HOUNDSTOOTH FAME IS TOO GREASY FOR GLITTER : GAGA AS THE GUTTERDRUG : FAME & THE ANAGIRLS LIMITED $$$ ENGAGEMENT! : A RETROSPECTIVE OF PRODUCTION-VALUE FASHION; OR, AN ANALOGY INVOLVING GLITTER, VOMIT, AND PAIN.

By Carina Finn

the details scream over-privileged teen aristocracy, the jamaican-flag knits & houndstooth nails. everyone needs some low-culture kitsch in their closet; if you’re under 25 & “legit” you have to have it. 

“POP MUSIC WILL NEVER BE LOWBROW”

pop music makes its own language & the language is made of refrains. the repetition of the hook which is a mask all monsters wear is a loop of constant passwords. if the passwords do not unlock value that is to say style or worth then the password is of little consequence and is repeated endlessly (see: rebecca black’s FRIDAY or The Black Eyed Peas’ I GOTTA FEELING).

In the original video version of FRIDAY, the illusion of style is chemically reproduced; the image is screenprinted in toxic ink, the inhabitants of the video are uncannily animated mannequins produced by the same kinds of machines that produce pop with a high production-value. because the economy of pop music is dictated by either cost or exclusivity, rebecca black’s video has a low production-value because its language is not exclusive and its materials are not costly.

In this hipster cover of FRIDAY, the password does not acquire its referent-value by means of repetition, but by its imitation of an exclusivity that acquires its value via a semantic disjunction. the components of the image projected in this video have randomly assigned values, and the viewer must work harder to establish objective correlative indicated by the combination of coke-bottle glasses, tie-dye, harmonica descants, college sweatshirts, tween-girl pop lyrics, etc.

Contrast these with THE FAME PART ONE, in which the password, or refrain, is not repeatedly endlessly – it is not even complete. A constant loop of pop creates a language that is minor and exclusive and therefore raises its value. The language can exist because it steals from itself, makes a hinge of its own parts.

EITHER A MINOR LANGUAGE CONNECTS TO MINOR ISSUES, THEREBY PRODUCING PARTICULAR RESULTS, OR IT REMAINS ISOLATED, VEGETATES, TURNS BACK ON ITSELF AND PRODUCES NOTHING

“I do not think that is an elitist attitude” [i]

THE POWER-VALUE OF GAGA is imitation, intimidation. the fashion is a repetition of the antithesis of such, such that the imitators become the gods themselves, the paradigm like a virus rather than a symptom. in this way, gaga’s power, which is desire (defined by the fact that her acolytes wear her style like masks), infects her public with military tactics. she demands that they comply they acquiesce it’s their desire to be loved by their object, so they make of their bodies, idols.

IDOLATRY IS AN ESCAPE FROM FORMAL REDUNDANCY

the repetition of a system : ESCAPES FROM POWER FORMATIONS. DESIRE IS NOT INFORMED, INFORMING; IT IS NOT INFORMATION OR CONTENT. in which case is the system by which the same is conveyed – form rather than information, the matrix which defines a quality of GAGA-NESS, into which a given agent might input the components allowed by their own economy and press it through the mesh. the result is a disposable fabric which can be mass-produced, becomes weaker with every wear, shifts the status of desirability of the wearer from a concentrated fabric with a high production-value to one which has been stretched to a level of transparency due to a scarcity of luxurious resources; or, DESIRE IS NOT SOMETHING THAT DEFORMS BUT THAT DISCONNECTS, CHANGES, MODIFIES, ORGANIZES OTHER FORMS, AND THEN ABANDONS THEM[ii] –

or, fashion is a collective constant present: In The Fashion System, Barthes says that Fashion Time is “festival time,” that “festivity is tyrannical, it conquers time” (Barthes, 250). Fashion Time is time and its afterlife, the moment of the outfit & its temporal death, an undeath that endlessly cycles through the collective consciousness as Fashion continues to infect itself with a constant rebirth. Fashion Time is of and outside of time but never in Time.[iii]

time in THE FAME is a fantasy of form. the action of being fashionable is urgent; there is an object of some value that must be acquired immediately. there is a sale – this implies rarity, as this particular value is only available for a limited amount of time. to turn value into an object is to commodify the insubstantial substance à STYLE.

the value of the individual song is cut so the value becomes the conglomerate, the collective. the soundtrack changes songs like outfits. every hook is on sale there is a small tear of entrance. the tear is a needle-hole, or a lesion, which allows the contamination of the body by the drug machine.

teenagers ripping apart sales GIVE ME MY DISCOSTICK just dance wearing sunglasses breaking glass with glittery scepters and taking taking taking and wearing black and finding the one thing they want which has value only because they want it; or,

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY is I WANT THAT machine.

“We must begin by enlarging the definition of drugs” (Felix Guattari, MACHINIC JUNKIES).

we must acknowledge FASHION-AS-DRUG. we must look to the origin of the term HEROIN-CHIC, in which the body that seeks to imitate purity of form for the sake of fashion must suffer by entering into the physical language of fashion, which requires a salve, a rupture of “reality,” an injection :

everything that contributes to provide a sensation of belonging to something, of being somewhere, along with the sensation of forgetting oneself, are ‘drugs’[iv]

what is the value of the sick life, or the life of the sickness, the natural development of disease?

the fashion junkie, the heroin-chic, the organless body, the anoretic, the reverent. these things have value they are LIMITEDTIMEONLY! this is because they are going to die, soon. their extremity, their excessive withholding of “nutrition” in favor of “luxury”, is fatal. the fact that it is fatal is part of its appeal. a drug can kill you; that’s why it’s fun. we want to be saved, we want absolution, we want to die.

“this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence”[v]

the teenagers take to the streets they are starving. they take bites of things with value they spit it out they taste like poison. the ultimate fame is adoring degradation.

the rush of glitter-vomit is a drug. it feels good to be watched, adored, sacrificed. the point is to adore oneself to the point of destruction. the point is an absolute quality of vanity. to love the imitation so much so it’s ”true”. to lose oneself in the materials of oneself, to be constantly breaking, combusting, on purpose. to keep making ruptures, to keep reinventing, to keep up with the economy one must constantly be emptying. becoming-nothing is style; fashion is waste. the wasteless are the totally wasted, they break.

THE RESIDUAL CRYSTALS THAT CONSTITUTE MACHINIC DOPE CAN PENETRATE THE ENTIRE PLANET, REANIMATE AND RELAUNCH IT[vi]

in order to be reborn one must die. there has to be an ultimate excess; the body must first be emptied, then filled, then emptied and filled again, must be pressed & pressed many times through the mesh of reality to become unreal, to transcend the organic, to achieve fame – to not need. to exist in a constant revolution-state of teen which has value because it is always-rare; or, the becoming-body is always limited-edition.

inside of the temporality of fame time is malleable, shifts, condensed and stretches, is defined by a quantity of light; or, glitter. the light burns holes in the fabric, makes lesions, or sites of affliction, harbors for drugs. the need of the constant-present is continuous destruction, never-ending consumption of the materials of construction. there has to be a loop. there has to be a digesting, a regression. one gets a bit obsessed with the process of crafting the body such that value is a goal rather than an assignation, an alienated, all-encompassing sign with no signification other than fame.

in this case, fame forms an absolute-zero, attainable only when the subject has transcended substance, become a specter of reflection, smashed glitter, vain annihilation.

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[i] Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions: I AM AN IDEA THIEF p. 21

[ii] Some of the above CAPITALISED text is from Guattari, Soft Subversions: The Adolescent Revolution, p. 156

[iii] The italicized text is from my talk, THE COLLECTIVE FASHION CONSCIOUSNESS, presented at the IU Collections and Collaborations Conference in Spring 2010 . The full text is linked here: http://ladyblogblah.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-collective-consciousness-look-at-my-outfit-we%E2%80%99re-at-war/

[iv] Guattari, Machinic Junkies, p. 158

[v] Derrida, “Dissemination,” p.1845

[vi] Guattari, Soft Subversions: Machinic Junkies p. 161

Author Bio:

Carina Finn is an MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her chapbook, I HEART MARLON BRANDO, was recently released by Wheelchair Party, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SUPERMACHINE, TYPO, boo!, Alice Blue, CutBank, Seven Corners, and elsewhere. She has won two Academy of American Poets prizes and been nominated for a Pushcart. Her plays have been performed at Notre Dame and The Bowery Poetry Club.

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Marketing Mother Monster

By Cheryl Helm

When Lady Gaga announced her deal with Zynga to create her own virtual playground (GagaVille) within Facebook’s popular Farmville game, there was a great deal of muttering about whether (a) she’s jumped the shark or (b) she’s sold out and has become just another commercialized pop product. My reaction was, “It’s hard to go off the reservation if you were never on the reservation to begin with.” In fact, Gaga has a pretty solid track record in circumventing the conventional marketing machinery of the music business when it comes to sharing and distributing her work, summarizing her philosophy in the interview with GoogleTalk:

“I don’t want to be a part of the machine. I want the machine to be part of me.”

The music business machine has a long history of mass-producing pop stars and teen idols who were, indeed, packaged and sold. Pop music early on acquired the cachet of a corporate product much like the Hollywood studio system (and built on that model), manipulating pop singers like puppets: choosing their clothes, styling their appearance, selecting their songs, managing their public appearances and performances, and handling all the advertising, including photo shoots and trade media ad campaigns. Disney was one of the earliest, and, one of the most (in)famous, pop-star factories and continues to be one today. It began in the late fifties when Disney figured out a way to capitalize on the rock-n-roll craze and still protect its brand as good, clean, wholesome fun (as a counterweight to the perceived sleaze and satanic temptation of rock n roll). Their formula was quite simple: find respectable, pretty and handsome white teenagers who could sing well enough not to inflict pain, and dance well enough to perform simple dance routines. Then record some bloodless, but virtuous, insipid pop songs and ta-da: Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. The brand was Disney, and the product was a morally upstanding teenage role model and a sure-fire moneymaker until s/he was no longer so cute, or thin, or pliable.

There are certainly conventions to be observed in how a pop star is imaged and promoted – much like any brand. Photo shoots are utilized to create and enhance the star’s image, and to appeal to consumers to buy their records and attend their concerts. Brand endorsements are lucrative but even more importantly, they reinforce the pop star and hir music as products to be consumed. So in terms of music marketing and promotion, there is a reservation and most pop stars are on it.

And then there’s Gaga.

From the beginning, she was her own creator and her own advertiser. “Just Dance” got airplay because she promoted it herself, tirelessly and ceaselessly. The Fame succeeded because she was touring and campaigning for it before the first single even dropped. With precious little help from the music industry, she created her own brand, and the product is Gaga: her art, her vision, her passion, her conviction.

So it’s hardly surprising that most of Gaga’s promotional efforts are self-defined, self-controlled, and seldom conform to the industry models. That is, her promotional efforts are often art forms in and of themselves, part of her life’s grand performance, and/or what she perceives as her vocation to help bring about social justice for all. Even her records are largely promotional rather than end products; the real product is Gaga herself, on stage where she can be experienced, not consumed. In most of her promotional efforts, there is not a firm separation between the promotional activity and her performance project.

How does she do it?

Leveraging technology has always been part and parcel of Gaga’s aesthetic. She uses technology the way a painter uses watercolors, oils, acrylics, fabric, multimedia collages – as a medium for expressing and conveying her artistic visions, of which music is only one dimension, albeit the most important one. In other words, technology is only one palette, one of many avenues for both creating and sharing her work with her audiences. Her earliest shows were distinguished by the use of avant-garde films as interludes that also conveyed some element of her performance project, and also by such props as the now-famous GaGa glasses constructed with iPod LED screens to articulate part of her artistic message. The deployment of such technology has only become more extensive as her show has grown into a full-scale spectacular extravaganza.

Gaga uses social media to an unprecedented degree, and no other living artist has been as successful as she in employing Twitter and Facebook to build and support a growing fanbase that is fiercely loyal and willing to promote all her ventures. While other pop stars (Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber et al.) have followed suit, they tend to use Twitter as a virtual billboard to hawk their wares – asking their fans to buy products, attend performances, etc. Gaga simply announces that a new release is forthcoming, or an interview or performance has been scheduled, and her fans take on the responsibility of promoting it.

This type of viral marketing by word-of-mouth allows Gaga to completely control the content of her marketing AND builds a greater sense of unity, a sense of “us-ness” or “we-ness” that many of her fans don’t experience in their daily lives. Her fan base is built upon an army of disaffected, bullied, rejected, ridiculed, and socially-isolated people who are cut off from the normal experience of belonging within their peer groups. Her fans have embraced Gaga so avidly because she is one of them, an outsider who is still socially isolated from the mainstream music community and who is subject to a barrage of hateful comments on every media site that posts a story about her. Even though she has reached the heights of artistic achievement in pop music (and her trajectory is *still* climbing), she’s still the odd girl out, she’s still the misfit. Her fans know exactly how that feels and embrace her for it, creating a place where SHE belongs, in a spirit of love and acceptance.

Because in Gaga’s case there is mutual identification between the star and her fan base, her marketing efforts are driven by a desire to serve the community of “little monsters” as much as they are propelled by the need to sell her music, her art, her vision. GagaVille is an excellent example. With GagaVille, she has created a virtual playground for her fans and other users of Farmville who may not be familiar with her music – a place where her fans can create a virtual world of their own and populate it with elements that are personally meaningful. GagaVille reinforces the sense of community within the Gaga fan base as more users join the game, become neighbors, and share and exchange rewards and goods.

With its initial launch, Gaga used GagaVille to distribute exclusive content (songs from Born This Way), but the site has a limited shelf life, through May 26, 2011. However, given her passion for social justice, it’s quite possible that she may choose to extend GagaVille and use it in the future as a way to encourage her fans to become more active in fighting for equality, for their own rights and the rights of others. The potential for GagaVille to become a medium for motivating political and social activism is certainly there.

Additionally, by pre-releasing songs from Born This Way on GagaVille, Gaga managed to cut most leakers off at the knees, and thus did not experience the creative death of a thousand leaks – she employed GagaVille to release and distribute her songs before leakers could steal and post them. Although the album did eventually leak, one day before Gaga was to stream the entire record to fans in the UK through Metro (where she also, by the way, served for one day as a guest editor, a position she used as a platform to promote her educational program about bullying), the net effect has been to drastically undercut the leaking subculture that spoiled the rollout of her previous album, The Fame Monster.

Her latest promotional venture with Starbucks is, at first glance, a much more commercial campaign. Beginning May 19, 2011 and continuing through June 7, 2011, Starbucks is conducting a scavenger hunt featuring Lady Gaga. Store customers scan QR codes to obtain clues to use in the seven-round game, which involves math, logic, and reading skills, as well as pop-culture knowledge to decipher the clues. The game is designed to encourage group play, much as GagaVille is. The first players to solve all the clues in each round receive Starbucks merchandise and Lady Gaga promotional items. Much like Fuse TV takeovers featuring Gaga for a day (and for the Born This Way roll-out, an entire week), Gaga took over Starbucks’ digital network for a day on May 23, 2011, allowing visitors to stream the entire Born This Way album, obtain a digital download of “The Edge of Glory,” and view an exclusive video by Gaga.

Obviously the chief benefit to Gaga in this business deal is to promote sales and airplay for her album and its current single. The album was played in all Starbucks stores on May 23, 2011 (a first for the corporation), and is among the albums sold in the stores. But this deal also achieves an important social goal for Gaga by providing another technology-based means for her monsters to visit and participate as a group by discussing the clues and messages, which further fosters a sense of community among her fans.

In creating and advancing her project, Gaga also differs dramatically from her peers in the area of product endorsement. This technique in and of itself is not unique to Gaga; many pop stars are used as front women (and men) to market everything from clothing to perfume. But Gaga’s choice of what products to endorse, and her involvement in the creation or purpose of those products, are often strikingly different from her colleagues.

Corporations will often hire celebrities as “Creative Directors” to market a product that the celebrity has no actual involvement in creating. Their role is strictly that of a figurehead, putting a familiar face and name on the product. But not Gaga. In her own fashion, Gaga has inverted and reversed the role of such celebrity endorsement deals by creating her own product line (The Grey Line) for Polaroid. When Gaga accepted the position of “Creative Director” for Polaroid, she dove right in to the entire design process.

Together with the Haus of Gaga, she designed a pair of camera sunglasses that could record video or still photos and display them onscreen, a product that recalled her famous iPod glasses from The Fame era. Thus her own performance project bleeds into the design of a new product that is clearly directed, first and foremost, at her own fan base. You can be sure that in next year’s tour, she will look out into the audience and see hundreds, if not thousands, of Polaroid camera glasses displaying messages and images that are significant to her fans. And with this new product, her fans can create and literally reflect their own personal visions, media, and messages to Gaga and the world. This is creative empowerment at its best.

She also redesigned the iconic Polaroid camera for the digital age and incorporated inkless technology into the printing process. She rounded out her product line with a Bluetooth digital printer that can print images from the camera glasses, the Polaroid camera, and a cell phone. These products reflect Gaga’s personal and aesthetic commitment to sustain, re-imagine, reinvent, and reinvigorate iconic pop culture by recreating something that is both ever so familiar and yet so forward-looking at the same time. And it puts the power to create directly into the hands of her fan base.

The conventional marketing model for fragrances – another major product line often endorsed by celebrities – has been turned on its head with Gaga’s involvement in developing her own fragrance for Coty. While it’s likely that celebrities have some say in the fragrances developed for the product lines they endorse, Gaga chose the essential ingredient herself: the molecular structure of her own blood. Talk about bleeding one’s aesthetic into a product! This revelation certainly perpetuates Gaga’s reputation as a quirky, eccentric star who never trods a predictable path if she can avoid it.

It also explains a rather cryptic remark made during her ShowStudio interview in May 2010. Asked what was the nerdiest thing she’d ever done, she giggled and said that she and her Haus were trying to discover the effects of the smell of blood on people. Now we know why. And again, Gaga is creating something both unique and deeply personal directed toward her fans. It’s not just a fragrance for your skin. It’s the essence of Gaga herself….the ultimate bonding between star and audience.

Gaga’s passion for humanitarian and social justice causes is well-known, so her willingness to serve as spokesperson for the MAC Viva Glam products to raise funds for AIDS prevention and treatment is a natural extension of her personal commitment to such causes. In addition to using the products herself, she’s made several personal appearances to promote the cause that the products fund. In an interview on Good Morning America, she leveraged her fashion aesthetic by wearing a Mugler latex outfit, which she said was “condom inspired” because she wanted to talk about the issue of safe sex.

She also created a short video with Nick Knight for MAC Viva Glam that is itself a work of art. It features the Viva Glam products, uses a non-verbal message to promote safe sex, AND foreshadows several elements of the video for “Born This Way,” which was released some time later.

Viva Mac Lotus

"BTW" Lotus Spirals

Left: Viva Mac, Right: "BTW"

Spilt/mirrored-image face

Left: Viva Mac, Right: "BTW"

Backbends

Top: Viva Mac, Bottom: "BTW"

Stripteases

Once again, Gaga managed to blend her performance project with the endorsement of a commercial product line that promotes her own social and humanitarian values. Much like her music videos, Gaga uses every marketing opportunity to articulate some element of her overall aesthetic, to build layers of cultural references and commentary, and to nurture her community of fans – to intensify the personal bonds and create a larger, deeper sense of belonging and identity, a sense of us-ness that liberates them from their social isolation, out of which is born a new sense of freedom and creativity. She is nurturing the next generation of artists and designers, and the next generation of political activists and leaders who will change the world, one (commercial) project at a time.

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A “Fame Hooker” Speaking in Future Tense: Prophets and Profit in “Judas”

By Keri Ferencz

The following piece is the third in our series on “Judas.” For the first piece, click here; the second, here.

Like “Born This Way” before it, “Judas” finds Lady Gaga caught “between two ultimate forces,” aware of the dangers yet attracted to both. Whereas in “Born This Way” Gaga, “herself split into two,” embodies both creation and destruction, in “Judas” the oppositional forces are externalized and personified, making explicit her attempt at serving both. Given the complexity of Gaga’s project, it is possible to theorize any number of oppositions she might be caught between; of particular interest to this reading of the “Judas” music video are Lady Gaga’s seemingly contradictory desires for fame and transcendence through art, and how “the pendulum of choice” dances between the two.

With its undeniable ties to commerce and capitalism, fame or commercial success is generally positioned as oppositional and base compared to transcendence or religious experience, though today’s practice of deifying celebrities does mark a tenuous connection between the two. Gaga has made no secret of her desire to be famous, and the iconography of earlier videos, most notably “Paparazzi,” firmly positions her as a woman attracted to the spoils of her fame, however destructive that fame might be. Simultaneously, Gaga goes out of her way to assert that her fame is irrelevant without the platform it affords her, telling Anderson Cooper “I don’t want to make money…I want to make a difference.” Ultimately she seems to understand that fame is merely the candy-coated shell of divinity; true icons need more than flashbulbs and fans to mark them as divine, not the least of which is a clear doctrine. Though Gaga alluded to such a manifesto in the Fame Monster era, with “Born This Way,” she presents her doctrine in no uncertain terms: be who you were born to become.

The “infinite birth” of the new race in “Born This Way” strikes to the heart of this doctrine and thus the religious or transcendent element of Lady Gaga’s project. In her Manifesto of Little Monsters, Gaga places special emphasis on the importance of “the spiritual hologram of who we…become,” which serves to remind that living is above all a process of becoming. French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari echo this notion, and suggest that becoming always begins by making a pact with an exceptional individual[i] – in the case of little monsters, that pact is with Lady Gaga herself. Gaga has, more than any entertainer that has come before, fashioned herself as a gateway to becoming (or self-realization) for her fans, hence her position as Mother Monster leading her children to salvation.

Once Gaga’s faithful have become self-actualized, confident in their individual monstrosities, there is little need for Gaga as guru unless she presents herself as a necessary, the one exceptional product that can offer passage to the plane of transcendence and becoming. In order to continue to make a difference – to “protect something so perfect” as her little monsters – Mother Monster must sell and re-sell herself as such, taking pieces of silver from her public as payment for being the one and only gateway to self-realization. Ultimately, she must therefore remain firmly attached to her fame, and thus her Judas, consumer culture.

Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver is undoubtedly familiar to most. The Gospel of John imagines Judas as a thief whose weakness was money, providing a scriptural basis for considering him as representative of consumer culture in Lady Gaga’s “Judas” music video. Whereas the video portrays Jesus as stoic, set above the violence and sex of the Electric Chapel, Judas is very much of the people, embracing multiple women (2:08) and gleefully engaging in a bar fight, at one point even disappearing into a group of writhing bodies (2:49), further aligning him with the mass often associated with contemporary consumer culture.

More explicit evidence for reading Lady Gaga’s imagining of Judas as an agent of consumer culture lies in the relationship between the two that is implied in the narrative. The pair’s mutual attraction is palpable, however there are two moments when it is clear that the Judas character sees Gaga/Mary Magdalene as an object to be possessed. First, with a glance, as Gaga and Jesus make their way through the crowd; Judas leers at Gaga with ravenous eyes as though she were a delicacy to be eaten rather than a human subject (2:38). The second instance occurs while Gaga is prostrate at the feet of both Jesus and Judas; Judas empties a can of beer onto her back (4:49) as though to baptise her with the holy water of mass culture.

Both moments serve not only to confirm Judas as the roustabout the song’s lyrics suggest, but also to make explicit that Judas – as an agent of consumer culture – understands Gaga to be a thing. Regardless, Gaga, the self-confessed “fame hooker” is “in love with Judas, baby,” and is thus wilfully complicit with that which objectifies her. She paints the lips that, with a kiss, will symbolize the betrayal of Jesus and a turning away from what is purely sacred. In love with and necessarily clinging to fame and that which is necessary for fame, Gaga cannot do away with her Judas, even if that means her seeming duplicity is revealed for all to see.

Complicit in his betrayal or not, within the narrative of the video Gaga as Mary Magdalene is also fiercely protective of Jesus, who can be read as a personification of all that is deemed pure and sacred in Gaga’s project, including her art, her doctrine, and her little monsters. Gaga leads a Jesus who is very much not of this world through the Electric Chapel as would a bodyguard, and when strife erupts, it is Gaga who protects Jesus and not vice versa (3:19). This is reminiscent of Lady Gaga’s attitude towards her little monsters, specifically the way she has been known to shield her fans from “violent and dangerous” right-wing protesters. Lyrically, Gaga claims “Jesus is my virtue,” (4:26) further suggesting him as representative of the most pure elements of her project.

Although she may play a part his betrayal, there is a sense, as in the Gospels of John and Matthew, that her betrayal is understood and forgiven even before it has occurred. During the second chorus of the song, as Gaga sings “I’m in love with Judas,” the camera finds Jesus watching blankly, seemingly unsurprised by her confession (2:05). Later, when Gaga as Mary Magdalene has the opportunity to prevent Judas’ kiss, Jesus almost imperceptibly shakes his head no (3:27), allowing the betrayal to occur. This moment of self-sacrifice on the part of Jesus causes Gaga to fall to her knees, in both grief and relief. Jesus has turned the other cheek to Lady Gaga’s duplicity, accepting her willingness to sacrifice him and thus the purity of her work as necessary for the greater good, the creation of the new “race within the race of humanity…which bears no prejudice, no judgement, but boundless freedom.”

“I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public…I can show you so you’re not looking for it,” Lady Gaga told Elle magazine in January of 2010. Though Gaga was referring to the “Paparazzi” video, the quote is equally applicable to “Judas,” which ends with Gaga stoned to death by a crowd partially comprised of the apostles-cum-gang members. Hyper-aware of the pitfalls of fame, Gaga delivers “Judas” and “Paparazzi” – portrayals of those pitfalls and her downfall – so that we may not seek to destroy her ourselves, as we have done to so many icons before her. More to the point of this analysis, with “Judas,” Lady Gaga is laying herself bare, washing herself clean by admitting her duplicity and necessary attachment to consumer culture and her love of the fame that comes with it.

Far from being a selfish act and yet not entirely selfless, Gaga’s mediation of the oppositional forces of consumer culture and transcendence personified in “Judas” is a task worthy of Atlas. Crafting her art from both while simultaneously working to prevent the destructive collapse of one into the other, in remaining upright under the weight, Lady Gaga holds herself open as a channel towards self-realization for all her little monsters standing in the darkness.

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[i] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (London: Continuum, 1987), 244.

Author Bio:

Keri Ferencz is currently writing a thesis on the religious dimensions of pop music fandom as part of her M.A. in Popular Culture at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Culture junkie, movie maniac, bookworm, and lover of all things Yacht Rock, Keri lives in Toronto where she tries to inhabit a life-size choose your own adventure novel. 

She can be found singing like a bird at http://www.twitter.com/keri_lotion.

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