Jetztzeit and the Messianic Skip of Gaga’s “Scheiβe”: I Don’t Speak German, but Benjamin Does

By Eddie McCaffray

The motif of “skipping” – of a phonograph’s needle or a CD player’s laser beam rudely leaping across the surface of a disk – dominates the song “Scheiβe.” Start from the beginning; play the song. “I don’t speak German but I can if you like, ow! – immediately one wonders what this declaration is apropos of. No one asked you to speak German Lady Gaga, did they? Who was even talking about German? The song just started! Right away, this song creates the feeling that we’ve begun in the middle of something, some other conversation. Something’s been skipped and now everyone is confused.

Then, Gaga’s German [begins 0:03]: incomprehensible gobbledy-gook, yet rhythmic and repetitive. Isn’t that how a CD sounds when it’s really stuck? Dzhep-dzhep-dzhep-dzhep, fhet-fhet-fhet-fhet? Next comes the churning, fuzzy, bass-synthesizer backbone [begins 0:19], and it too sounds like the beginning (or middle) of a thought. It’s resonant, suggestive, even begins to develop like music should before stalling out [example 0:23-0:27] and eventually resorting to repeating itself, to repeating its incomplete opening over and over again – the techno-organ line will do the same a little later [begins 0:41], when it appears. Then, the techno-scratching noises start up [begins 0:26]: they’re what first grabbed me, what first sounded like skipping, what pulled me into this impossible-to-consummate-feedback-loop of a song, of a creative project.

Because that’s where this is going: skipping isn’t just a weird, cool trash-aesthetic sound to build a dance banger around. As usual with Gaga (Stigmata), it’s a creative and ethical practice – even a principle, perhaps. It makes an argument, and it’s a way to do something. Not that we’re done tracing the motif in its simple appearance just yet, however. That was just a little taste of what’s to come. Maybe my essay is skipping a little bit itself.

Once we get into the lyrics proper, the skipping motif becomes explicit. “I’ll take you out tonight, say whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine. Put on a show tonight, do whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine.” Repetition interrupting itself. Then, the “I”s of the chorus: “I, I wish I got to dance on a single prayer, I, I wish I could be strong without somebody there,” almost as though Gaga is getting stuck on herself, on the self, on her own I. The last phrase then stutter-repeats into a reprise: “Oh, oh, oh, o-oh, without the Scheiβe yea,” Gaga’s voice becoming its own reflexive, diminishing echo. Next, the fragmentary return-and-modification of Gaga’s opening German declaration [begins 1:37]. Eventually, the stuttered “I”s and the fragment of “I don’t speak German but I wish I could . . .” blur together, distort, and literally skip [begins 2:46]. They’re even subsumed into the beat of the song itself. The whole sonic assemblage is reduced, or elevated, to a whirling blend of either not-quite or just-barely intelligible sentence (or musical) fragments, changing their order, recombining, and so on.

So what does this mean? What is the ethical or aesthetic meaning of all this skipping? The main message of the song is that Gaga wishes she could escape all the constraints and prerequisites of her actions: she wants to be strong – potent – without all the bullshit that invariably tags along. The conditions of her actions, or their results. The song itself is explicitly about this problem in terms of feminism or women’s rights; Gaga wants to be herself and do her thing without all this limiting, patriarchal malarkey. And skipping is, in fact, intimately related to this emancipatory struggle: when a fragment of music skips, it rejects its dependence on the principle and progression of the larger song.

Skipping is the rejecting of the intrinsic limitation that you can only sing or play the middle part of the song after the beginning part – or, for that matter, that one sound has to develop into a different-yet-related sound. Skipping puts the middle first, the beginning last, and it never ever gets to the end. Maybe it just plays one tiny part of itself, perhaps the tiny little part it likes best, a million times in a row; it feels no obligation to develop a musical or lyrical idea into its own implications, or to build such an idea out of what has already played, already appeared. The action of the skipping song rejects equally the concept of prerequisite and consequence. Skipping is a revolt both against diachronic development and against synchronic logic.

(It is also the revolt against a complete thought, or a finished identity. It is the musical equivalent of infinite births – of identity as an always-becoming, unfinished process. Born this way.)

Walter Benjamin articulated something similar to the concept of the emancipatory, disruptive skip in regards to (the music of) history:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a casual nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now [Jetztzeit], in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.

Historicism – the understanding of time as regimented space, filled in evenly with reality, through which human subjects march, leaving the past behind and approaching the future – is Benjamin’s opponent here. What he proposes instead is that the historian, the human being, achieve a relationship with all the scope of history at each moment rather than dutifully marching along the route dictated to him by the historicist schema. Our pasts, the past of everyone and everything, is here with each of us in this present moment, and so too are our futures. We remember, we look ahead, but in doing so, those infinite expanses of time are contained within our looking, and our looking is always in the present, always fills the present.

Thus our own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one; Benjamin’s history is one which steps forward out of its dictated place, breaks ranks, moves laterally, reaching across an infinite distance of time and space to apprehend what it needs, what calls to it, what it finds a connection with. It rejects the principle of development. It rejects the constraint that conditions potency: “For in [Judaism’s understanding of time], every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.” Every moment is the moment, of potency, of salvation, of emancipation.

Gaga recognizes this. That’s why this song – a plea or a desperate play for freedom – speaks out of the broken, all-encompassing space of the skip, out of a traumatic gouge on the shining surface of sound that refracts one beam of light into a thousand beams of light:

For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before . . . the consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classers in the moment of their action.

It’s no accident that, in the second verse of “Scheiβe,” Gaga replaces the skipping lyric (“Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine”) with “Express your womankind, fight for your right.” Emancipation speaks out of the gap opened in mechanism, in determinism, by the skip. The disjunction of linear time foiled, of torn plastic and screeching metal and leaping light, is a gap through which freedom bursts, a space from out of which all things are possible. In “Scheiβe,” Gaga is struggling to get stuck in that gaping void, that zero, that zone of pure potentiality, that nothing which allows for infinite somethings.

But the void is only ever possible as an incomplete or scrambled thought. Which is to say: it’s difficult to dwell there.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University. In addition to history, he likes philosophy, literature, and the Russian language.

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THE NEW FLESH

By Devin O’Neill

I watched the “Bad Romance” video the other day, the video that got me into Gaga. I wanted to see how it aged. So much seems to have happened in pop since 2009, the first time I jacked off to that video and cried because my artistic career was over and I now belonged to an Italian woman I’d never met.

When I first saw it, it felt razor sharp, fetishistic, and impossible to replicate. It had an unassailable countercultural credibility despite being blasted on the most mainstream content channels the mediaspace has to offer.

It still feels that way. Why? How does something this ubiquitous feel this edgy?

In answering this question, I’ll provide you with a step-by-step guide to producing your own art of the same shining, disruptive caliber. Be warned: if you follow my advice, there’s no escaping fame.

“There has to be danger, we have to instill a sense of fear in the audience, and ourselves. Rock’n’roll deserves that.”

–Trent Reznor

In order to properly engage constituent human fight-or-flight mechanisms, and thus compete for adrenaline-space in the hurricane gale of the new media, you must disrupt the environment of the viewer with cultural signifiers that do not have place in his ordinary threat-environment, and the best signifiers are linked to sex and violence, the beating and raping and subjugation of the identity; power and humility. All the old buttons in the monkey-brains of your viewers must be pushed relating to desire, social dominance, fear and territoriality. This is why the visual is so important – sounds can be driving, evocative, and terrifying, but our newest dangers and desires are so technologically complex that representing and then perverting them properly requires product-placement level symbolic dialog. Razor glasses, fetish gear, body auctions and golden prosthetics – if we can press the fear of wealth, fear of sex, fear of humiliation, fear of aggression, and fear-of-the-alien buttons all at once, our work is being done properly.

This cold, material danger should be balanced with vulnerability, which is just as terrifying.  Appear unstable, and allow your audience to see the human weaknesses in you that terrify them in themselves, but surround those things with a matrix of blades. Place your fleshy, teary-eyed frailties in the mechanistic jaws of the modern landscape of value exchange, like a fairytale maiden guarded by a giant firebreathing dog with the heads of Donald Trump and Karl Marx. Cry very close to the camera, and twitch a lot before being taken and bound – you are out of control. You are human.

Push these two buttons in alternating rhythm for that is the rhythm of power.

Understand the visual language that soothes your viewer’s needs. They are soft, warm creatures with leaping rabbits of desire in their chests, and it is up to you to coax those rabbits out with sweet carrots before baring your aforementioned knives. Study pornography as scripture and understand advertising as prophecy – tear the creatures from your television screen to pieces with you teeth and cybernetically reintegrate them into a lover the viewer longs for with perverse prepubescent disney-movie recognition. Swathe the gloss of those forms, reeking of desire, in the haute couture of status, the unreproducible stink of exclusivity. This occult swings on the central secret of art and entrepreneurship – the fact that the reins of creativity and collage are in everyone’s hands. You will make idols of fabric sequin and mirror from your closet, and your followers will worship these idols – because they haven’t known the central mysticism, that they can program reality, that they can make their own idols. And then later in your career, in your biggest magick-trick of all, you’ll tell them.

No explanations are necessary. You must be a self-evident non-creature, a representative of mysteries the populace already suspects exist. You do not need purpose; your style is purpose in its subversion. Dick Hebdige said the purpose of the safety pin, in terms of punk rock, is to negate its own purpose. You will wallow in the decadent drug-technologies of civilization’s nonbeing, capitalistic desire fellating itself until its cum drains, withers, dies. By reconfiguring each object in your surrounding energy field to be repurposed, and so to be purposeless in relation to the religion of purpose’s consensus is-ness, you metastasize a new paradigm of purpose that does not require memory or regret. This is impossible solipsism but each milestone of headway you make will contribute to your Fame. Since the homeostatic mode of your capitalistic prison is production, consumption, exchange, value, you will fart in a glass bottle and refuse to sell your bottled fart. But people will want to buy it anyway. You will not regret this. You will regret nothing. Regret is a function of response to systems other than your own, systems with demands. Besides, people will not buy your fart. They will buy you, and then you will kill them. Eventually, they will love you for it. Eventually, they will realize that each semiotic boundary and stylistic taboo that you sacrifice on the altar of yourself is not representative of the funeral of a discreet object – they are only flakes of skin, skin that you are shedding, as you transform into something else entirely. You are an instruction manual to become yourself.

Those are your commandments. Read carefully, live courageously, and be a monster. But not a little one. Not anymore.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, and branding practitioner. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com and http://devinoneill.blogspot.com.

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Haus of Stigmata: Laurence Ross

Gaga Stigmata is thrilled to welcome Laurence Ross as one of our official Haus of Stigmata writers. Laurence holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, and he lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a tragicomic novel, Also, I’m Dying, rendered in three one-act “plays” in which characters deliver performances of crisis, apathy, education, vanity, alcoholism, sexuality, husband, wife, child, and anarchy, among other things.

We’re very much looking forward to featuring additional pieces by Laurence in the upcoming year. For now, check out what he’s already written for Gaga Stigmata.

On “Marry the Night,” and its creative/destructive möbius strip

Gaga must alter herself, and the creation of a new self necessitates the destruction of the old. And so Gaga destroys, takes up the box of Cheerios and dismantles it, washes herself in the milk (whiteness) and O’s (zeros/nothingness). She pours an innumerable amount of zeros over herself because there is nothing left. She opens her mouth, full of zeros, not to sing, but to show us she has nothing(ness) to say. That the Cheerios/zeros/nothingness is all that there is to see here. Gaga has lost it – it being the everything of the self, all that there was. Gaga is now nothing. As she sings in the song, “I’m a loser.” Gaga must be stripped to a naked nothingness so that Gaga may dress herself up again.

“On The Whiteness of the Wail: From Ashes to Ashes”

How “Yoü and I” continues the narrative of “Paparazzi” and “Telephone”

Despite the fact that Jonas Åkerlund did not direct “Yoü and I,” the video seems like the third chapter in a continuing narrative that the Åkerlund-produced videos “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” began. There is Lady Gaga’s glamour-infused romance (the result of which is death), Lady Gaga’s release from jail (the result of which is death), and then Lady Gaga’s escape to/return to Nebraska (the result of which is death). Yes, there is a repeated (rebirthed) theme, but there is also a (funereal) procession, a narrative extension on the discourse. Gaga leaves one man for another, moves from one prison to another, transitions from one state to the next. Gaga is continually killing one version of herself so that the next may be born, which implies two paradoxical sides of Gaga: one that wishes to live and one that wishes to die. “Yoü and I” simultaneously exhibits the separation (Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone) and the synthesis (Yüyi) of these two (seemingly) opposing sides of Gaga’s self. There is the Gaga who wants to be with the lover, submissive and secluded in the Nebraska barn, and the Gaga who wants to be the spectacle, the pop star, the one with agency.

“On Plastic: The Endless Garment”

Analyzing closely “88 Pearls”

At the close of the film, as Gaga and Koh place the final pearl in the teacup, Gaga says, “Let’s do the last one together.” Gaga and Koh, together, each take hold of the pearl, each one’s thumb and finger carefully joining to pinch a side, their pair of hands forming two rings, two circles, which, when joined (jointed) at the point (joint) of the pearl, form the figure eight, form yet another figure of infinity.

“Playing with Pearls: The Adornment of Selves”

On the two videos for “The Edge of Glory”

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

“The Pasteboard Mask: Our Lady Leviathan”

Britney Spears : Lady Gaga

Sometimes a telephone is a means of escape (Gaga’s text to Beyoncé) and sometimes a telephone is a jail cell (“Callin’ like a collector”). Sometimes a pussy is a cat (Gaga’s cabdriver cat suit) and sometimes a pussy is a vagina (Venus’s symbol zeroing in on the Pussy Wagon in the final shot of “Telephone”). Sometimes a sandwich is lunch and sometimes a sandwich is a bit of dance choreography and sometimes a sandwich is poison – that’s the Wonder (Bread), the Miracle (Whip) of it all. And Lady Gaga exerts this freedom, this agency, over and over again. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187), Stein tells us in her poem Sacred Emily (1922), a poem that creates a world where words and phrases are repeated to diminish meaning’s stability and to emphasize meaning’s permeability. And this world is the one Lady Gaga inhabits, a world where the meaning and identity of a person/place/thing are never stagnant, always changing. If Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” possesses Yeatsian echoes of a modernist looking backward in time, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” possesses Steinian echoes of a Modernist looking forward to the Post-Modern, the dissolving of boundaries, binaries, and steel bars.

“Agents of Pop: ‘Of What Is Past, Or Passing, Or To Come’”

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GAGA: A PORTRAIT

By Steve Giasson

Author Bio:

Steve Giasson is a multidisciplinary artist (conceptual poetry, video, performance, theater, photography, translation), who intends to transgress genres and undermine romantic notions of authenticity, authority and originality.  He has sixteen books to his credit and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Étude et pratique des arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

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