What Lies in Her Wake

By Victor P. Corona

This is the second piece in our series on "Marry the Night." For the first piece, click here.

From the playful kiddie pool scene in “Just Dance” to the tub of transformative trauma in “Marry the Night,” containers of water, bathtub and otherwise, constitute an important visual motif in Gaga’s aesthetic project. The image of a splashing Yüyi the Mermaid in “Yoü and I,” the reperformative washings in “Judas,” the white tub within the installation-art futurism of “Bad Romance,” and the pool setting of “Poker Face” all point to this interest in wet spaces. Appropriately titled “In Lady Gaga’s Wake,” the new Vanity Fair cover article (Robinson 2012) opens with a photograph of the pop star poised rather precariously on the railing of the Staten Island Ferry, the foamy waves behind her leading to a blurry New York skyline in the distance. A flimsy reading of such imagery would involve casually tossing around phrases about cleansing the self, purifying the body, and so on. I am more interested, however, in linking this motif to what I see at the core of Gaga’s creative ventures: the possibility of an endless renewal of identity and its consequences for contemporary culture.

“The Prelude Pathétique,” the spoken introduction to the “Marry the Night” video, extends the premise that Gaga has already laid out in interviews and her Manifesto of Little Monsters: her career and the persona that enabled it are examples of the essential human struggle to make lies true, to posit future versions of our selves, and to consciously realize desired fictions. In “Marry the Night,” she applies the same logic to her history. If the future can be willed into existence, why not the past? As she declares, “And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it.” Indeed, memories “can be lost forever.” Gaga thereby aestheticizes “memory loss” and upholds its potential for individual agency and boundless creativity. This perspective opens up an alternative outcome for what George Orwell’s 1984 called “the mutability of the past,” the ideological foundation of a dystopia in which any artifact of an event or person deemed inconvenient to Big Brother’s dictatorship was simply dropped into a nearby “memory hole.” “Marry the Night” is thereby the Janus-faced product of Gaga’s artistic remembrance: the Mother Monster is imagining her past self preparing a future that is now her glittering present.

Pop culture offers other instances of fungible pasts. The DC Comics graphic novel The Killing Joke (Moore and Bolland 2008) provides a sinister look at the origins of the Joker, Batman’s great nemesis. The whole attempt at revelation, however, is ultimately cast aside. While taunting Batman about his depraved past, the Joker declares, “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Said to have been influenced by The Killing Joke, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) enacts this preference for imagined histories: Heath Ledger’s Joker gives his victims different accounts of how he was scarred. Here critics may step back and see a slippery slope toward a solipsism that negates the existence of any fixed, commonly shared reality. But in the hypermodern age of social media and mobile technologies, such a concern is as fruitful as discussing the merits of dial-up modems or beepers. What else are Twitter and Facebook, updated incessantly by smartphones, but opportunities to endlessly reboot one’s identity, to self-curate our past and present, to invent and perform new selves as we please?

Whether based on superheroes, revolutionaries, or rock stars, the origin myths of most legends are steeped in the narrative power of a traumatic but necessary moment that elevates the ordinary into something far greater. The murders of Bruce Wayne’s parents and Peter Parker’s uncle trigger the careers of costumed crimefighters. In authoring her own origin myth, “Marry the Night” provides a glimpse of Gaga’s past trauma but culminates in the image of her apotheosis, a red-and-blue superwoman emerging phoenix-like from the fire of her years of toil. That journey has, of course, led to her victorious present, although some have an enduring preoccupation with the ordinariness possible in her extraordinary existence. This tension is lavishly depicted in the Annie Leibovitz photo spread for “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” She dons couture while standing in a laundromat or eating a hot dog but wears nothing but heels and sunglasses while being sketched by none other than Tony Bennett.

At the beginning of “Marry the Night,” moments after declaring that she will become a star because she has nothing left to lose, Gaga requests a bit of music while mentally disturbed patients prance and stagger around the hospital ward. The scene is reminiscent of the concluding scenes of Amadeus (1984), in which an embittered Antonio Salieri finally accepts the collapse of his own bid for stardom as he stands in the shadow of Mozart’s superior musical genius. Declaring himself to be “the patron saint of all mediocrities,” he assumes the role of champion for the deranged inmates at the asylum in which he resides. The contrast is clear. Salieri’s doomed musical career ended among quivering lunatics. Gaga’s stay in the mint-tinged ward was a mere step in a journey that led to her current place as one of the most celebrated recording artists in recent memory. Although not discussed in the Vanity Fair article, Gaga has also left a string of resentful Salieris in her wake, especially in New York. If they are DJs they do not play her music. They pretend that she does not exist, even when she sells out Madison Square Garden, when her image graces newsstands on every corner, when everyone from my students to my eighty-something Mexican grandmother is interested in what she is wearing.

Naturally, bitter detractors are as much a part of stardom as are magazine covers and red carpets. The curious development we see in “Marry the Night” is Gaga’s willingness to push aside the cloying gripes about authenticity and instead demonstrate her commitment to “show biz.” The aestheticized depiction of her trajectory from rejection and hospitalization to a glowing spot in the pop firmament has demonstrated the irrelevance of preoccupations with perceived realness. This is yet another indicator of why Gaga may appropriately be called Andy Warhol’s greatest inheritor. Films by Warhol and Paul Morrissey have become so celebrated precisely because of their conscious blurring of lines between the Superstars’ on-screen performances and off-screen personas. What was real? Consider the recently re-released biography of Superstar Joe Dallesandro (perhaps best known for the Flesh, Trash, Heat trilogy). As his biographer writes, “With the low budgets and improvisational nature of these movies, with an array of curious personalities parading before the camera often calling each other by their actual first names, as well as with the Warhol brand and the growing mythology of his Factory, the line between what was acting and what was real had been blurred to the point of obliteration” (Ferguson 2011, ii). When being interviewed, Dallesandro himself is said to have told reporters, “Whatever isn’t there, just make it up” (Ferguson 2011, 1).

I once interviewed a Warhol contemporary who expressed concern that Gaga’s stage persona had somehow eclipsed Stefani Germanotta. Definitely, I thought, just as the thirty-year old sociologist version of my self “eclipsed” the high school student version or the undergraduate activist version. I thought back to the interviewee’s comment while watching the enactment of Gaga’s honest lies in “Marry the Night.” Gaga states, “It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting and as the artist of that painting I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.” Watching Gaga apply her wet gloss to a bedazzled past revealed the best answer to the question posed by the Born This Way album. Born what way? This way, this particular version of a self that one decided to make real, a fiction that became true. It’s a challenge as much as a question. And that too lies in her wake.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Michael. Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor. Michael Ferguson, 2011.

Moore, Alan and Brian Bolland. Batman: The Killing Joke. DC Comics, 2008.

Robinson, Lisa. “In Lady Gaga’s Wake.” Vanity Fair 617, 2012.

Author Bio:

Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., (http://victorpcorona.com) is a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. in sociology from Yale. He lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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Born Superstars

By Victor P. Corona

The following piece is the second in our series on "Born This Way." For the first piece, click here.

The title of Lady Gaga’s third album and its first single, “Born This Way,” raises the question: born what way? The single’s first sung verse provides an answer: “My mama told me when I was young, we are all born superstars.” This declaration is consistent with Gaga’s message about the conscious cultivation of one’s fame, the nurturing of the self-made image, and the celebration of Otherness. The figure of the celestial Gaga that introduces the “Born This Way” video enacts the titles she has earned. She is literally a star and a heavenly “Mother Monster” giving birth to beings without prejudices. Gaga has repeatedly reinforced visual ties between herself and the most famous mother figure in history, the Virgin Mary. In a Vogue cover story titled “Our Lady of Pop,” she refers to the writing of the new album as an “immaculate conception.” The product of her gestation is the music video that, to date, most thoroughly visualizes the core goals of her work: fully liberated creativity and the creation of truly unbowed versions of our own selves.

During the pronouncement of the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” Gaga as goddess floats above the earth while perched on a crystalline throne. She is also adorned with the kind of diaphanous veils that were so prominently featured in Nicola Formichetti’s Mugler designs. The star-like throne recalls the elaborate organ she played at the Grammys. In a discussion of that performance, Betancourt describes her organ as “haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets, [reminiscent] of the instruments used to replace a cell nucleus in the cloning process – an image that for a period of time was prolific in the news following the cloning fears of the late 1990s.” Although this is an excellent interpretation, a complementary reading might also draw attention to comparable crystalline assemblages in the Superman films. The iconic hero is, of course, an alien who becomes a paragon of virtue amid Metropolitan corruption and is largely immune to those prejudices that Gaga’s new race seeks to eradicate. In the films, ranging from the 1978 classic to the 2006 reboot, crystals constitute Superman’s extinct home-world of Krypton, the spaceship that transports him to Earth, and a secret base called the Fortress of Solitude. The elegant and shimmering quality of crystals associates purity and perhaps even divinity with the act of creation, whether the progeny is a Superman or superstars. Gaga’s guise as extraterrestrial – the most “outsider” being possible – meshes with Formichetti’s repeated descriptions of his Mugler designs for Gaga as “alien.”

The image of the celestial Gaga, legs spread, giving birth to her new race occurs even as her hellish counterpart gives birth to evil, which is embodied as a machine-gun that sprays star-like bursts of bullets. The site of the heavenly birth takes place on “G.O.A.T.,” a “Government Owned Alien Territory,” an area of space where the “eternal mother” is in labor (the name of the birthing site can perhaps be tied to the irreverent lyrics of another album track, “Government Hooker”). The acronym brings to mind Capricorn the sea-goat, although the video’s rendering of the constellation also approximates the female reproductive organs and the Satanic figure of Baphomet, who is himself imprinted with a pentagram. 

Constellation of G.O.A.T, shaped like the female reproductive system.

Image of Baphomet

Indeed, the bound silver bouffant Gaga wears has been compared to the images of elongated alien heads created by the surrealist artist H. R. Giger. She wore her hair in a similar manner during her interview on the Gayle King Show and other recent public appearances. Curiously, Giger has produced a stunning work where a pearl-skinned woman said to represent the mythical spirit Lilith straddles the head of Baphomet. Note that both Gaga and Giger’s Lilith wear gilded collars.

Mother Monster upon her throne.

Lilith and Baphomet, H.R. Giger

To be clear, I am not suggesting that “Born This Way” is somehow a vehicle for diabolical beliefs. Rather, this is another instance of Gaga’s subversion of images and symbols that are already so pregnant with meaning. In claiming that everyone is born a superstar, Gaga directs our attention to the heavens, which is the realm of actual stars as well as human hopes for an afterlife. She confronts creation myths and belief systems that also marshal the imagery of stars. Her own vision of creation, however, is underway at the present moment. The “mitosis of the future” involves an actual star giving birth to superstars that can shed the biases of the past.

Gaga’s interest in the image of the “superstar” is not new. A song titled “Superstar” was written in 2008. The lyrics describe a stardom that is accessible to all. “Tonight you are a superstar,” she sings, “Can’t you see? You’re my celebrity.” Gaga’s take on the “superstar” idiom can also be seen as a link between her aesthetic and the work of Andy Warhol. Like “Born This Way,” Warhol understood stardom as an innate quality. Certain people were particularly interesting to Warhol, which led to their inclusion in his minimalist films, often playing only slightly exaggerated versions of themselves. The artists and performers who most closely associated themselves with Warhol’s Factory were baptized as “Superstars.” New Factory identities were adopted via stage names like Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Viva, and Billy Name. By labeling themselves as what they sought to become, they undertook a conscious project of building their own fame. This intent is clearly expressed in Gaga’s “Manifesto of Little Monsters,” where she states, “We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or rather to become, in the future” (see also Durbin and Vicks 2011). If you call yourself a superstar, if your mother (Monster or natal) tells you that you were born a superstar, then that is what you are.

After Warhol’s death in 1987, the Factory Superstars had a second coming in the Club Kids and their “King,” Michael Alig. In response to the declaration of the “Death of Downtown,” Alig initiated a wave of Club Kid theatricality that dominated New York nightlife via a love of outré fashion that is not dissimilar to what the Haus of Gaga celebrates. In Warhol’s own Interview magazine, Alig states, “We were all going to become Warhol Superstars and move into The Factory and recreate the whole thing.” But the Warhol scene was twisted into a Leigh Bowery-esque piece of performance art. Alig claims, “I guess we were making fun of the Warhol Superstars. We changed our names like they did, and we dressed up in outrageously crazy outfits in order to be a satire of them – only we ended up becoming what we were satirizing.” Their performance of superstardom had a sinister end, however. While Gaga’s approach to fame as performance art now imagines the birth of a new people, the Club Kid King’s reign culminated in the killing of a fellow reveler (Alig will be up for parole in the coming years). It is curious, however, that from his jail cell, Alig has contributed writing to a stage production called “Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical.” The work, directed by Alistair Newton, chronicles the ambition and ascendancy of Gaga, perhaps Warhol’s greatest heir to date.

Andy Warhol and the Superstars Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, and Ultra Violet

The Club Kids

Whether birthed by Warhol, the Club Kids, or Gaga, what is the essence of being a Superstar? That each person is beautiful in his or her own way? Perhaps. But individual agency is also vital. When telling her followers to “Rejoice and love yourself today,” Gaga is asking that they look toward the promise of G.O.A.T. and then look inward with satisfaction rather than anxiety. This celebration of the uniqueness of individual identity has led some critics to see Gaga as merely a gentle reformer rather than a gender-bending revolutionary. As Powers of the Los Angeles Times writes, “‘Born This Way’ never hints that outsiders should remake the world in their image, instead invoking God and mommy to suggest that society’s frameworks need not change, only open their doors a little wider.” The song is certainly a call to amplify social spaces so that marginalized persons may be included and upheld. But it is significant when a song that subsumes “transgendered life” and other identities under superstardom becomes a mainstream pop hit. As Gaga told Vogue, “...every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a fuck about the bullies at my school.’” The long road to a glistening, judgment-free G.O.A.T. has to start somewhere.

Bibliography

Betancourt, Roland, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks. “I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! – ‘Born This Way’ Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion.” Gaga Stigmata 14 February 2011.

Bollen, Christopher. “Michael Alig.” Interview 16 April 2010.

Durbin, Kate and Meghan Vicks. “From The Fame to Born This Way: Lady Gaga and the Monstrous Evolution of Identity.” Gaga Stigmata 1 March 2011.

Powers, Ann. “Snap Judgment: Lady Gaga, ‘Born This Way.’” Los Angeles Times 11 February 2011.

Van Meter, Jonathan. “Lady Gaga: Our Lady of Pop.” Vogue March 2011.

Author Bio:
Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His writing is available at http://victorpcorona.com.

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Gotham and the Glitter Way

by Victor P. Corona

On July 6th, as the temperature gradually crept past 100 degrees, New York City welcomed both Queen Elizabeth II and Lady Gaga, two women who have played central roles in an ongoing cultural reckoning with the power of tradition and fame. The city’s political leadership ceremoniously received Her Majesty, who addressed the United Nations, visited Ground Zero, and opened a memorial garden in honor of Britons killed on 9/11. The Queen—for whom Gaga performed in December 2009—was reminded by New York’s mayor that the city was named after a very distant cousin of hers (Kleinfield). Later that evening, Gaga fans assembled to welcome their “Mother Monster” to Madison Square Garden for the first of three sold-out shows, while fan websites worked to make “Madison Square Gaga” a trending topic on Twitter. Gaga’s arrival in Gotham for a week of performances coincided with other career milestones that cemented her place as the world’s first hypermodern pop star (Corona). Having displaced President Obama as the most popular living person on Facebook, Gaga also became the third most followed person on Twitter, just behind yesteryear’s pop princess, Britney Spears, and Ashton Kutcher,[i] while her album The Fame sold the highest number of digital copies in music history (Grein).

In explaining the meaning of her Monster Ball concert tour, she told CNN’s Larry King a month earlier that the show was a “celebration of shame,” “a rejection of insecurity,” and “an exorcism for my fans and for myself.” At the beginning of the Garden show, Gaga proclaimed to her audience that the show “will set you free” from insecurities. Male and female fans—her “little monsters”—seemed to harbor few insecurities as they adorned themselves with glasses made out of cigarettes, hats composed of telephone parts, vestments made from crime scene tape, and other outfits inspired by Gaga’s music videos and appearances. The next morning, an apparently bewildered New York Post writer concluded that the show was “Broadway for the deranged” (Aquilante). A New York Daily News critic discussed the show’s allusions to The Wizard of Oz via its story of a band of friends that is transported to a faraway land (Farber). Yet in Gaga’s world, an innocent trek down the Yellow Brick Road is replaced with a journey along the “Glitter Way,” one that brazenly eschews the primacy of verity. As Gaga told concert-goers, “I hate the truth. See how far you can go with bullshit.”

During the Monster Ball’s set changes, eerie footage showed Gaga biting into a heart and wearing masks and hoods that recalled the frightening looks of Leigh Bowery. In a video interlude accompanied by her “Dance in the Dark” song, Gaga stands dressed in a frilly white gown, assuming a statuesque pose. The performance artist Millie Brown, dressed in black, vomits a bright blue liquid on Gaga, who simply stares straight ahead.[ii] This segment seemed to enact the lyrics of Gaga’s wildly popular “Bad Romance” single, “I want your ugly, I want your disease,” a kind of visual promise to her audience of what her ongoing artistic venture will entail. The visually and sonically overwhelming spectacle of the Monster Ball was therefore a clear demonstration of the ability of the pop singer and her Haus of Gaga creative team to interweave diverse aesthetic elements. Gaga’s successful execution of this project contributed to her being named 2010’s “Most Creative Person in Business” by Fast Company magazine. Placing her alongside executives from Apple and Nissan, the magazine lauded her ability to combine “au courant dance pop and Web savvy to build a business empire notable for both the speed of its creation and the diversity of its platforms” (Macsai).

But Gaga, her fellow performers, and excited fans were not the only actors in the Monster Ball spectacle. Parents in attendance also tried to reckon with the gender-bending theatricality that has come to feature so strongly in Gaga’s aesthetic. At the merchandise counter, an anxious-looking mother approached a vendor and asked to see a white t-shirt bearing the clawed hand that has become the “little monster” salute. Brow furrowed, she eyed it carefully until she finally asked the vendor, “Is this t-shirt ok for boys?” Later, during the show, two grim-faced parents seated near me remained motionless even as the rest of the audience bounced and swayed. The father stood silently with arms folded at the sight of Justin Tranter of Semi Precious Weapons asking the audience if they liked his glistening high heels. The man did not seem amused when Gaga introduced one of her male dancers and said that he liked both girls and boys. But after Gaga vanquished a giant angler fish with sparks emitting from her chest and crotch, the reluctant father succumbed and quickly took out his camera.

Gaga’s Glitter Way reached Gotham in the middle of a year that has already stirred the imaginations of the city’s creative community through exhibits like the Metropolitan Museum’s “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” the Brooklyn Museum’s display of late-career works by Andy Warhol, and the Tim Burton and Marina Abramovic retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In May 2010, Gaga visited Abramovic’s unprecedented durational performance, one that seemed to severely test the artist’s emotional, mental, and physical stamina. Staring directly at any museum visitor who wished to sit across from her during a three-month period, Abramovic’s dramatic commentary on the intimacy and intrusion of the human gaze also attracted the musicians Björk, Lou Reed, and Rufus Wainwright. A few weeks later, during a conversation with Gaga broadcast live on the fashion site SHOWstudio.com, an interviewer read a question submitted by Abramovic, who simply asked Gaga, “Who creates limits?” Gaga’s unhesitant response was consistent with her concert’s gospel of individual liberation and also recognized just how far Abramovic had pushed her own consciousness. Gaga replied, “We do. We create our own limits. [Abramovic] is a limitless human being!”

Late last year, MoMA had launched another major retrospective, one that celebrated Tim Burton’s dark Pop Surrealist vision and his unique ability to incorporate ghoulish distortions of human bodies into his drawings, animations, films, and sculptures. The ambition of his oeuvre in some ways resonated with Gaga’s own devotion to the monstrous. A related MoMA film series, “Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters,” featured films that inspired his vision, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a prime example of the German Expressionist influence that the Daily News detected in Gaga’s Monster Ball. It is perhaps not surprising to observe the renewed vigor of a monstrous motif in pop culture, given the endless string of embarrassments suffered by celebrities and politicians. Imagery and narratives built around “misfits” and “freaks”—perhaps best exemplified in contemporary cinema by the Twilight films—somehow capture an alternative sense of authenticity and heroism. More scholars are paying attention to this motif, as seen in the planned University of London conference called “Hybrids, Monsters, Aliens and Other Creatures in 20th and 21st Century Writing,” to be held in September 2010.[iii]

Since many others have described Andy Warhol’s influence on Gaga, I was not surprised to catch glimpses of artistic resonances at the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade.” Indeed, a profile of Gaga in New York traced her artistic transformation back to the Pop artist, stating, “Before Warhol, however unusual, she’d been in the general category of rock chick. He freed her to invent herself, like so many before her, expand herself, make herself a spectacle” (Grigoriadis). The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit highlighted Warhol’s experimentation with different techniques in his later works, some in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat.[iv] Yet Warhol conserves his early interest in core symbols of American pop culture and the influence of his own aesthetic initiation through commercial art. A massive painting features motorcycles, Jesus, a 6.99 price tag, the Wise potato chips logo, and an eagle, while smaller canvasses based on print advertisements read, “Steaks 99¢,” “Self-Defense Secrets Revealed!” and “Are You ‘Different?’” 

Warhol’s fascination with the commercial logos and messages that pervade urban life was echoed in the bright neon signs that serve as a backdrop to the first part of Gaga’s Monster Ball: “BBQ,” “Implants Sedation Dentistry,” and “Death Cases Car Accidents Whiplash Injured Children.” Alongside these, a red neon arrow that reads “Death” points offstage.

 

A preoccupation with mortality is another interest shared between the two icons. Visitors to the Warhol exhibit are greeted with ten images of the Pop artist being strangled from behind. Gaga herself has stirred controversy through the murders that occur in three of her videos and her bloody performances during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and the Monster Ball shows. In another set of images, Warhol sits calmly with a skull on top of his head, just as casually as Gaga lies next to a charred skeleton at the end of her “Bad Romance” video. Other works reflect Warhol’s curiosity about Abstract Expressionism. Yet rather that imitate the movement that his Pop art initially challenged, Warhol seemed to defy and dilute the intent of the Expressionists’ gestural paintings by creating works that appear to be drips but are actually prints. Also, the shimmering smears and splotches in the Oxidation series are made not with thick oil paint but with urine. Just as Warhol’s stylistic versatility signals his openness to crossing boundaries separating artistic movements, other observers have noticed similarly fluid and ambiguous characteristics of the aesthetic edifice that Gaga has constructed around her vocal ability and songwriting. As Vicks correctly notes in this blog, “Her performance continually transgresses and functions by transgressing, which allows Lady Gaga to be both whimsical and serious, sexy and monstrous, and meaningless and meaningful at the same time” (Vicks).

Although it was inevitable that Gaga’s Monster Ball troupe would follow the Glitter Way back to Gotham, the three sold-out Garden concerts were particularly significant for the pop star, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Several years earlier, Gaga’s high school yearbook entry had declared that her dream was to headline at the Garden, where she had once seen Madonna, Cher, and the Rolling Stones perform. She would have probably been amused by the fact that the commotion she triggered at baseball games a month before had prompted the popular Gothamist blog to declare that the city was “unofficially on Gaga Watch” during her week of performances (Carlson). But before leaving New York to continue her Monster Ball in Canada, Gaga performed for a national audience during NBC’s The Today Show on July 9th. Like the Monster Ball audience, fans flooded Rockefeller Center wearing intricately built hats or with lightning bolts painted on their faces. Standing just in front of me, a mother carefully adjusted her teenage daughter’s bright pink wig. A boy behind me, speaking in Spanish, excitedly told someone over the phone to watch Gaga’s performance and look for him in the crowd. After a rehearsal, Gaga appeared on the telecast dressed in custom-made Emporio Armani suits. As the show wound down, Gaga continued to sing and dance even as heavy rain started falling upon the 20,000 amassed fans, finishing her performance by screaming, “Let it rain!” As the show went to commercial, an anchor murmured, “Wow…incredible,” reacting as many Gothamites did during their sweltering yet spectacle-filled week of Gaga.

Works Cited

Aquilante, Dan. “Madison Sq. Ga-Garden.” New York Post. 7 Jul. 2010.

Carlson, Jen. “The City’s Unofficially On Gaga Watch.” Gothamist. 7 Jul. 2010.

Corona, Victor P. “Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga.” Journal of Popular Culture, forthcoming.

Grein, Paul. “Chart Watch.” Yahoo! Music. 7 Jul. 2010.

Grigoriadis, Vanessa. “Growing Up Gaga.” New York. 28 Mar. 2010.

Farber, Jim. “Lady Gaga’s Concert at Madison Square Garden is a Nod to Expressionism, ‘Oz.’” New York Daily News. 7 Jul. 2010.

Kleinfield, N.R. “The Queen Breezes In for an Afternoon.” New York Times. 6 Jul. 2010.

Macsai, Dan. “100 Most Creative People in Business 2010.” Fast Company. Jul. 2010.

Vicks, Meghan. “The Icon and the Monster: Lady Gaga is a Trickster of American Pop Culture.” Gaga Stigmata. 19 Mar. 2010.

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[i] http://www.famecount.com/all-platforms

[ii] http://milliebrown.blogspot.com/2010/02/vomiting-on-lady-gaga-new-monsterball.html

[iii] Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=373

[iv] In the film Basquiat (1996), directed by Julian Schnabel, Warhol is played by another key Gaga influence, David Bowie.

___________________________

Author Bio:

Victor P. Corona is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. in sociology from Yale. He is currently conducting research for a book manuscript on careers, creativity, and organizational change in cultural industries. His work has been published in Magazine Americana, Theory, Culture and Society, Public Organization Review, Organization, Journal of Civil Society, and elsewhere.

vc2118@columbia.edu  |  http://www.columbia.edu/~vc2118