Jetztzeit and the Messianic Skip of Gaga’s “Scheiβe”: I Don’t Speak German, but Benjamin Does

By Eddie McCaffray

The motif of “skipping” – of a phonograph’s needle or a CD player’s laser beam rudely leaping across the surface of a disk – dominates the song “Scheiβe.” Start from the beginning; play the song. “I don’t speak German but I can if you like, ow! – immediately one wonders what this declaration is apropos of. No one asked you to speak German Lady Gaga, did they? Who was even talking about German? The song just started! Right away, this song creates the feeling that we’ve begun in the middle of something, some other conversation. Something’s been skipped and now everyone is confused.

Then, Gaga’s German [begins 0:03]: incomprehensible gobbledy-gook, yet rhythmic and repetitive. Isn’t that how a CD sounds when it’s really stuck? Dzhep-dzhep-dzhep-dzhep, fhet-fhet-fhet-fhet? Next comes the churning, fuzzy, bass-synthesizer backbone [begins 0:19], and it too sounds like the beginning (or middle) of a thought. It’s resonant, suggestive, even begins to develop like music should before stalling out [example 0:23-0:27] and eventually resorting to repeating itself, to repeating its incomplete opening over and over again – the techno-organ line will do the same a little later [begins 0:41], when it appears. Then, the techno-scratching noises start up [begins 0:26]: they’re what first grabbed me, what first sounded like skipping, what pulled me into this impossible-to-consummate-feedback-loop of a song, of a creative project.

Because that’s where this is going: skipping isn’t just a weird, cool trash-aesthetic sound to build a dance banger around. As usual with Gaga (Stigmata), it’s a creative and ethical practice – even a principle, perhaps. It makes an argument, and it’s a way to do something. Not that we’re done tracing the motif in its simple appearance just yet, however. That was just a little taste of what’s to come. Maybe my essay is skipping a little bit itself.

Once we get into the lyrics proper, the skipping motif becomes explicit. “I’ll take you out tonight, say whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine. Put on a show tonight, do whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine.” Repetition interrupting itself. Then, the “I”s of the chorus: “I, I wish I got to dance on a single prayer, I, I wish I could be strong without somebody there,” almost as though Gaga is getting stuck on herself, on the self, on her own I. The last phrase then stutter-repeats into a reprise: “Oh, oh, oh, o-oh, without the Scheiβe yea,” Gaga’s voice becoming its own reflexive, diminishing echo. Next, the fragmentary return-and-modification of Gaga’s opening German declaration [begins 1:37]. Eventually, the stuttered “I”s and the fragment of “I don’t speak German but I wish I could . . .” blur together, distort, and literally skip [begins 2:46]. They’re even subsumed into the beat of the song itself. The whole sonic assemblage is reduced, or elevated, to a whirling blend of either not-quite or just-barely intelligible sentence (or musical) fragments, changing their order, recombining, and so on.

So what does this mean? What is the ethical or aesthetic meaning of all this skipping? The main message of the song is that Gaga wishes she could escape all the constraints and prerequisites of her actions: she wants to be strong – potent – without all the bullshit that invariably tags along. The conditions of her actions, or their results. The song itself is explicitly about this problem in terms of feminism or women’s rights; Gaga wants to be herself and do her thing without all this limiting, patriarchal malarkey. And skipping is, in fact, intimately related to this emancipatory struggle: when a fragment of music skips, it rejects its dependence on the principle and progression of the larger song.

Skipping is the rejecting of the intrinsic limitation that you can only sing or play the middle part of the song after the beginning part – or, for that matter, that one sound has to develop into a different-yet-related sound. Skipping puts the middle first, the beginning last, and it never ever gets to the end. Maybe it just plays one tiny part of itself, perhaps the tiny little part it likes best, a million times in a row; it feels no obligation to develop a musical or lyrical idea into its own implications, or to build such an idea out of what has already played, already appeared. The action of the skipping song rejects equally the concept of prerequisite and consequence. Skipping is a revolt both against diachronic development and against synchronic logic.

(It is also the revolt against a complete thought, or a finished identity. It is the musical equivalent of infinite births – of identity as an always-becoming, unfinished process. Born this way.)

Walter Benjamin articulated something similar to the concept of the emancipatory, disruptive skip in regards to (the music of) history:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a casual nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now [Jetztzeit], in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.

Historicism – the understanding of time as regimented space, filled in evenly with reality, through which human subjects march, leaving the past behind and approaching the future – is Benjamin’s opponent here. What he proposes instead is that the historian, the human being, achieve a relationship with all the scope of history at each moment rather than dutifully marching along the route dictated to him by the historicist schema. Our pasts, the past of everyone and everything, is here with each of us in this present moment, and so too are our futures. We remember, we look ahead, but in doing so, those infinite expanses of time are contained within our looking, and our looking is always in the present, always fills the present.

Thus our own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one; Benjamin’s history is one which steps forward out of its dictated place, breaks ranks, moves laterally, reaching across an infinite distance of time and space to apprehend what it needs, what calls to it, what it finds a connection with. It rejects the principle of development. It rejects the constraint that conditions potency: “For in [Judaism’s understanding of time], every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.” Every moment is the moment, of potency, of salvation, of emancipation.

Gaga recognizes this. That’s why this song – a plea or a desperate play for freedom – speaks out of the broken, all-encompassing space of the skip, out of a traumatic gouge on the shining surface of sound that refracts one beam of light into a thousand beams of light:

For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before . . . the consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classers in the moment of their action.

It’s no accident that, in the second verse of “Scheiβe,” Gaga replaces the skipping lyric (“Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine”) with “Express your womankind, fight for your right.” Emancipation speaks out of the gap opened in mechanism, in determinism, by the skip. The disjunction of linear time foiled, of torn plastic and screeching metal and leaping light, is a gap through which freedom bursts, a space from out of which all things are possible. In “Scheiβe,” Gaga is struggling to get stuck in that gaping void, that zero, that zone of pure potentiality, that nothing which allows for infinite somethings.

But the void is only ever possible as an incomplete or scrambled thought. Which is to say: it’s difficult to dwell there.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University. In addition to history, he likes philosophy, literature, and the Russian language.

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Soldiering Emptiness : Inverting Crucifix

By Meghan Vicks

This is the first piece in our series on "Marry the Night."

The origin, argues Maurice Blanchot, does not truly exist, for there’s always something that precedes it as a generative source. He further argues that even if the origin did exist, it would be impossible for us to comprehend or approach it without sullying and thereby destroying the origin itself: it would be irrevocably transformed and changed just by our presence, by our coming into contact with it. What Blanchot is interested in, however, is our fascination with origins in the first place, with our desire for our bare, unaccommodated selves at all. “Man at point zero,” he writes. Blanchot attributes this desire for the zero-point – the chimerical origin – as oriented not so much to the past as to the future: that is, we desire to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse our worlds of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero.

It’s incredibly appropriate, therefore, when Lady Gaga tells us at the onset of the video for “Marry The Night” – her “origins mythos” video – that she loathes reality, and that the story of her origin that the video will reveal is just as much her artistic creation as it is a description of what “really” happened. “Marry The Night” isn’t about what really happened; it’s about what “really” happened.

See, when talking about “origins” or “reality,” we can no longer do so without the recourse to quotation marks (as Nabokov so famously claimed). Artistic creation (the quotes) marries reality; analogously, Gaga (the artist) marries the night. And reality is all that shit, trauma, emptiness, and horror that artistic creativity somehow makes beautiful and bearable. Sometimes I think it’s terrifying, what art has the power to do: make palatable and even beautiful real suffering – that kind of suffering that has no redemptive quality or spark of beauty when one’s enthralled in it.

When Gaga, cradled by suffering, dyes her hair in the bathtub, she’s trying to aestheticize that trauma, make it beautiful somehow. In doing so, she transforms the trauma into something redemptive, into something that’s no longer trauma. Again, when she puts on lipstick and blush in the car. When she bedazzles her denim. The hair dye, lipstick, blush, bedazzler become the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen, and Gaga becomes the artistic vision. And the trauma? It becomes the canvas, that blank space or emptiness upon which a pure potentiality of creations may come into existence.

As Gaga speaks about losing everything, and about being a “soldier to her own emptiness,” she articulates an awareness that sometimes nothingness itself can become the ultimate creative force, that even, perhaps, nothingness is absolutely necessary for artistic creation at all. You’re a soldier to your own emptiness, but emptiness allows for a kind of infinite freedom, a borderless space that allows for new things to exponentially be.

Infinite bedazzled emptiness.

So she’s turned that trauma into a creative power, into an artistic vision. And in doing so, she’s inverted the trauma, freed it from its own ontology and thereby allowed it to become something beautiful. You’re watching a video that is trauma mirrored; you’re face-to-face with your own trauma inverted. After all, you’re the one watching the mirrored reflection of Gaga’s trauma; Gaga’s mirrored trauma positions you as its spiritual hologram.

No, seriously: didn’t you notice that parts of the film were inverted (take a look at the writing on the wall)?

When I flipped the shot, I found that the wall reads this:

As we watch “Marry The Night,” we’re watching an inverted cross: Gaga has taken the trauma of her crucifix and transformed it into beauty. And what’s more traumatic than the crucifix? What’s more beautiful than its inversion?

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