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.

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From "Dance in the Dark, Little Monsters: On Gaga's Post-Goth Posthumanism"

By Robin James

The following is an excerpt from a longer article to be published in Gaga Stigmata’s forthcoming book. In that piece, Professor Robin James argues that Lady Gaga’s main aesthetic ancestor is goth. Gaga’s work not only has direct musical debts to goth bands, but also takes indirect visual and thematic inspiration from the goth genre. In the following excerpt, James examines how one of Gaga’s songs takes musical cues from the goth tradition, and then demonstrates how Gaga’s work goes beyond that tradition: that is, how Gaga performs post-goth posthumanism.

The most obvious similarity between any one Gaga track and any one goth-y track is between “Dance in the Dark” and Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove.”[i] Both songs are composed around essentially the same treble synth hook. Gaga’s track pulls an “Ice Ice Baby” on Depeche Mode’s original, altering the hook’s melody by turning a quarter note into two eights on the same pitch (basically, making the antecedent phrase a more exact mirror of the consequent phrase).[ii] Overall, Gaga’s sound shares a lot with Depeche Mode – and, to an extent, Yaz (which splintered off from Depeche Mode in the early 1980s). Early Depeche Mode was very synthy and proto-industrial, particularly their 1983-1984 releases Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward.[iii] The videos for “People are People” portrays band members playing parts of the manufacturing process, e.g. corrugated metal, as instruments.[iv]

Screenshot from the video for “People are People”

This use of factory machines and raw materials as musical instruments is more or less what defines industrial music as such. So, while Depeche Mode might not be the most “hardcore” industrial act, the band clearly writes some properly industrial music. In fact, Depeche Mode’s combination of industrial and mainstream synthpop is actually quite similar to Gaga’s own music. “Strangelove” appears on the 1987 album Music for the Masses, which takes the earlier albums’ industrial and synthpop sounds in a more mainstream, poppy direction. “Dance in the Dark” uses guitars in combination with synths and drum machines, as does Depeche Mode’s work on Music for the Masses and Violator. Yaz was even more distinctly synthy and electronic, but, like Gaga’s work, was and still is received and treated as belonging to the post-Moroder electro-dance-pop tradition. Gaga’s powerful and soulful alto vocals are quite obviously reminiscent of Yaz’s lead singer, Alison Moyet. Although her voice may sound like Moyet, Gaga’s songwriting, especially her approach to vocal melodies, is closer to Dave Gahan’s (Depeche Mode’s lead singer). Unlike many industrial bands, which rely on either more aggressive, closed-throated metal-influenced vocals (like KMFDM), or more minimal, often effected, vocals (like Kraftwerk), both craft long, very melodic vocal lines that require some serious singing. Although Moyet was a very strong and expressive singer, her phrases were relatively short and distinct.

So, while Gaga’s image might lead some to think of her as a postmillennial Material Girl, her sound demonstrates that she’s more like a twenty-first century update of Depeche Mode and Yaz: strong female vocals and synthy industrial darkness combined with a pop melodic sensibility. She acknowledges this influence in a press release for The Fame Monster: “this album is a pop experimentation with industrial/Goth beats, 90's dance melodies, an obsession with the lyrical genius of 80's melancholic pop.”[v] Depeche Mode encapsulates all these influences, and is perhaps the clearest and closest of Gaga’s musical influences.

In this section, I’ve discussed Gaga’s music as such, and put her compositional and performance choices in the context of both specific goth/industrial songs and the goth/industrial aesthetic more generally. Above and beyond anything her visual or textual presentation does, Gaga’s music is grounded in a goth dance tradition that stretches from Joy Division to Nitzer Ebb to Wax Trax to Attari Teenage Riot. Like Depeche Mode and Yaz – and, more recently, Nine Inch Nails – Gaga combines industrial instrumentals with long, sung melodic phrases with a classic pop or even musical theater sensibility. Both because Gaga’s own work combines specifically goth references and aesthetic choices with influences from a wide variety of other genres (thus “watering down” the goth references), and because mainstream pop itself bears the influences of industrial and EBM (thus making mainstream pop more “properly goth”), Gaga’s latter-day Wax Trax pop diva sound is stylistically “post-goth.” In Gaga, goth is no longer an indie subgenre, but chart-topping and download/page-view-record-breaking music for the masses.

In the next section, I turn to Gaga’s visual and textual production. Not only is her post-goth status more evident in these contexts, but this is also where her post-goth sexual politics are most evident. Gaga’s sexual politics are more properly “goth” than, say, Depeche Mode’s because the latter artists’ songs often positively represent (and even incite) sexual desire as such, Gaga calls into question the very desirability of sex and sexuality (as an act, as desire, as an identity).

For example, “Dance in the Dark” emphasizes the grotesque and debilitating effects that the performance of heteropatriarchial constructions of femaleness and femininity has on women’s bodies and psyches. The first lines of the song describe the normatively desirable and “sexy” female body as the “monster” created by a Frankenstein-esque beauty industrial complex: “Silicone, saline, poison, inject me.” Moreover, the refrain offers a fairly traditional white feminist critique of the male gaze: “baby loves to dance in the dark/cuz when he’s looking she falls apart.” “She” does not experience pleasure in men’s scopophilic objectification of her body; she cannot bear its weight, and can experience a coherent (rather than shattered) corporeal schema only when she is certain “he” (i.e., patriarchy) can’t see her. A later verse presents non-patriarchal constructions of female desire as monstrous: “Run run her kiss is a vampire grin/The moon lights away while she’s howling at him.” Under the light of the moon – which is traditionally identified with women and their menstrual cycles – rather than under the Apollonian light of patriarchal truth and reason, female sexuality appears inhuman (and, notably, as a classic goth icon, the vampire).

Both Gaga’s and goth’s sexual politics turn on the figure of the monster. Like goth, Gaga uses images and figures of posthuman monsters to critique heteropatriachial norms governing gender and sexuality.

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[i] Lady Gaga, “Dance in the Dark” on The Fame Monster New York: Interscope 2009. Depeche Mode, “Strangelove” on Music for the Masses, London: Mute, 1987.

[ii] Vanilla Ice’s early 1990s track “Ice Ice Baby” samples the bassline from Queen and David Bowie’s single “Under Pressure.” However, Vanilla Ice (Robert Van Winkle) has claimed in several instances that the bass loop in his track is in fact not the bassline from “Under Pressure” because his bassline has an extra note. See Stillman, Kevin (February 27, 2006). "Word to your mother". Iowa State Daily. http://www.iowastatedaily.com/articles/2006/02/27/news/20060227-archive5.txt.

[iii] Depeche Mode, Construction Time Again, London: Mute, 1983. Depeche Mode, Some Great Reward, London: Mute, 1984.

[iv] Video available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGnX-MbYE4, accessed 27 November 2010.

[v] See “Lady Gaga Returns with 8 New Songs on ‘The Fame Monster’ from the website “PR Newswire”: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lady-gaga-returns-with-8-new-songs-on-the-fame-monster-63780227.html. Accessed 28 November 2010.

Author Bio:

Robin James is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at UNC Charlotte. She specializes in contemporary continental philosophy, feminist theory, critical race/postcolonial theory, and the philosophy of music (particularly popular music). She has published articles in journals ranging from Hypatia to The Journal of Popular Music Studies, on topics ranging from Rihanna's Afrofuturist critique of traditional philosophical aesthetics to a comparison between Judith Butler's use of "autonomy" and Peaches' use of the electric guitar.