Take Gaga Out Tonight (One Song on the Edge of Glory)

By Derritt Mason

This is the eighth piece in our series on “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

My initial response to “The Edge of Glory” was fairly standard, as far as my initial responses to Lady Gaga videos go.

“Where have I seen this before?” I thought to myself, confronted with another Gaga-ian pastiche of instantly familiar yet not readily situated images. Certainly, the brick façade and fire escape are reminiscent of any number of films set in New York City. Perhaps I was thinking of Tony and Maria’s enchanting West Side Story duet “Tonight,” wherein our star-cross’d lovers grasp longingly for one another amidst iron bars not unlike the ones upon which Gaga grinds her spectacularly vejazzled crotch:

Or perhaps, due to my indulgent consumption of serialized television programming, Gaga’s apartment entryway smacked of the portal to Carrie Bradshaw’s Shrine to Shoe Fetishism:

Still, no. Where had I previously seen another woman, similarly en deshabille, transform a brick-backed fire escape into her own personal dais of erotic dance?

Aha! I was thinking of Mimi, the HIV+ heroin-addicted heroine of Jonathan Larson's Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical RENT (1996) – and specifically the number “Out Tonight,” Mimi’s paean to living in the now, an expression of the show’s oft-repeated tagline: “No Day But Today!” Visually – especially in terms of setting and choreography/movement – and thematically, the similarities between “The Edge of Glory” and “Out Tonight” (I’m posting the 2008 RENT: Filmed Live on Broadway version) are striking:

... and grew increasingly striking as I watched and re-watched the pair of clips. Gaga’s echoing refrain of “tonight, yeah baby” and suggestion that “you’re who should take me home tonight” certainly recall the chorus of Mimi’s number and her repeated invitation: “Let’s go out tonight / I have to go out tonight.” Both women also plan to dance in/around fire: Gaga, “Put on your shades, cause I’ll be dancing in the flames”; Mimi, “Get up, life’s too quick / I know someplace sick / Where this chick’ll dance in the flames.” And both risk encounters with danger: Gaga, “It’s hard to feel the rush / brush the dangerous”; Mimi, “My body’s talking for me / It says, time for danger.” Most notably, however, “The Edge of Glory” could be read as a response to the ostensibly present-oriented temporality of “Out Tonight” and RENT more generally. Gaga’s lyric “I’m on the edge of something final I call life tonight” could be comfortably imported into “Out Tonight” or the subsequent number “Another Day,” where RENT’s mantra of “no day but today” appears alongside the equally present-oriented lyrics: “There is no future, there is no past / I live this moment as my last.”

So what? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but my sense is that we’re on the edge of something interesting (if not glory in the strictest sense), and the undeniable thematic and visual similarities between “The Edge of Glory” and “Out Tonight” warrant further investigation. For the moment, I will make the precariously undeveloped claim that Gaga provocatively toys with temporality in “The Edge of Glory” in ways that pay tribute to while complicating RENT's focus on the present as an ideal temporal orientation.

Set in the late 80s/early 90s, RENT explores the effect of HIV/AIDS on a group of twentysomething bohemian New Yorkers. The show’s live-in-the-now themes emerge from the way HIV/AIDS dramatically alters how those affected by the crisis perceive time. In In a Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam describes this shift as a sense of “constantly diminishing future” that “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and [...] squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand” (2). While RENT’s lyrics reflect precisely what Halberstam is describing, the “now” in RENT, I would claim, operates in service of a hopeful future, one glimpsed at the end of the show through Mimi’s survival, her coupling with Roger (RENT’s angsty musician), and the queer family they establish through the course of the play.

Gaga’s relationship to time in “The Edge of Glory” seems more complex. The song itself and her stripped-down video are rife with nostalgia for the 80s and 90s (the saxophone solo, her wardrobe choices), yet as I have already described, her lyrics are similar to “Out Tonight” in their celebration of the present moment. Like RENT, however, “The Edge of Glory” seems to contain traces of futurity: we are, after all, always on the edge of glory and “hanging on a moment,” suggesting that our achievement of glory will be perpetually deferred. Unlike RENT, however, Gaga’s emphasis on the future via the present exists by virtue of her incorporation of nostalgic elements into the song and her video. Given more space and time, I would argue that Gaga’s video is in line with what José Muñoz describes as queer utopian thinking, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision,” one that locates potentiality in a previous era and uses it to conjure a hopeful version of a future-to-come (4). For Muñoz (and Gaga, it would seem), “the present is not enough,” and it is only by maintaining a “relation to alternative temporal and spatial maps” that we can begin to disrupt linear, straight time and imagine a queer future (27). Although I’m not currently certain what kind of utopia we could imagine through “The Edge of Glory”, Gaga’s video is quite queer: it is set in a space that is simultaneously no-place and every-place, both outside of time and located quite specifically in a particular decade, and empty (only Gaga and Clarence Clemons appear in the video) but filled with desire that manifests itself, through Gaga’s Mimi-esque dance moves, as a relationship between Gaga and her invisible spectators and Gaga and the urban New York-ish landscape.

My sketchy argument is complicated by the fact that, as RENT continues to run off-Broadway and through a number of national tours, it now operates and signifies quite differently than when it initially opened in the mid-1990s. What does it mean, for example, that RENT is a present-day phenomenon that is now (like Gaga) drawing on a previous era to relay its message about present(/future)-oriented living? This warrants further consideration at some point in the not-too-distant now. Until then, I suggest we take Gaga “Out Tonight” (maybe even to the Cat Scratch Club?) and see what unfolds.

Works Cited

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Muñoz, José. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Print.

Author Bio:

Derritt Mason is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta. His article “Queer Exposures: Anti-Gay Violence and the Landscapes of Wyoming” recently appeared in The Brock Review, and he has forthcoming publications on childhood and perversity, and narratives of mobility in the It Gets Better project.  Derritt is currently obsessed with the song “Scheiße.” This is Derritt’s second article for Gaga Stigmata; his first can be found here.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Song Incarnate

By Cheryl Helm

This is the seventh piece in our series on “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

As best I can tell, most people seem to dislike “The Edge of Glory” video because it doesn’t have a story-line. That’s because they’re looking for it in the wrong place. The story-line is not in the video. Rather, it is in Gaga’s body. For the first time in her video career, Gaga has created something organic, in which the music and the visual are one. She is both the song and the singer. She becomes the Song Incarnate, music made flesh.

Watch her move.

Soundtracked by a pulse and choral heart monitor (which indicates that the song is driven by the flesh, is synonymous with the body), a hand extends around the corner of a building on a street billowing with white fog gently bloodied by the backlights. A hand appears at the window, sliding back a white curtain backlit in red and warm white. The woman becomes shadow behind a veil, a woman striking a sultry pose on a street corner. In the window, she is form obscured by the glare. She leans hipshot against the stoop as the beat bleeds into the song. As the song takes its beat from a heart’s pulse, Gaga takes form as the music swells – they are together in a symbiotic relationship, body and song dependent upon each other for existence.

This the moment when you realize that this video is going to be something very different and you’re not sure you like it. It feels uncomfortably intimate, as if you’re actually seeing Gaga, the woman behind the glitz and gimmickry and a dozen dancers. Gaga as she is, in her element, at home, on the streets of New York City. The Street, complete with Street Musician.

This is the Woman Behind the Curtain.

Gaga has become such an iconic figure in short films brimming with eye candy, stuffed full of content and replete with dozens of visual and cultural quotes, with each release launching a veritable scavenger hunt by some of the most innovative, freethinking art critics and cultural analysts (yes, I’m talking about you, Gaga Stigmata). Consequently, we’re just not used to seeing her so unembellished, unaccompanied, and seemingly unrehearsed.  And this time, that’s all we get. Just Gaga. Just the Song. As epicenter of the performance, which is why there is so little to distract us from the song itself. That’s not accidental. It’s intentional.

There is a story-line, but it’s visceral, told in the ancient language of music wedded to flesh: Gaga is both storyteller in the singing of it, and the story itself in the way she tells it through her body. The medium is the message and Gaga is both.

The video is set in Gaga’s artistic, as well as physical, birthplace. This is her life. This is who the fuck she is, and where she came from, embodied in a glorious song about the glorious feelings of winning at Life, even if you are near the end of it. In reality, the Edge of Glory is not a complicated state. It’s an elemental state, whether you’re standing at the edge of love, a momentous career or geographic shift, or the very edge of life itself, and you’re about to throw yourself into the embrace of your future, your destiny. It’s something that can only be experienced, not explained.

Gaga embodies that elemental joy and passion and sense of freedom, and honors its simplicity. She does it mostly with her body, which aside from a few hair flips, playful head tosses, and sultry Vogue expressions, is relatively unencumbered by the poses learned on the runway and in front of the fashion cameras. Also unobscured by elaborate sets, eye-popping costumery, and head-scratching manifestos and religious metaphors.

Watch her move.

As she saunters toward the camera from the corner, she’s completely in her body in a way we don’t normally see her. The shoulder movements are organic, and her walk is more sashay than casual runway strut. Still holding the camera’s gaze, she walks backward, drawing you toward the corner, then turns with a head-toss and walks away with natural swag, tossing a look over her shoulder just to see if we’re following. She’s animated by the song, unfettered by anything but the need to move to the music. It’s physical and it’s visceral because she wants us to feel the music the way she does in that moment.

And that’s what we see. Gaga dances in a way we rarely see her, except in candids shot at after parties. This is Gaga dancing before The Fame. It’s the dance of the Street, the dance of the Club, the dance of Burlesque and the heavy-metal Go Go. She’s utterly physical in a way we’ve not seen before. She makes love to the bricks and mortar, to the front stoop, to the rain-slicked walk, to the streets of New York City itself. She’s in her element, she’s in her body, and in her body is the song, the lyric, the momentum, and the bone-deep memory of being on the Edge of her own glory. She makes her body the message of the song. She is the story-line. She is the joy and liberation and euphoria when there’s nothing behind and only a leap of faith ahead, with only a song to carry you forward.

She is at her most spontaneous as she dances to Clarence Clemons’ deep-roots sax solo. There is nothing to distract her, nothing to do but dance. And dance she does. Moving as the music, not as a choreographer, tells her body to move, and in her body are the memories of seminal moments in her musical history: movements she may have seen in the old school music videos of her childhood, movements she claims for herself because she owns the emotions that created them. She is at her most free and most joyous in this section of the video. You can almost see her heart and soul take wing and soar. She is entirely herself and no one else. She is Gaga before we knew her, the historical Gaga before the onslaught of her public Fame. She is Gaga as private person before the private/public joint venture persona whose life she art-directs in every moment of visibility.

Much has been made (on the basis of very few actual facts) of the fact that this was not the original concept for the video. There were nod-and-a-wink hints about “something fishy,” rumors of mermaids, photos of a subway set and what looked like a surgical suite, and clearly something typically-Gaga and complex was being planned. This plan came to a screeching halt after one day of shooting. Some have called the resulting video “boring” and “crappy,” and blamed it on being a hasty, slapped together project. I can’t think of anything more insulting to Gaga’s innate talent and prodigious ability to create something out of nothing, time and time again.

In scrapping the original, elaborate, high concept for “The Edge of Glory,” Gaga tapped into her deepest musical and artistic instincts and memories. The necessity of doing it quickly called up something deep in her artistic soul and she honored it  –  “honored her vomit,” committed to it, married herself to it. Spontaneity is part of Gaga’s creative process. There are many behind-the-scenes stories about her tendency to change her mind about something and throw the entire company into disarray as they rush to make manifest her last-minute vision.

Case in point: the costumes for the 2011 Grammy performance of “Born This Way.” The Fresno Beehive cited an AP fashion story (no longer available unfortunately) that quoted Gaga as saying:

“You know I plan months in advance, but unfortunately I always change my mind at the last minute. Actually the outfits for the Grammys we made two days before and all the material came from a trucking company in Fresno.”

She does this, not because she has the power or authority to make such expensive and likely panic-inducing decisions, but because her most singular article of artistic faith is to honor the product of her inspired moments.

“The creative process is approximately 15 minutes of vomiting my creative ideas, in the forms of melodies, usually, or chord progressions and melodies and some sort of a theme lyric idea. It all happens in approximately 15 minutes of this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings. And then I spend days, weeks, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is that you honor your vomit. You have to honor your vomit. You have to honor those 15 minutes.” [Gagavision 43]

She never seems to labor long over the creation of a project. For example, she said she wrote the title track, “Born This Way,” in about ten minutes. But then she spent the better part of a year stroking it, tweaking it, together with every other song on the record. “I licked and touched and kissed and made love to every single note and melody and lyric on that album,” she told US Weekly.

But as she herself has noted, there’s a period of artistic pregnancy between conception and birth. And the newborn is always as flawless and perfect as she wants it to be, with very few exceptions, usually circumstantial. “The Edge of Glory” video appears to be one of those unforced exceptions. It’s not perfect in the way her previous videos have been. Its conceptual and constructive seams are showing. You know you’re seeing a set and not New York itself. You know the steam rising from the drains is machine-generated, and the video is making an statement about the “who and what” of the Gaga we first see. She is visibly lip synching, and we all know how she feels about that. Which is the most emphatic clue that the way this video looks is deliberate and not accidental, not merely slapped together at the last moment. And it’s done for a purpose.

It is precisely this unpolished imagery coming at us that makes the video seem unnervingly personal and intimate and spontaneous. Even her approach to the camera is intimate. She’s allowing herself to be shown instead of commandeering the lens and giving you the feeling that she’s watching you watch her. There’s none of that sentiment here. Rather than performing her characteristic videographic Show and Tell, she seems to simply say, “See me. Watch me. Here I am.”

What the video lacks in long, deep deliberation is more than compensated by its spontaneity, which is precisely what gives music its raw power and emotion. Rejecting elaborate and complicated symbolic discourse, Gaga created something elegant in its simplicity, pure in its intentions, and deeply tethered to her own instincts and influences.

Culturally, in doing what can fairly be labeled as retro inasmuch as “The Edge of Glory” is an old-fashioned honest-to-God music video, Gaga has shown us again what is good, even great, about our musical heritage that need not be archived or abandoned simply because newer forms exist. The ways in which music is packaged, presented, and experienced are part and parcel of the cultural heritage of the music itself. In “The Edge of Glory,” Gaga clearly rejects the notion that her frequent use of complex short-film presentations for some songs should preclude her embrace of the ancestral roots of music videography for other songs.

In this case, the video is both medium and message. Her use of classic music videography was meant to honor the musical heritage of an art form that can be made relevant today. Her choice of incorporating saxophone into “The Edge of Glory” was meant to honor her musical heritage. Featuring Clarence Clemons as the ONLY other person in the video was meant to honor the musical heritage that he embodied.

In the glory days of MTV, music videos were all about the song, nothing more. Little was done or allowed to detract from the power of the music. That may seen like ancient history but sometimes, a song deserves nothing less than to be let alone, unfettered, free of artifice and complexity and cinematic angst, the kind of song that should be all that you see and hear. “The Edge of Glory” is exactly such a song. TEOG is exactly the right kind of video to honor it.

And lest we forget, one of Lady Gaga’s most iconic, epic performances consisted of standing still and striking fixed poses, mostly in silhouette, on a fixed platform (the Monster Ball’s opening, “Dance in the Dark”). And another of her most poignant and beloved performances was created spontaneously in less than 48 hours after throwing out a full-scale production number at the last moment (2010 Brit Awards).

Sometimes less is more, and simplicity can be the most elegant art form of all. It says everything by saying almost nothing at all.

Author Bio:

Cheryl Helm is an unapologetically unreconstructed hippie and devoutly politically incorrect. She sold her soul to rock n roll in the 50s, bought her first good electric guitar from Patti Smith's husband in Detroit, and never looked back. She writes poetry, prose, L-Word fan fiction, essays, editorials, music criticism, and some things she can’t quite define. She’s been published in obscure feminist literary journals, alternative presses, newspapers, Creem Magazine, and blogs, leaving behind digital traces like glitter.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Edge of Banality?

By Robin James

This is the sixth piece in our series on “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

In this post, I argue that the music in “The Edge of Glory” deconstructs, or at least destabilizes, the song’s superficial “cheesiness” or banality.

I’m going to focus more on the song itself rather than the video. However, I do want to point out two visual references that others may or may not have already picked up on. First, Gaga’s eye makeup is very Siouxie Sioux.

Second, dancing around on the steps of a walk-up wearing black leather and studs is very reminiscent of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message.

Here, around 0:38 and again around 1:04, Melle Mel, wearing some leather studded gauntlets and hat, raps while he and the rest of the group sit around on the steps of a walk-up. Interestingly, right at 1:04, he raps, “Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge.” I wonder if the visual reference is an intentional gesture toward this specific lyric?

The visual aside, let’s focus on the music. I want to talk about two specific features of the song: (1) its referencing of female electronic musicians, and (2) the role of camp and irony as what distinguishes this successful performance of an otherwise highly cheesy and formulaic song from an unsuccessful performance of a song that remains stuck in its corniness and banality (e.g., Rebecca Black’s now-infamous Friday). In fact, TEOG’s referencing of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” in (1) is evidence that there’s something more to the song than its superficially cheesy, formulaic composition and lyrics.

(1) “On the Edge” with Avant-Garde Female Electronic Musicians

Everybody’s been all excited about the sax solo in this track. But it’s not the only 80s musical reference. The music itself references two female pioneers of electronic music. First, the intro’s repeated vocalizations on “oh” or “ah” recall Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”

This vocalization reappears throughout the song; it is especially prominent around 0:33, 2:20, and 3:50. Interestingly, “O Superman” ends with a little bit of saxophone. Another similarity between “O Superman” and “The Edge of Glory” is the use of noodly, Baroque-y arpeggiations (here, by a flute).

“The Edge of Glory” uses arpeggiation in a somewhat different way. The arpeggiated synthesizers around 1:20 (and again at 2:44 and 4:19) break from the usual formulaic arpeggiation (this is a standard feature on synths) to a more overtly Baroque-style breakdown. What makes Gaga’s use of synth arpeggiations more “baroque” (i.e., in the style of 17th and 18th c European art music) than your average dance track’s use of synth arpeggiators is that in “The Edge of Glory,” these particular arpeggiations (so, not all the arpeggiations in the piece, only this specific line at the end of the choruses) move along with the underlying harmonic progression, much in the same way that a Baroque-era harpsichordist would have ornamented his or her performance. There is also somewhat of a “spinning-out” effect, which is also characteristic of Baroque music. Wendy Carlos invented Baroque-style synths – her Switched On Bach played some of Bach’s Inventions and Brandenburg Concerti on the then-new Moog synthesizer.

These references to Anderson and Carlos are certainly subtle, and are likely lost on listeners without at least a passing history of 20th-century avant-garde and/or electroacoustic music. However, as I argue in the next section, they are among the key indicators that Gaga (or at least the song) is in on the joke, so to speak, and that the song is not reducible to its cheesyness, formulaicness, and banality.

(2) Not as Cheesy as It First Sounds

I’ll admit, the first few times I heard this song I couldn’t stop laughing. Both the lyrics and the overall form of the piece made it sound like the alternate theme song to Top Gun. “The Edge of Glory” could be the name of some Top Gun clone, staring Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe instead of Tom Cruise. (It doesn’t just evoke Top Gun, but also Days of Thunder, even Karate Kid – any of those brash, young hero films of the 80s/early 90s.) Which is to say: It sounds tailor-made for one of those 80s hero narratives, where some young brash underdog puts it all on the line, struggles a bit, but ultimately overcomes whatever loss or difficulties to have an even greater triumph. It’s in the music itself, not just the lyrics or the video: with its builds and drops, its swooping and “swooshing” harmonic progressions, the air stunts and dogfights almost choreograph themselves. For example, in the chorus, Gaga sings “It’s hard to feel the rush/brush the dangerous…”, the music swells, there’s a cymbal roll, and right here you can imagine jets screaming across the screen. Then, as the melody climbs with the repetitions of “the edge,” we can imagine jets climbing, climbing, climbing higher into the atmosphere…

All this rhapsodizing is to say that the music is really, really cheesy and formulaic. BUT, the music is not odiously distasteful. I laughed along to it, but I didn’t find the song utterly unbearable. Why?

TEOG is not reducible to mere cheesiness, banality, or formulaicness because it transcends its superficial lyrical and musical meanings, offering another layer of meaning in addition to the most obvious one. We don’t laugh at it, we laugh with it. How can we tell it’s laughing at itself? There are several ways.

First, Gaga sells this performance: she uses various performance strategies, including camp, to push the idiotic lyrics and music to a sort of argument ad absurdam. This is similar to the strategies Angela Davis identifies in the work of Billie Holiday. According to Davis, Holiday was often given the dregs of Tin Pan Alley, but she performed them in ways that drew critical attention to what could be merely banal, unremarkable, or vacuous (i.e., by pointing out what was banal about it).

Second, the identity of the sax soloist indicates that we ought to be careful not to misinterpret the song. The sax player is Clarence Clemons, of the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen’s backing band. This band is famous for its early 80s “Born in the USA.” This song mocks late Cold-War American exceptionalism, but is famously misinterpreted as a pro-American anthem. We should be similarly cautious about TEOG: though it might first sound like a Top Gun style hero narrative, it’s not.

How do we know it’s not? Well, there’s the argument ad absurdam I just talked about, but there’s also the “O Superman” references. Anderson’s piece is, especially as compared to Springsteen’s “Born…”, a more aesthetically bleak and critical tale of Cold-War dystopia. With allusions to F-16s and nuclear winter, “O Superman” is not an anthem of victory, but apocalypse: “Superman” doesn’t come back from the edge, but falls off it. So, if the Top Gun style narrative is the story of the liberal self overcoming challenges to be reaffirmed in its autonomy, authenticity, wholeness, and indeed supremacy, the “O Superman” narrative is one of the undoing of the liberal self (similarly, Anderson’s song avoids musical “narrative” conventions, i.e., tonality and harmonic development). All of TEOG’s references to “Superman” – the repeated vocalizations, the arpeggios, the sax – indicate that TEOG’s narrator falls over the edge. This falling is not a falling in love, but a more bleak undoing. The song is haunted by an ominousness that a superficial listen belies – much in the same way that the “me” decade, the quintessence of which being hero flicks like Top Gun, is haunted by HIV/AIDS, Iran-Contra, the War on Drugs, etc.

So TEOG laughs with us. We know this primarily because of Gaga’s over-the-top performance. She doesn’t just perform it “correctly” – she pushes the cheesiness and banality of the song to its extreme, thus pointing out the song’s own limitations. It is this performative argument ad absurdam that distinguishes TEOG from unsuccessful performances of similarly banal and formulaic songs. Right now everybody knows about Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” This song is the current poster-child for bad, formulaic, banal music. The problem is, it’s hard to identify what exactly is so awful about it. While Black’s performance certainly isn’t world-class, it’s not inaccurate: her vocal performance is, for all intents and purposes, correct. So if the problem isn’t her singing, maybe it’s the songwriting? It’s a formulaic song, sure, but other artists’ covers of it have uncovered a decent song behind Black’s correct but “uninspired” performance. So if it’s not the singing, and it’s not the songwriting, what is it that is so awful about Black’s “Friday”? I would argue that Black’s “Friday” doesn’t laugh with us: it doesn’t strive for anything beyond the merely literal. It tries to be too “authentic” and “sincere,” and thus discourages or prevents any of the campy argument ad absurdam that we see in TEOG. While TEOG pushes the “edge of banality,” it pushes itself right on over that edge into irony and critique. Black’s “Friday,” on the other hand, remains a safe distance from that edge.

Author Bio:

Robin James is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at UNC Charlotte. Her research engages contemporary continental philosophy with musicology and popular music studies, feminist theory, and critical race/postcolonial theory. Her book, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music, was published in 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield, and she is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled Sound and Sensibility: Moving Feminism Beyond the Visual. She is also working on several projects related to feminism, queer theory, and popular music. She blogs about popular music, feminism, and race at http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

The Pasteboard Mask: Our Lady Leviathan

By Laurence Ross

This is the fifth piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece, here for the second, here for the third, & here for the fourth..

Your tail will then split in two and shrink into what human beings call pretty legs. But it will hurt.

– the Sea Witch

“Well, I would kill for fashion.”

– Lady Gaga

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks … Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough … Talk to me not of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

– Ahab

There are two music videos for Lady Gaga’s newest single, “The Edge of Glory”: the one that exists and the one that does not. This is not exactly a lamentation for a reality that could have been. More so, this is a Borgesian analysis, a deconstruction of the imagined work, an essay at assaying the untaken path in the garden of forking paths.

The First (Second) Version, Which Exists:

If the aesthetic of “The Edge of Glory” is more reminiscent of MGM studios than of New York, it is for good reason – the video was not shot in New York. Moreover, there seems to be little attempt at making this set feel like New York. In what reality is there a street in New York (much less one with a burning building) that goes unpopulated for more than five minutes? Even as Gene Kelly sings and dances in the (artificial) street in the (artificial) rain, there are passersby, and Gaga, in taking a spin around the lamppost, is undoubtedly echoing this performance.

Perhaps that MGM context is the context in which this video should reside, the context in which we should approach our appreciations, lamentations, and critiques. Gaga, as always, is delivering a performance. She is on a set, a set whose artifice is purposely showing its seams at every edge. Gaga emphasizes this artifice, this edge, from the very first shot of the video: her hand emerges from behind the edge of the street-corner building, an edge we cannot see beyond. The second shot? Gaga’s hand running along the edge of an open window frame, an open window that leads into a room in which we can see nothing.

The antiquated and stark aesthetic of this music video – especially when compared to the super-saturated confections Gaga has been feeding her little monsters – seems to have caused a wide-spread reaction of being served a stalk of broccoli for dessert. But a music video made with the aesthetics of another time, (let’s say for example, since everyone is saying it anyway, the 80s), means something much different when the video is produced in 2011 rather than, well, the 80s. The video is, perhaps, less so an homage, and more so a new thought. The video wears the mask of antiquity, putting forward the question, what (if anything) is behind the mask? After all, we are looking at a stage set, the mask of a building, a building that is simply a façade, a shadow, an imitation of the real life thing.

The Second (First) Version, Which Does Not Exist:

Of that which does not exist, we have shadows, we have ghosts, we have specters. We have been the spectators of a handful of live performances of “The Edge of Glory” that complicate the existent video, creating a labyrinth of imagery. On “Le Grand Journal” (15 June, 2011), Gaga is literally spun around toward the crowd, revealing Lady Gaga-as-mermaid. She is half human/half fish. She is, from one aspect, a monstrous mutation. From another aspect, she is beautiful, born that way. And from yet another aspect, she is both, simultaneously. Your fish tail, which we find so beautiful, looks hideous to people on earth. Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is a paradox. And if Gaga is consistently anything at all, she is a paradox. Here is her stage, her performance with all the layered, mirrored complexities we expect Gaga to be continually birthing.

Lady Gaga-as-mermaid is out of water; she is out of her natural habitat. The mermaid is attracted to the surface world as Gaga, in “The Edge of Glory,” is attracted to the Other world, the world on the other side of that edge, whatever that world might be (be it death or simply the other side of the window, the turn around the street corner). Lady Gaga-as-mermaid needs a mask to breathe in this Other world, yet seems unwilling to actually use it. She seems committed to a type of death, a voluntary drowning in air, as she momentarily stares at and sings to the device that could give her life, give her breath, before discarding it. Or, conversely, the mask is a necessary device that facilitates her surgery. The mask is an anesthetic mask, one that will allow her to cross the line from water to land, from tail to legs, from one side of the water to the other, one that will allow her to cross the edge that is the water’s surface. And Gaga sings with eyes half-mast, already in a state of sedation. There are the doctors/angels dressed in white and aquatically moving at the foot of the operating table, offering masks up to Gaga – offerings of life and/or death, offering the paradox that one must die in order to live.

This performance contains many of the elements that exist in the nonexistent video, a video (not) directed by Joseph Kahn. Mermaids, dancing doctors, the menacing tray of surgical instruments, the metallic operating table. The aquamarine wig – a color that simultaneously conjures images of the ocean and of hospital scrubs. We watch (or would watch) this spectacle as the captivated audience seated in the amphitheater of a surgical concert/Sea World show with the captive creature (the captive Gaga) as its centerpiece. We watch this performance from our seats, spectators hungry for spectacle, our bags of candy in hand, and we are tickled pink or blue or maybe both.

The Duality/Singularity of Gaga:

The existent version of the “The Edge of Glory” video is not without its complexities. The outfit/costume Lady Gaga wears throughout the entire video is a piece by Versace. Versace’s logo, the (disembodied) head of Medusa, adorns the outfit/costume. The Medusas are layered: one Medusa strung on a necklace and hanging free as an ornament, the other tightly affixed to Gaga’s throat on a choker. And the old woman clamped eight big oysters onto the princess’s tail to show her high rank. “Ow! That really hurts,” said the little mermaid. “Yes, beauty has its price,” the grandmother replied. Versace’s logo is often encircled in a wreath and represented as a coin. And as with any coin, there are two sides, one edge, and the viewer can only view one side at a time. To see the one side is to give up the other.

The box Gaga has painted on her cheek as a beauty mark signifies a container, a confinement, though this box is not filled in. The box is an open box, an open window of sorts, a third eye (as we have seen before in the “Born This Way” video). The box is simultaneously a symbol of constriction (a prison, a coffin, a vagina) and of freedom (an open space, a gateway to the soul, a vagina).

Medusa herself embodies a feminine paradox. She is a powerful, allegedly beautiful figure; though, if she is imbued with the desire to be with a man (as Gaga’s lyrics to the song are imbued), that desire would be unquenchable in her current, monstrous form. Any man that gazed upon her would turn to stone. Her one consolation was sitting in her little garden, with her arms wrapped around the beautiful marble statue. Medusa’s power is simultaneously a curse, her hair producing loneliness and amplifying longing. Medusa’s hair constitutes her (dual) identity. “I am my hair, I am my hair,” sings Gaga. “I’m the spirit of my hair, it’s all the glory that I bare.” And if Gaga is her hair and Gaga’s hair is conceived as all her glory, then that glory (identity) must be two-toned, two-toned as the half-black-half-white hair she bares throughout the existent video.

And though there is only one set in the existent version of “The Edge of Glory,” there are actually two Gagas: the Gaga on the fire escape and the Gaga on the street. The Gaga on the fire escape seems reluctant to escape the burning room she emerges from – and in fact, does not, first climbing up the ladder of the fire escape rather than down, and then re-entering the burning room at the video’s close. Meanwhile, the Gaga on the street is supposedly removed from the danger of the flames behind her. Both Gagas are backlit by red light (“fame hooker, prostitute wench,” “it isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight”), though the Gaga of the fire escape seems content to dance with the (artificial) building while the Gaga of the street kisses the very (artificial) street she walks on. Both Gagas seem to be egging the viewer on, beckoning the viewer to follow (and indeed, the viewer/camera does follow).

Then there are the lyrics of the song itself, which present two conflicting sides/stories to reconcile. Or perhaps not to reconcile, but to co-exist. There is the story of the song’s origin (the death of Lady Gaga’s grandfather) that Gaga delivered during her Google interview. And then there is the narrative that is most explicit in her performance on American Idol (25 May, 2011): a story of two lovers, which, if the lyrics are interpreted from a certain perspective, transforms the song into a type of murder ballad. Gaga sings, “Another shot before we kiss the other side / I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight.” The shot being either (or both) the shots of tequila that Gaga and her father drank in the wake of her grandfather’s death, or the shots of a double-suicide (the needled syringes of a couple of Darvon cocktails, or Gaga and her lover falling together from the edge of the crag). Both videos, the existent and the non-existent, seem to trace the narrative of the lover and the idea of wanting to follow someone into death, of giving up one’s life in its current form to be with another, and of (a type of) suicide. Death is present, by revolver or le petite mort – take your pick. Or pick both. But whichever you pick, death in this way, from a Christian perspective, is noted as a sin (“I’ll be dancing in the flames tonight”).

Think of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, a poem in which a woman in heaven presses herself against the very edge of the rampart, the golden bars, in longing for her lover who is still stuck on Earth. She is unsatisfied with a heaven where her lover is absent; she wants, “Only to live as once on earth / With Love – only to be, / As then awhile, forever now, / Together, I and he” (lines 128-132). This is a type of love Rossetti recognized as pride, (granted, pride in one’s love, but pride nonetheless), and pride is the sin of Lucifer, the sin that is the origin of hell. Love and sin, for Rossetti and for Gaga, become fused into one desire, one action. Gaga then muses, “It isn’t hell if everybody knows my name tonight,” implying another form of prideful love: self-love. You might call it vanity. But is loving one’s self such a terrible thing? In “Born This Way,” Gaga sings, “There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are,” and we are left with yet another paradox: love as sin.

Guillotining Gaga:

There is one other performance of “The Edge of Glory” to consider: the guillotine-lined stage of Germany’s Next Top Model (9 June, 2011). The entire performance begins with a Gaga in shadow, a ghost-Gaga (“Scheiße”), then transitions into a dualistic-Gaga, Gaga at the piano (“Born This Way”) looking at herself in the mirror (the boudoir, the vanity), and then she walks through the three guillotines of sex, money, and vanity (“The Edge of Glory”). Beneath the guillotine in which she is finally beheaded (the one labeled vanity), she lays back in a facsimile of a hair salon’s shampoo chair, as if she is getting her hair cut/washed/altered/styled (a creative act, an act of life in spite of death, “that I’ll die living just as free as my hair”) instead of suffering an execution, a beheading, a death in the same vein as Medusa. The little mermaid was also beheaded, not in Hans Christian Anderson’s fiction but in our own reality. The statue of the little mermaid that resides in Copenhagen has had its head sawn off twice, a statue that is already a reproduction of the original, a copy, an artifice that can be continually replicated and recast. And of course, through Gaga’s execution, Gaga does not die, but instead survives. The little mermaid drank the bitter, fiery potion, and it felt to her as if a double-edged sword was passing through her delicate body. She fainted and fell down as if dead. Gaga executes yet another birth. There again are two heads: the old head and the new head, the real head and the false head. “Beauty is a lie!” Gaga screams, baring the severed, false head for all to see. There is, once again, Gaga after Gaga, Gaga bearing Gaga, Gaga both employing and exposing artifice as the means of her identity/hair/art/fame/act/reality.

Similarly, at the end of the existent music video, the final shot is of Gaga’s head in reverse, hanging upside down, loose and swaying, before she rights herself again and crosses over the threshold of the window frame.

“I’m on the edge of something final we call life tonight,” she sings. But what is on the other side of the edge? Now you mustn’t think for a moment that there is nothing but bare, white sand down there. Oh, no! The most wondrous trees and plants grow at the bottom of the sea, with stalks and leaves so supple that they stir with life at the slightest ripple in the water. Gaga still stands after the fall of the guillotine, still baring her hair, and bearing another Gaga in the process. Perhaps the other side of life is not death, but life. Perhaps the two sides of a coin are the same. Perhaps there are double-headed coins (Versace). Perhaps the tail is an illusion. Perhaps the mermaid, in this reality, does not exist.

Note: The italicized portions of the text are lines taken from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Bibliography:

Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. Ed. Maria Tatar. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2008. Print.

Bain, Becky. “‘American Idol’ Finale: We Judge The Performances.” Idolator. 26 May 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Almost Loses Her Head On ‘Germany’s Next Top Model.’” Idolator. 9 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Bain, Becky. “Lady Gaga Is A Little Mermaid On ‘Le Grand Jounal.’” Idolator. 15 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2007. Print.

Born This Way. Dir. Nick Knight and Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

Daw, Robbie. “Review Revue: Critics React To Lady Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory” Video.” Idolator. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

Lady Gaga. “Born This Way.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Hair.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “Judas.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Lady Gaga. “The Edge of Glory.” Born This Way. Interscope Records, 2011. CD.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2002. Print.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Blessed Damozel.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. E. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1446. Print.

The Edge of Glory. Dir. Lady Gaga. Perf. Lady Gaga. 2011. Film.

The Edge of Glory. (Not) Dir. Joseph Kahn and Lady Gaga. (Not) Perf. Lady Gaga. (Not) 2011. (Non-existent) Film.

Wieselman, Jarett. “What went wrong with Gaga’s ‘Edge of Glory’ video?” New York Post. 17 June 2011. Web. 19 June 2011.

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.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to "like" Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.