glittering confetti is abundant. Britney’s dancers (and our attentions to them) have receded into the background where they presumably belong, now appearing fully clothed in black garb and covered with facemasks. Here, Britney is the one who bears new skin, her segmented dress fastened with giant golden staples, a new life and body she has triumphantly pieced together in the face of her personal apocalypse.

Lady Gaga and Beyoncé don their own funereal garb as they drive away into the sunset, though theirs is a mock-mourning, a stilted eulogy, the face of grief with no real sadness beneath the mask. They are a grotesque vision of two women veiled in sorrow, their hats overly large, and Lady Gaga’s a pastel, almost the shade of baby blue, a shade much more akin to birth than death.

Britney wants to be rebirthed, yes. But not as something to come, as something past. Not an advancement, but a regression, a return to a lost identity. Britney does not want change. Britney wants to be Britney. She is the femme fatale and she is her own enemy. She wants her name and identity gathered into eternity, even at the expense of some slight artifice – a few staples here and there, and a little mind/body swap. She wants to forever sing to the world, “It’s Britney, bitch.”

Gaga has sung a similar statement, though one that portrays her identity as far less concrete. “I’m a free bitch, baby.” Gaga is not defined or limited by her name, just as Stein’s words do not hold stable definitions. Gaga embraces the mutations of identity, which include the mutations of others and the mutations of herself. Britney longs to be forever young while Gaga (and anyone who identifies as an offspring of Mother Monster) knows she is always and continually being reborn.

Bibliography:

Hold It Against Me. Dir. Jonas Åkerlund. Perf. Britney Spears. 2011. Film.

Lady Gaga. “Bad Romance.” The Fame Monster. Interscope Records, 2009. CD.

Michelson, Noah. “Britney E-Mails Her Heart.” Out Magazine. 7 March 2011. Web. 15 March 2011.

Spears, Britney. “Gimme More.” Blackout. Jive Records, 2007. CD.

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

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

Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. F. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 2040. Print.

Writer Bio:

Laurence Ross holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. 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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The Monstrous Art of Pop

by Davide Panagia

[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in The Contemporary Condition (March 20, 2010)].

The issue is one of coming to terms with one’s relation to one’s culture. Nothing less is what the intensity of Lady Gaga’s feats of the spectacular make available.

Her songs and videos – and her artistic life in general – relentlessly pursue the limits of Pop, not as a representational genre but as a medium. It is in this sense that she is an inheritor of the Warhol legacy; but, I would say without reservation (though with an awareness of the unpopular claim I am about to make), she surpasses Warhol through her discovery of the medium of Pop. For where Warhol transformed art into Pop and thereby created a new representational genre, Lady Gaga has transformed Pop into an art with a set of aesthetic convictions, possibilities, and ambitions all its own.

As absurd as this might sound to those lackluster critics who will (and do) insist that Lady Gaga is all style and no substance, the simultaneous release of two major concept albums – The Fame and The Fame Monster – prove the extent to which in our contemporary condition style and substance are incompossibilities of one another. And before readers think that I am claiming that the incompossibility of style and substance means a kind of postmodern irony at the heart of Lady Gaga’s performances, please allow me to correct any misapprehensions of the sort: the claim about the irony of performativity wants to grant purpose to multivalent objects of aesthetic worth and thus betroth to them an intelligibility that makes them accessible and available to our interpretive expectations. My point, instead, is that what defines an aesthetic object is its ability to place the listener or viewer (in this case, both) in an uncertain situation where one’s capacity to give priority to either style or substance as the ground of judgment is disoriented. This, because our modes of sensorial apprehension are discomposed by the experience of the object. Aesthetic experience, in other words, occurs at the dark precursor, somewhere between sensation and reference. And the incompossibilities of sensation and reference are the tools of Lady Gaga’s art.

But I digress.

As we are incessantly reminded, Lady Gaga’s music follows a line of descent with some of the more relevant music and videos coming out of 1980s MTV pop culture, most notably the rhythmic flows of Madonna, the dance hooks of Michael Jackson, and the lyrical voicings of Cindy Lauper (though, as a note of personal insight, I would also add the profound influence of Cameo’s “Word Up” song and video). “Dance in the Dark,” from her recently released The Fame Monster, is most explicitly indebted to Madonna’s lyrical montage with its free-flow rambling in the middle of the song that revisits Vogue’s “Rita Hayworth gave good face” moment:

Marilyn

Judy

Sylvia

Tellem' how you feel girls!

Work your blonde (Jean) Benet Ramsey

We'll haunt like Liberace

Find your freedom in the music 

Find your Jesus

Find your Kubrick

You will never fall apart 

Diana, you’re still in our hearts

Never let you fall apart

Together we'll dance in the dark

But her successful partnership with the Swedish director and video artist, Jonas Åkerlund, betrays another line of descent in her aesthetic stylings found in some of the more progressive of the current Swedish synth-pop disco bands; including (I would say) Fever Ray and The Knife, but also Abba (listen to “Alejandro” and you will hear “Fernando”) and Roxette. Like her collaborations with the recently deceased Alexander McQueen (who premiered Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” in his Spring 2009 show) and the Italian installation artist Francesco Vezzoli (at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the videos that Åkerlund has produced and directed for Lady Gaga screen her insistence that what is crucial to our contemporary condition is our capacity for interface: that is, that our handling and beholdings of the objects of our culture speaks to our willingness to handle and behold one another. The simultaneous release of the song and video “Telephone” (on March 11, 2010) is a case in point.

Telephone’s lyrics are about a young woman at a dance club who does not want to be bothered by people calling her on her cell phone because she is too busy having a good time. “Stop callin’; Stop callin’; I don’t want to talk any more! I left my head and my heart on the dance floor,” proclaims the ritornello. Simple enough.

The song, however, announces something different than the lyrics. Upon first listening to it, I was disappointed by Gaga’s use of Auto-tune, something I didn’t think she needed given that she has an excellent voice. Auto-tune is the controversial audio processor (used by many in the music industry) that allows anyone to sing at perfect pitch by adjusting off-key performances through the use of a phase vocoder – it is the device that made Cher’s altered vocal effect in “Believe” possible and catchy. Upon second listening, however, I realized that the placing of the Auto-tune alteration in “Telephone” is not intended for pitch correction, but is an attempt to mimic through voice the sound of a ringer and to give emphasis to the artificiality of everyday life. The prominence of Auto-tune and the fact that “Telephone” lyrically and melodically swings to the beat of a busy dial-tone makes available our integration with multimedia technological culture so that the “Stop callin’” of the ritornello isn’t merely a request but is also a marker of our cultural interface: there is no naturalness to voice, especially in the digital age. 

Åkerlund’s music videos are known for their mock movie-trailer stylings. And though at times humorous, their real effect is not one of parody but of intensity. The colors, contrasts, and close-ups throughout the “Telephone” video, for instance, are exaggerated to the point of the monstrous. It’s almost as if Åkerlund is trying to show the viewer what a video can do, and not simply what it can represent. And, indeed, with “Telephone” this disconnect is especially palpable given the fact that the video has nothing to do with the lyric’s themes of being in a dance club and not wanting to answer one’s phone. 

Correction: Lady Gaga is in a club of sorts – a rough trade women’s prison in the middle of a desert – and we can surmise why she ended up there if we think of “Telephone” as a sequel to the other Gaga/Åkerlund collaboration, “Paparazzi,” wherein Lady Gaga kills a boyfriend who, in turn, had tried to kill her by throwing her off a balcony. A further disconnect: Gaga’s collaboration with Beyoncé in the song “Telephone” is turned into a “Thelma and Louise” partnership when the two ladies – in full dis/fashion regalia (including makeup whose colors recall the pastels of their automobile) – board their “Pussy Wagon” (the pick up truck that Uma Thurman had used to escape the hospital in Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and go on a highway diner killing spree. Once again, a monstrous disconnect that is perfectly in-line with the theme of The Fame Monster – the ugly side of fame where makeup is transubstantiated into black tears, or even spilled blood.

That Lady Gaga has made a concept album with both The Fame and The Fame Monster worthy of a Patrick Bateman monologue is a notable achievement; even more remarkable is that this conceptual artifice ties into some of the best instances of American popular culture, especially the pulp crime genre that Robert Warshow had written so elegantly about in the 1940s. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow claims that “What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans” (The Immediate Experience). It is universal to Americans, he goes on to explain, because Americans react to it immediately, at once sympathizing and dissociating themselves from it: the gangster, Warshow says, “is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”

The persona of the gangster is transubstantiated, for Lady Gaga, into the persona of the Fame Monster (notably, a trope Michael Mann has also explored in his recent film, Public Enemies): the fashion icon/victim, the doer and the sufferer, the one who projects an image and is defeated by that same projection. And isn’t this what we all do? Do we not all project images and bear the weight of others’ projections? Facebook, the iPhone, wi-fi, and 3-G (soon to be 4-G) wireless networks are not merely the ornamental contexture of contemporary culture, they are the instruments of interface with it; they are the mediums through which events of relata emerge in our contemporary condition, they are the objects we handle and behold when we handle and behold one another.

It’s precisely this aspect of Gaga that the lackluster critics overlook with vertiginous accuracy. Most stunningly, Camille Paglia’s recent iconoclastic rant in the pages of The Sunday Times (“Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex.” September 12, 2010) mumbles such incomprehensions by accusing Gaga of being a “ruthless recycler of other people’s work,” citing the recent “Alejandro” video as an instance of Madonna-theft and then asking “at what point does homage become theft?” Despite Paglia’s clichéd vitriol, the question is the right one to ask. And, in fact, Paglia gives us the answer to her question in declaring that “Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age.” What might I mean by this? 

Simply put, the song (and video) “Alejandro” are Gaga’s attempt not so much at homage but at putting into view what the digital age affords. Let’s think here about some of the major events that might be associated with our digital age. Other than the monumental advent of personal computing and the Internet, one major digital age phenomenon that comes to mind is the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. A second major event: cut and paste interface technology like that available in software programs such as Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, Quicktime, Vuze, and Hardware. And a third: the proliferation of virtual venues for the projection and transmission of the products that emerge from our use of digital manipulation software – virtual venues like You Tube, Facebook, Pirate Bay, and so forth. Such conventions, software, and venues make the adoption, extraction, manipulation, appropriation and transmission of audio and video, song and image, immediately available elements of popular culture. The idea here is a complex, though not complicated, one: to live in the digital age means that we no longer submit to the position of passive spectatorship. That is, we are no longer merely consumers: we are also handlers. And by “handlers” I mean people who engage popular culture through transmission as much as through reception. This, it seems, is one of the key ontological shifts that comes with new media digitality. The song and video “Alejandro” places that ontological shift into full view.

To put this slightly differently, and in the hope of comforting some of Camille Paglia’s acerbic distress: What Lady Gaga is up to with “Alejandro” is neither simply homage nor theft but indexing: through such performances she indexes the handlings that our digital age makes available. One need only take a closer look and listen at “Alejandro” to note how forceful her commitment to and aesthetics of handling is. The song (as already mentioned) betrays its indebtedness to Abba. But one can’t help also hear resonances of Roxette and, in the opening hook, a stunning recall of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” “Alejandro” (the song) is neither homage nor theft but a mash-up; and “Alejandro” (the video) is also neither homage nor theft but a photo-shopped assemblage. This is what the nature of Pop in the digital age is; and Lady Gaga is, in this regard, not simply a media Pop star but a New Media Pop artist. 

In his book on film, one of the first books in the study of film ever written by an American philosopher, Stanley Cavell declares (in 1971) that “it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself – to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks” (The World Viewed, 103). For Cavell the task of the artist is to make available in his or her art the conditions of possibility (and therefore also the limits of possibility) of that art. Anything less amounts to formulaic reproduction and artistic failure. The task of the artist in the modern period, in other words, is that of making available the immediate experience of an art-form by making present the constitutive elements that make that art-form possible.

The elements that make New Media Pop art at once possible and convincing are not qualities that belong to the object, they are effects that arise from one’s interface with it; specifically, I’m talking about the sense of conviction that comes with an immediate grasp of a work. New Media Pop art is New Media Pop art because it affords an immediate grasp. Hence the importance of the shortness of the pop song, for instance, and its hook. In a two-to-three minute period the artist must convey a sense of absolute precision and certitude that will resonate or hold beyond the moment of impact, thereby creating the sensation that nothing else matters to the art-form at that moment other than that work, as if that work is the only thing that can count as Pop. Through this experience of absolute – almost theological – conviction we discover that the task of New Media Pop art – the “muse of the art itself” – is to declare immediacy for itself. Nothing less amounts to artistic (and not just commercial) failure.

Therein lies the mendaciousness of the aesthetic object: a work’s prestige, or its conjuring trick, is its conveyance of a conviction without authority or ground to validate that conviction. It’s in this sense that Lady Gaga is absolutely right to declare, in the Summer 2010 double-issue of Rolling Stone, that “Music is a lie. Art is a lie. It is a lie. You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true” (Rolling Stone, July 8-22, 2010, p. 71). Art can only afford sensations; but sensations (as David Hume showed long ago) do not belong to the province of verification, or to that kind of knowledge that would give veracity to one’s judgments. The mendaciousness of which I speak, marked by the “as if” of my previous paragraph, thus returns us to the condition of incompossibility discussed in my introductory remarks. The wonderful lie made true through receptivity is another way of suggesting that the incompossible ground of aesthetic experience is sourced and sustained only through our expressions of conviction in the face of the vivaciousness of our sensations. 

This is the aesthetic ambition that Lady Gaga claims for New Media Pop art in and through her music, her videos, and her performances. The task now is to come to terms with it; that is, to conjure the terms of its possibility and to think through what the new criteria of judgment, appraisal, and (indeed) disapproval might be in the face of Gaga’s projection of this New Media Pop aesthetic. 

Through The Fame and The Fame Monster Lady Gaga has made the claim that Pop commands an immediate attention that no other medium of art can pretend to or duplicate, and it is precisely the immediacy of her stardom, and Pop’s availability through it, that marks for Lady Gaga one of the cornerstones of our contemporary condition: our interface with and handling of culture as opposed to our subjection to it. 

Author Bio: 
Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.