Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder
Ever since Lady Gaga sang, “He’s got me like nobody […] she’s got me like nobody” in “Poker Face,” she has been playing with fluid grammatical identities. Accordingly, this essay will consider Lady Gaga’s lyrical use of the first-person singular pronoun, and, more broadly, the role of the narrator in her songs. As have many songwriters before her, including some she cites as influences, Lady Gaga often writes songs that function as the narrative or manifesto of some fictionalized narrating personality. Bruce Springsteen, one such influence, is well-known for writing character songs, wherein the speaker is specified enough to have a particular financial and/or romantic situation, personal past, or philosophical outlook; this character is then acted out by Springsteen’s song. Thus, though these narrators are only occasionally named, they do have distinct sensibilities as artistic creations separate from both the song and singer herself. Such a narrator may be fairly specific, such as in “Paparazzi,” or less so, as in “Government Hooker.” But in both songs, the “I” of the lyrics is not really intended to be understood as Lady Gaga herself, but as another persona Gaga sings through.
However, Lady Gaga plays with this trope beyond simply employing it – she steals rather than borrows. In several of her songs, the “I”, the narrator, is not simply one character, created to sing a particular song, but instead is inhabited by dual or multiple fictionalized speakers sharing that always-singular “I”. For example, as discussed previously by myself and others, “Judas” presents a narrative wherein it is difficult to tell just who is speaking to whom, or about whom. And, to heighten the anxiety caused by this narrative uncertainty, Gaga’s songs often threaten power relations in the same move. Not knowing if Jesus is betraying Judas or if Judas is betraying Jesus is worrisome not only because it makes identity uncertain (who’s who?), but also because those two identities traditionally have an established and meaningful relationship – one which includes and encourages certain assumptions about power, legitimacy, and morality; this very relationship is destabilized and made uncertain as well. The same is clearly true of the stalker/superstar relationship in “Paparazzi,” and of the client/hooker one in “Government Hooker.”
I suspect, and will argue, that this uncertainty – both in its basic perspectival-narrative aspect, and in its (gender, power) “trouble” aspect – is directly linked to Gaga’s performative project. Beauty, or power, achieved through performance, are in the “I” of the beholder, in its quality as the subject. And it is just by blurring, through art-ificial performative identity, the line between beholder and beholden (subject and object) that power, beauty, and identity are made available or attainable for an individual who had previously been objectified into passivity and exploitation.
Is “individual” really the right word for a constantly-unfolding, transient-yet-destined, process that will always be constituted by the limits of subject and object?
Is there a grammar of the new race of Mother Monster?
Three-in-one “I”?
We will start with the most explicit, to my mind, example of this perspectival-narrative uncertainty: the “Judas” song and video. As I discussed in an earlier piece for GS, “Judas” presents lyrical and narrative uncertainty about whether Jesus, Judas, or some woman (Mary Magdalene?) is singing. Consider the verse:
When he calls to me, I am ready
I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs
Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain
Even after three times he betrays me.
In the first of these four lines, Gaga sings from the perspective of either an apostle or Mary Magdalene, called to or summoned by Jesus. Here, the narrator could even be Judas himself; this lyric could reference Judas in the middle of coming to give Jesus the betraying kiss, responding to Jesus’s salutation as written in the Gospel of Luke: “Judas, are you betraying the son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:47-48) Similarly, the next line suggests (relatively unambiguously) Mary Magdalene, who washed Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. The pledge of forgiveness could be Jesus speaking of Peter, who was prophesized to and did in fact deny his relationship to Jesus three times on the night of the crucifixion (as is suggested by the fourth line). It could also, perhaps, indicate Jesus’ forgiveness of the Judas kiss. These uncertainties are compounded by the chorus of the song – which suggests Jesus still loving Judas, despite his betrayal, in addition to a pining ex-lover – as well as those that appear in the other lyrics.
Thus the narrator in “Judas” must switch many times, often in the space of single line, and usually not between two possible identities but between two clusters of possible identities: from “Judas-or-Mary” in the first line to “Mary” in the second to “Jilted-Lover-or-Jesus” in the third and fourth. And the likely addressees (the likely objects) change as well! Does the singer transform from one to the other to the other to the other in order to become whatever is necessary for holding the listener’s attention? To maintain the authoritative, power-position before the verb? Has performance trumped identity – first by being the identity of the performer and then by fulfilling its role all too well? What does such a narrative voice suggest about Gaga’s whole project of fame? That the performer and audience are one? An endless chain of performers performing for performers?
Let us expand and explain this idea by studying the “Paparazzi” song and video. As Ayah Rifai suggests in her November 2010 essay for Gaga Stigmata, the pop superstar of “Paparazzi” in fact seeks the love of fans, is desperate to receive what they are desperate to give. When the stalker and stalkee, paparazza and popstar, are so closely adapted to one other, who holds the power? Who is disciplining whom? Whose discourse constitutes which object? The superstar and the paparazza need each other, and the stalker is the inversion of the superstar – not the best performer but the best fan. The desperate search to express oneself is in fact a desperate search for the attention of others. The most intimate possession, the self, interacts symbiotically – not exploitatively – with the most foreign phenomenon, the power of the Other.
“Promise I'll be kind”
Perhaps this is best exemplified simply by the desperate, romantic vocal performance Gaga gives to “Paparazzi.” Though sung from the perspective of a paparazza, the song is invariably (of course) performed by the pop star. Its desperate professions of love and devotion cannot help but bleed beyond the lines of the fictive, narrating stalker persona; Gaga’s love of fame leads to her love of photographers, of stalkers, and that shows in her vocal and live performances. In these performances of the song, Gaga often dies – the pop star martyring herself for the sake of her death-obsessed “fans”? So desperate to give them what they so desperately need that she will die – and live again? In the extreme intimacy of such a symbiosis, is the distinction between performer and audience somewhat arbitrary?
Rifai writes, “In this interpretation, the paparazzi unwittingly function as disciplinarians who cleverly keep stars in line – and perhaps even transform them into seemingly ‘docile bodies’ – because they document them from the moment they step outdoors to the moment they return home.” While I do agree with this reading, it seems to me that equally present in Gaga’s project is the idea that the performer (the object, the stalkee) does have agency. We know all the clichés about record executives manufacturing the fame and success of performers, but doesn’t this overblown cynicism more or less miss the undeniable participation of the superstar? In the paparazzi-superstar symbiosis, being watched becomes as active, as needed, as watching. The active voice of “he watches” is usurped by the passive of “she is being watched.” In highlighting the power of the viewer’s view, the power of the viewed’s performance should not be forgotten: the ability to become what(ever) others want is still an ability, an action, an agency, and undoubtedly a creative and powerful one.
Slime Dress; Fluid Body
This trouble of perspective – this “who is objectifying whom?” and the change in power-dynamics such grammatical uncertainty causes – is further illustrated by the inversion of the human relations carried out in these narrative shifts. Because Judas, Jesus, and Mary sequentially pass through the same “I,” it is impossible to establish the power-to-act of any one exclusively. Sometimes Judas precedes the verb and occupies the subject position, acting upon Jesus (“I’ll bring him down, bring him down down”), and other times their position is reversed (“forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain”). The absence of a single power-vector, of a monarchical subject, is revealed. In such a multi-polar world, the whizzing of activity overwhelms the nodal sobjects – “nodal” because they now occupy a relative, rather than privileged, position; and “sobject” being a neologism denoting what is left after the subject/object distinction has been deconstructed. Action/verb overshadows both subject and object: being conditioned not by doers and objects, but conditioning them. The thematic subjects of these songs become their grammatical verbs: sacrifice, betrayal, and love in “Judas”; longing, obsession, performance, observation in “Paparazzi”; fucking as well as simply being (anything, everything) in “Government Hooker”; and acting (without permission or condition) in “Scheiße.”
Thus the verbal theme of “Judas” communicates a feeling of anguished backsliding ever attendant on desperate aspirations – whether the speaker is someone remembering an addictive, abusive relationship they are not yet over or Jesus clinging to his wayward disciple, it is the action of reaching above while dragging behind that lingers above all uncertainty: “Jesus is my virtue, while Judas is the demon I cling to.” Similarly the fluid identities of “Paparazzi” lead to an endless loop in which longing longingly regards longing: the paparazzi obsessively pursue the star, who obsessively pursues fame, represented in the figure of the paparazza. The photographers struggle to take pictures of the star struggling to be photographed. These songs are not about narrators but about actions: anguished backsliding and longing. And these are, after all, two rather similar actions. The painful backsliding in “Judas” complements the insatiable longing of “Paparazzi.” Just as the narrator of “Judas” is torn between what she knows is good for her and what she knows is bad for her, the narrator of “Paparazzi” can never conclusively achieve that for which she longs. Fame exists only in being hounded by photographers and stalkers; the invasive torture that has killed Gaga in so many performances is what the superstar pursues. She responds to desire, to interest, both of which are endless (and endlessly variable) appetites – she is condemned, has condemned herself, to transform forever. The singer of “Judas” desires something (Jesus, virtue) that her nature (which clings to Judas) precludes. She is caught between the initiation and completion of an action, just as the singer of “Paparazzi” is denied satisfaction: her goal, longing, is the antithesis of satisfaction! In the end, the symbiosis of performative identity dissolves the subject and the object into verbs, making a universe where completion, satisfaction, and rest are impossible because there is only timeless action.
This trope – the paradoxical, transformative nature of performative identity – appears in the song “Government Hooker” from her recent album Born This Way. The song highlights the alternation between power and exploitation inherent in performative identity. Gaga sings “I can be anything, I’ll be your everything/Just touch me baby, (‘cause I don’t want to be sad)” – with the last line sung in a metallic male voice utterly at odds with the female pop voice that delivers the first three lines. Beyond the question of who is speaking (of who is subject and who is object), these two voices comprise a single, coherent, interwoven narrative: one of desire mutating and multiplying to satisfy itself. The distinction between the client and hooker is secondary to their mutual performance, their speaking, their reality, which is one of cooperation: the hooker becomes whatever is necessary for the client. This simple lyric also suggests that the hooker has her own agenda – after all, she gives a command to the client when she says “just touch me,” she reveals her agency, and any prostitute does have an agenda. He or she is exploited; but at the same time a prostitute demands and receives of her client just as her client does of her (money). Perhaps this suggests that it is a trick of history, of situation, and not one of fundamental reality, that certain roles or professions are weak, amoral, and victimized.
“Put your hands on me”
Two commonly-appearing verses in the song further suggest the power of the hooker and, more fundamentally, the unity of hooker-client, the problematization of the subject/object distinction: “As long as I’m your hooker!” and “Yeah, you’re my hooker!” (conspicuously not sung in a mechanical and masculine voice, but in that of the feminine narrator). These suggest, first, that the hooker functions as such contingently and temporarily: “As long as I’m your hooker” implies the corollary that all the promises and offers of the song end when the “I” is no longer “your hooker” – which is thus at least theoretically possible. Again, it is important to distinguish between the reality of prostitution in society and the ontological relationship here metaphorized as prostitution: Gaga’s performativity in this area is more a critique of Cartesian dualism and the panoptic power of the gaze that it produces than it is a statement on the social reality of prostitution.
“As long as I’m your hooker”
With this in mind, it is clear that these two verses suggest the agency of the hooker regarding the client, even going so far as to reverse the relationship, thereby removing the distinction between the prostitute and her client. Following a display of Freudian versatility – “I could be girl (unless you want to be man) / I could be sex (Unless you want to hold hands) / I could be everything, I could be anything, I could be Mom (unless you want to be Dad)” – Gaga closes the song with a triumphant, feminine, hooker-voice in chorus with the mechanical, masculine, client-voice: “I wanna fuck Government Hooker (back up and turn around) / Stop shitin’ me Government Hooker (put your hands on the ground!) . . . (Get down!)” The song transforms by its end from a tale of object-exploitation at the hands of the subject (client exploits prostitute) to a mutual celebration of their power over one another, and an enaction of their unity. Both exercise and enjoy power and submission alternately, simultaneously, and complimentarily. As the identities of the two are “reduced” to actions or verbs, their symbiosis is revealed.
This metaphysical statement of empowerment expressed as grammatical trouble takes on a similar form in the song “Yoü and I,” a rocker ballad written by Lady Gaga about her (now ex-) boyfriend Lüc Carl. Much of the verses are sung by Gaga as Gaga: “It’s been a long time since I came around . . .” But in the lead-in to the chorus, and in the chorus itself, Gaga quickly blends speaking as herself, speaking as Lüc, and speaking as Lüc speaking as Gaga. When she sings, “He said, ‘sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on / sit back down on the couch where we made love the first time and you said to me: ‘something about this place. . .’’” the chorus to follow has transformed into her quotation of Lüc’s quotation of her. With this in play, does Gaga have a stronger claim than Lüc himself to the narrator, to be the character of the character song? The title certainly fails to establish just who is “you” and who is “I,” instead making the narrative identity totally ambiguous with the simple use of supposedly-reliable pronouns. Who can claim to be the “you” or the “I,” though both terms claim specificity? Both are in irresolvable play. The song professes the love of Gaga for Lüc by professing Lüc’s love for Gaga. This revealed reciprocity leads to union – not coincidentally metaphorized by a joyous love.
“You taste like whiskey when you kiss me, oh!”
This continued, extended play goes so far as to suggest that the actor may be a feature – perhaps a secondary one – of action. Subject is not the prerequisite or creator of action, but a feature of its (grammatical) voice. This makes sense in an aesthetics where action has become the character of a character-song. If we are what we do (what we perform?), Gaga is a superstar and a stalker and a paparazza; she is Jesus, Judas, and Mary; also hooker and client; politician and activist; Lüc and Gaga. I believe that such a metaphysics is at the heart of her fame project and her entire performance art project. As Rifai and Gaga herself have suggested, her work must be understood as a whole: music, videos, performances, interviews, every costume . . . And this work – her persona that encompasses such contradictions of power and exploitation – undermines discrimination at its most basic level, by accepting the other as the other, by ascribing agency to the object as the object. It does not seek that agency by demonstrating that the object is really a subject or demanding that it become one, not by unifying all people under a single theoretical concept of “human” that remains at bottom a straight white man, but by ascribing rights, ascribing agency and creativity to the object without demanding that the object becomes something different, without qualification or any justification besides the assumption that every thing should – does – have agency, and is equal despite manifold perceptible differences. In response to the flat assertion that a hooker, as a grammatical object, could never have agency, Gaga’s metaphysics offer a flat assertion that a hooker obviously is the origin as well as the target of power; thus not that the hooker is a subject, but that an object shares the claim of the subject to agency. The object has an equal right to “I”.
Finally, the song “Scheiße” functions as a commentary on this entire principle. The song, when read as addressed to shit, (“I’ll take you out tonight, do whatever you like / Scheiße Scheiße be mine, Scheiße be mine”), becomes a pining, hopeless love song, very similar in this way to “Judas” and “Paparazzi.” Gaga is pleading to be worthy of her shit – her messy (by)product, her action, and its outcome. As in “Government Hooker,” in “Scheiße” a desperate polymorphous perversity is employed to entice and earn her own activity: “I’ll . . . do whatever you like . . .” Performance, transformation, and creativity seek desperately to seduce themselves by means of themselves.
Scheiße be mine
But Gaga also wishes that her action didn’t require this qualification – that her verbs did not require a subject. This regret contrasts interestingly with the desire to be worthy: Gaga uses the same word (“shit” or “Scheiße”) to mean her creations (foremost of which is herself) that she worships, and the limitations and qualifications that limit her ability to create, to be. What she is grappling with here is the fundamental unfreedom of existence: if you create something, you become unfree to not have created it. In terms of performative identity, you can be anything, but once you are, you are no longer free to be something else. The desire or impetus to create means that one is never without condition – desire to create is a condition that creation always requires! Gaga might sing “I wish I could be strong without the Scheiße, yea,” but strength requires at least something to bear. The perfect freedom offered by performative identity is, considered from a different perspective, perfect unfreedom: you must enact yourself, you cannot enact another. The “shit” Gaga produces – herself – limits the potentiality that she wants to be to a mere actuality; achieving one possibility extinguishes all others.
Gaga’s mediation on this paradoxical, existential freedom-unfreedom is expressed as a feminist message: “Love is objectified by what men say is right / … blonde high-heeled feminists enlisting femmes for this, express your woman kind / fight for your rights.” Gaga recognizes that the grammatical privileging of subject over object operates as a blueprint for various forms of discrimination – in this case, sexism. Being a strong female means acting without qualification (“If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) – of occupying the role of assumed efficacy that has so often been gendered masculine. So she makes the taking of this space (“When I’m on a mission, I rebuke my condition / If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) the condition and goal of gender liberation. It could be the goal of any emancipatory or anti-discrimination movement, combating exploitation by combating objectification at its most fundamental level.
This feminist aspect is best exemplified in the line “I don’t speak German but I can if you like.” Here Gaga attaches overcoming herself (speaking German even though she can’t speak German) to the condition of a man’s desire. As long as the traditional grammar remains the basis of power and agency, she can only overcome herself, grow, be strong, accomplish, act, through either the fiat or the imitation of masculinity. Instead of the self-expression of performance being guided by Gaga herself – by her project of becoming worthy of her shit – that expression, that creation is guided by the desires of men: by the shit of others. It may not be possible, on a fundamental, ontological level to escape the conditions inherent in existence; but Gaga does see a way for womankind to escape the conditions imposed by patriarchy. A new grammar, a new verbal perspective, to express the power of the object as well as of the subject.
Thus I argue that the narrative play of Lady Gaga’s lyrics offers both a re-imaging of the character-song form and a key to understanding not only the meaning of her songs but the nature of her entire artistic project. The grammatical troubling of this voice expresses the theme of performative identity and the radical agency to which it leads. It is at once philosophical and emancipatory, artistic and political; it is itself a paradox, a unity achieved not despite contradiction, but by means of it.
Perhaps this is a meaning of the third eye Gaga wears on her chin as Mother Monster in the video for “Born This Way”: her two eyes have been inverted and deconstructed into one. Does this eye have sobjective vision – seeing and also seeing its own seeing? Does it unify power and submission in one perceptive act? Can it see what is without losing sight of what might be?
Author Bio:
Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.
