So Happy (I Could Like it Rough)

by Michael Flory Ogletree

Collage by Mark Schaer

—Cherry cherry boom boom

My religion like glitter mixed with rock and roll

My Christmas tree in your ashtray

My telephone is a monster

Our hair is perfect
We are the crowd

We live a cute life

I lose myself inside your mouth

Show me your teeth

With your half wired broken jaw
a hard pair we will be

your last fix and your last hit is delicious

this photo of us can't catch shit if it drops

I left it, I put it back

Don't think too much

just smoke my cigarette

Cadillacs and liquor bottles take me home

I can’t see my knees

I’ve never seen my knees

find your Jesus

like those girls in the movies

and we're in heaven,

let’s get lost in my bed

take a bite of me

like chewing on pearls

show me your fangs

in the silence of the night

I touch myself

I touch your best friend

We might’ve fucked not really sure,

Sometimes I felt so def in the jam
The Shadow is burnt,

cigarette stained lies get weak

my summer boyfriend’s not straight anymore

The world is gonna shut my playboy mouth

the world is gonna bend

Underneath my Christmas tree
300 mirrors are burning

the floor is shaking

Half psychotic,

Pornographic dance fight

I'm the twelve on your table
Put the breakdown first
you in my rear window

Your vertigo stick in her pocket

Put your hands on my waist,

she's got both hands,
Check this hand

bleed it from across the block

All your love is revenge

I’m a free bitch

there's nothing else I can say



Artist Statement: For this poem, I gave myself the task of using something from each song on the two albums as well as the Christmas single, maintaining at least a half-stichic integrity to the original. My interest in Gaga, apart from the killer hooks and beats, has to do with our overlapping fixation on the gruesome and how that is recast in terms of pleasure or delight, though still manifesting in an unsettledness if not outright uncomfortability in the reader/listener. It is within the tension of these forces that I find myself most intrigued.

Author Bio: Michael Flory Ogletree is an MFA candidate at the University of Oregon. His poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Court Green, DIAGRAM, H_NGM_N, New CollAge, Pebble Lake Review, and others. He is terrified of horses.

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The Femme Outré & Other Real Fakers: Going Gaga for Artifice and Femininity in the 21st Century

by Becca Klaver

Gaga, what can I say but that I recognized you the moment I saw you. You were a star, a sign of everything I knew about women and artifice, taken to the most illogical, asymmetrical extreme. Over and over they call your outfits outré, from the French to push beyond bounds, and everywhere you go you push beyond, casting mirror-ball light onto the limits we thought we were too post-post-post- to still believe in. You put the shock back in pop, and this has everything to do with gender.

I went to Catholic school, too – replete with uniforms and uniform worldviews. When I was in eighth grade, a runaway to public school, my new best friend took me on as a makeover project. Raiding her closet and thrift stores down by the university, we tried out Raver, Hippie, Glam, and Grunge. It was fun, but nothing stuck. What I really wanted from my newfound fashion freedom, it turned out, was to be able to mix and match all of these prepackaged looks, and to apply touches that belonged to none of them. I spent high school combining and recombining, indulging a thirst for texture, color, armor. At the end of senior year, the feathers, velour, faux fur, animal prints, long gloves, and rhinestones helped me secure “Most Original Style” alongside “Most Likely To Win on Jeopardy.” In college, I acquired a vocabulary for what I was doing – performing, and specifically performing the straight-girl-as-femme – through a gender studies minor, a particularly fantastic writing class called “Scandal, Femme Fatales, and the Information Age,” and my residence in Los Angeles, whose artifice I thought a very suspect thing.

So you see, I recognize you, Gaga. People like us – artists, poets, singers, dancers, fashionistas – need, or once needed, to perform, bedeck, exhibit our identities as others, little monsters, queers, aliens, artists. It happens in every town. And in every town, now, people know who you are. And so they know who we are: you made us all famous. Do all your fans say, I feel like I know her? Some celebrities cultivate an aura of remoteness. But in spite of your gleaming armature, in spite of your exacting poise while performing, you seem like one of us. Vulnerable in interviews, contradicting yourself from one to the next, staging your identity every day even as you struggle to articulate it. And you do try, seeming gosh darn earnest at every turn, patting your heart as your eyes fill up with tears, straining your brow, shyly avoiding eye contact, even slumping your shoulders, hands clasping instead of clawing, uninterested in posturing during conversation. I’m real, you want to say, not artificial, and then you move over to the stage and become unreal, or realer, or the thing called Gaga.

They all say you had to say goodbye to Stefani, or that you do daily. I’m not sure I believe it. Before I do, I would like to know what that moment looks like. Is it when you put on the first mask, or the last? The heels or the eyelashes? Is it the moment you start singing? Or does Stefani vanish from the second-story window at the sight of the first cameraman of the day, lunging from the shrubs? I don’t want anyone to separate who I am with my makeup on from who I am without it. I’m the same person.

You went so far down the gender spectrum, you circled back around on the other side. As Anne Sexton writes, A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind. A woman who is too much woman, too unsettlingly woman, must be something else – must be in drag or a freak but not just woman. When they asked Google if you were a hermaphrodite, when the kids playing foursquare whispered loudly that you had a penis and then squealed and shoved each other, that was a schoolyard way of saying that you had taken woman so far beyond bounds that they didn’t recognize it anymore. Besides, who would wear so many outlandish outfits unless she were hiding something? Isn’t hyperbolic style just a big cover-up? Well, yes: gender is often the very thing we hide or exaggerate when we hide or exaggerate ourselves. Your pixellated crotch on the “Telephone” video proves you’re in on the joke.

The guy from the New York Times asked, “How important is artifice to you?”, and you replied, “Artifice? As in artificial?” He clarified: “No, as in a construct, a stratagem.” Then you said, “I don’t know, that word implies artificial to me. I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically. I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.”

I’ll admit that I was surprised by – and amused by the irony of – the fact that you weren’t familiar with the word artifice, but the artist isn’t, and shouldn’t have to be, the critic. I do have a problem with all of these definitions, though, each of which define artifice as a negative concept. Artificial. A construct. A stratagem. Like the related word artful, which can mean crafty as well as skillful, artifice as a concept rides the line between trickery and creativity, between casting a spell and making a work of art. When the artwork is the body (“I am a walking piece of art”) – and not only the body, but its décor, and its gestures, and its mise-en-scène (that is, and the entire image-matrix in which a persona is bound up) – the audience becomes especially convinced that there is a difference between Artifice (Bad) and Art (Good).

I am not so convinced. When artifice is seen as the opposite of authenticity, naturalness, reality, and openness we forget (or maybe, never knew) the fact that artifice and femininity have had an uneasy relationship for most of modernity. Giggles, skirts . . . blanched deference, hesitation . . . the trappings of femininity have been “optional” in theory for a long time, but not until the late twentieth century in some privileged countries on this planet did girls and women start to have a real choice about how girly, womanly, or feminine they wanted to appear. Indeed, in some cultures in 2010, the costumes of femininity are enforced by armed guards. And beyond that, modern western culture has long policed the idea that it is “natural” for women to behave in modest, flirty, or coy ways – that it is “natural” for women to be artful – as in, conniving and strategic. What you do, Gaga, that is so magnificent, is to realign these costumes and mannerisms of femininity with artifice instead of naturalness, thereby calling into focus – and celebrating and redeeming – the unnaturalness of it all.

Cultural theorists have been saying for at least two decades that gender is a performance, but not until you, Gaga, did they have their glittering, sequined exemplar. And you underscore the fact that femininity is not “natural,” but not “artificial” in a bad way, either – on the contrary, femininity can be performed quite artfully. It may take a Haus of designers to create you, but you are nothing if not dazzlingly crafted. You can “be yourself” and “be authentic” especially if you are an artist of selfhood: the performance is transparent; more than that, the performance is all there is. The adolescent fear of being perceived as “fake” and the “deep self” of psychoanalysis are traded in for the sheen of surface.

Those who find you inscrutable probably haven’t been paying very close attention to what’s happened to femininity as it moved into the twenty-first century. They might not know what a big problem and question it is for The Thinking Girl Now. We apply eye shadow, or we don’t. We wear pants, or we don’t. (“No pants.”) We giggle ecstatically, or we don’t. We smile and nod while someone speaks to us, or we don’t. We call ourselves girls well into our 20s and 30s, or we don’t. There are so many ways to perform girl and/or woman now; granted, most of the performers don’t recognize their behaviors as performances. But for those of us who do, who must, we now have something – someone – to point to in order to explain what has happened: the change that’s come upon us all, the detachable femininity that we recognize because we enact it on a smaller, more private scale. It is easy to point to you, because you are everywhere. And whether a widespread comprehension of gender as a performance has seeped into popular consciousness or not, we know, through you, that gender performance has hit the mainstream (with all the complications of commodification that this implies).

You shout it out from every page and screen: Once feminine costumes and behaviors became regularly detached from women (in theory, through gender, queer, and feminist studies; in practice, through drag and burlesque, through the hallway and the sidewalk), femininity may have looked the same, but its function changed. The fact that biological women can perform femininity, and the audience can sense that this is a performance, is the fundamental difference. And perhaps this crucial change also provides an explanation for all of the “Lady Gaga hermaphrodite” online searches. It’s simply hard to believe that a “real woman” would find a need to perform femininity – so, instead of making the conceptual leap toward accepting detachable (unzippable, unbuttonable, unvelcroable) femininity, people question your gender instead. As Ella Bedard points out, “[Gaga] cites iconic, often gendered identities without indicating the existence of a ‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self that these performances can be said to mask.” So, people go looking for the empirical evidence of a “‘neutral’ or ‘normal’ self” – that is, for evidence of the young woman known as Stefani Germanotta – in the place they usually go for fact-checks, the Google search box.

When an artist like you comes along to declare, to the tune of incredibly catchy pop, that we’re all freaks, made of fake parts in authentic assemblages, the whole world sits up and listens. Or gets up and dances. And when a woman artist like you dresses every day like she’s on a runway or in a museum installation, “no pants” and all (or nothing), we are reminded not only of those cultural places in which femininity is on display, but of the basic fact that femininity, by virtue of being, historically, the gendered quality linked to display, is both an act and an art. Those of us who perform it consciously are real fakers. And we’ve got tickets to the ball.

* * * 

Author Bio:

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost, 2009). A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is also editing, with Arielle Greenberg, an anthology of poems for teenage girls. Becca holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a PhD student in English at Rutgers University. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY, and blogs at the pomo expo.

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I am a Beautiful Monster: Lady Gaga as Dadaist Barometer

by Steve Halle

The following is an un/creative essay by Steve Halle. The essay is a pastiche of the “Translatator’s Introduction” for I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, the collected writings of Francis Picabia translated by Marc Lowenthal. You can read Lowenthal’s introduction here. You can read Picabia’s poem Baccarat here. Halle’s basic approach is to trim Lowenthal’s introduction, and to “find and replace” Lady Gaga’s name for Francis Picabia’s, adding further details when necessary. Of this process, Halle explains, “After encountering this relatively recent collection of Picabia's work and noticing obvious similarities between how his art is portrayed in the ‘Translator's Introduction’ and my appraisal of Lady Gaga's career thus far, the choice to do a pastiche of the essay seemed like a perfect fit. I also thought it fitting to plagiarize Lowenthal's essay for an article about Lady Gaga's connections to Dada, as the form then would be part and parcel of the content. I appended false-but-appropriate names to many of the quotes Lowenthal uses in his essay, for an ironic-comic effect. The overall result is pleasing, if shocking, that the two artists should be so similar.”

Baccarat

I am a beautiful monster

who shares her secrets with the wind.

What I love most in others

is myself.

I am a beautiful monster;

I have the sin of virtue for support.

My pollen stains the roses

from New York to Paris.

I am a beautiful monster

whose face conceals her countenance.

My senses have only one thought:

a frame without a picture!

I am a beautiful monster

with a velodrome for a bed;

transparent cards

populate my dreams.

I am a beautiful monster

who sleeps with herself.

There are only seven in the world

and I want to be the biggest.

                                                                                    —Lady Gaga

The Gaga movement has been framed and assessed in numerous ways: as the groundwork of an abstract post-pop music and video poetics, a starting point for the interrogation of gender, a prelude to post-postmodernism, a reprisal of Dada, a celebration of anti-fashion, anti-ego, and performance theory embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 2010s, as well as—perhaps the most common summation—the movement that is laying the foundation for a total art of constant shock and spectacle mediated by the lack of boundary between public and private self. However one wishes to use Lady Gaga, though, her overriding significance to the twenty-first century, and its one attribute that continues to cast a formidable shadow, is the way Gaga managed to, however briefly, embody an attitude.

Gaga, as an attitude, is, in its simplest form, one of attack: on the government and military who instigated the senseless horror of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, on the capitalist excesses that turn flesh into product, on the division between art-as-performance and the performance of everyday life, and on the stultification imposed by a no-longer-relevant pop tradition. Gaga is ultimately a refusal, and becomes, as s/he evolves, one of the finest contemporary examples of nihilism. If this is something of a simplification of only the best-known of Gaga’s attributes, it nonetheless captures her most emblematic and memorable characteristics. What the unconscious was to Surrealism, refusal and appropriation are to Gaga; and that this nihilistic and opportunistic spirit is potent (and emulated) is in no small part due to the genius of Lady Gaga. A self-declared funny girl, liar, failure, alcoholic, drug-experimenter, and pickpocket (not to mention singer, songwriter, and fashionista), Lady Gaga is above all a most “beautiful monster,” who for a now significant period of time has been able to rightly claim the distinction of being the anti-artist par excellance.

There are a few of us who, every morning on awakening, wish we could consult Lady Gaga like a marvelous barometer on the atmospheric changes that took place overnight. —David Bowie

Were we to consult this “Gaga-barometer” today, we would find ourselves with data that indicates a prolonged and explosive storm of activity throughout the early twenty-first century. Gaga is in many ways a true reactionary. If her pop-politicism prevents her radical leanings from taking on the usual apathy of pop, her life and work are nonetheless fueled by reaction: to art, to current events, to friends and enemies, and even to herself—this self being arguably the most chaotic catalyst of them all. A self-proclaimed egoist and uncompromising artist, Gaga juggles the men and women in her life equally, invents fashion scandals as readily as she invents pop megahits, and is happy to dismantle traditional notions of pop stardom in the midst of the digital age. Assessments of her and her activities were understandably contradictory; Camille Paglia wrote “I never met Gaga; but every thought of her is like an experience of my own obsolescence.” Halberstam: “let no one object that Gaga has to die someday; it’s enough that at this moment the very idea strikes me as insane.” Elton John is a close friend; Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry have become readymade rivals. The fact is no one is indifferent to Gaga’s personality and eccentric persona, and the majority of the people with whom she crosses paths tend to vacillate between camps of total dismissal and total adoration. She has no contemporary as skilled at bringing about such extremes. Assessments of Lady Gaga’s work also remain conflicting, and although Gaga’s output is rapidly being admitted to the canon of pop spectacle, her pan- or bisexuality continues to simultaneously inspire or bemuse. Her lengthy outpouring of figurative and abstract kitsch made for a shift in output not dissimilar to the shifts in the careers of Andy Warhol or David Bowie. Fans and critics alike constantly attempt to predict her next move.

One mainstay supporting these sometimes violently conflicting vicissitudes in Lady Gaga’s work and attitudes is undoubtedly the specter of her relatively innocent middle-class Catholic upbringing as Stefani Joanna Angelina Germanotta. Gaga’s own exuberantly nihilistic conception of her upbringing and attempts to “fit in” have become the best-known triggers for her current mode of serious play in constructing her elaborate-but-eccentric persona that blurs the boundaries between the concepts of her private self and the self-as-perpetual artist. Any understanding of contemporary identity construction would be impossible without at least an effort to understand Gaga. And it does take effort: to discover her early years as a composer of piano ballads and art school attendee may baffle contemporary critics. Gaga says: “I look at those artists [Queen, David Bowie, Peggy Bundy, Donatella Versace] as icons in art. It’s not just about the music. It’s about the performance, the attitude, the look; it’s everything. And, that is where I live as an artist and that is what I want to accomplish.” Who would have imagined the scandal-mongering neo-Dadaist to have ever uttered such a pure statement? Who could have imagined that Gaga’s rearguard of art school training and writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls would evolve into such a hyperbolic and abstract persona, let alone the neo-Dada works and male heteronyms for which she is recently gaining notoriety?

Yet for all her chameleonic facets, Lady Gaga’s career can easily be broken down into three distinct periods, and easily be read along a Gaga axis: The Fame, The Fame Monster, and “Post-Monster.” The classifications are all the more convenient in that they also mark periods echoed by shifts in the eccentric performance of her gender and sexuality. The rumor that Lady Gaga is hermaphroditic played a preponderant role in her move toward fame during The Fame by blending curiosity about her gender with the lush lifestyle embodied by her performances and club friendly hits.

The Fame Monster, however, turns the rumor of Lady Gaga as intersexed back in on itself, examining the construction of the feminine as spectacle through her videos for “Bad Romance” and “Telephone,” songs like “Dance in the Dark” and “So Happy I Could Die” and performances like the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and 2010 Grammy Awards.

Finally, the Post-Monster phase continues to question the flesh, evinced by Lady Gaga wearing a dress made of meat, flesh to adorn flesh, at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. During this phase, Gaga has continued to not only push the boundaries with fashion but also with her own gender, appearing on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan as a male alter-ego, Jo Calderone.

Gaga has destroyed “beauty” and built her work with the leftovers. —Donatella Versace

It is her talent for destruction that makes Lady Gaga a true neo-Dadaist. But the destructive nature of Lady Gaga, despite being her best known feature, is only one of her facets. Her negligent and provocative attitude works all too well in New York, among what is essentially a community of upper-class bohemians rooted in nightclubs and discotheques, whose gravest threat was usually little more than a case of boredom. In Gaga’s case, the fruits of this boredom—the beginning of her Post-Moster phase and Monster Ball Tour, as well as her first public political efforts—were ultimately overwhelmed by her mental and physical exhaustion resulting from her relentless New York schedule, which caused her to miss a scheduled show on January 14, 2010 in West Lafayette, Indiana.

I am free in no state. —Lady Gaga

All things are nothing to me. — Lady Gaga

Gaga wants nothing, nothing, nothing. — Lady Gaga

Madonna’s music, videos, and fluid persona will be obvious throughout the songs and videos of Lady Gaga, because they function as readymades, especially in her work on The Fame Monster (such as in the “Alejandro” video, in which Gaga went so far as to make collages and recontextualizations of Madonna’s tune “La Isla Bonita,” the “Express Yourself” video, and her Blonde Ambition Tour (cone brassiere) persona, as well as the dance tracks “Fernando” by Abba and “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base). Lady Gaga only required the pedestal of fame in order to append her signature to Madonna’s personas and take control of them as her own. Madonna has been an influence on many of the current generation of pop stars, but Lady Gaga is the first to adopt and reassemble Madonna’s oeuvre as an unequivocally complex readymade ripe for bricolage. Even when not directly quoting or rewriting her, Lady Gaga never ceases to expound on the most typical Madonna-esque themes: sexuality, religion, morality, instinct, idealism, egoism—and, of course, gender construction (a complicated topic, to say the least, for both).

That Lady Gaga’s appropriation of Madonna is sometimes criticized as superficial and problematic is a critique levied against Gaga (and her collaborators) mainly by those who do not understand the fluidity the digital age affords the function of the pop artist. One revelation about Gaga’s inability to completely transcend that which she appropriates and reassembles is her genuine interest in her influences, the readymades that she repurposes. Larry King quips: “I discover an underlying respect and geniality (as opposed to ruthlessly appropriative and transgressiveness)are the dominant traits of her character; her egoism stems from this. She is not afraid of wounding people, but she is afraid of seeing blood flow…”

It is her dark spot, this geniality and respect mixed with an instinct to destroy, that manifests itself throughout Gaga’s life (and particularly throughout her most intensely creative periods), the neurasthenia, depression, substance abuse, and boredom that prevents her from becoming a Übermensch in regard to her life.

If Gaga could claim any such moniker, it would not be Übermensch, a super-everywoman, but something more like Max Stiner’s Unmensch—an embracement of an egoism so extreme that not only morals but even morality itself is discarded, along with all notions of taste, science, idealism, reality—even the very notion of mensch (a monster); in short, a rebellion against the notion of fixity for an idea, art object, or persona.

It is somewhere in a realm between freedom and ownness that Gaga’s art dwells. Lady Gaga’s freedom (and reputation) reside in the act of rejecting or reassembling: more than her early forays into the lifestyle of The Fame, more than her monstrous period of transparencies, abstraction, and pastiche, it is Gaga’s resistance to all trends, ideas, influences, and individuals, her fierce opposition to any spotlight not trained upon herself—her fashionism—that ensures her place in art history. It is a monstrousness worthy of inspiring an escape from cultural stultification.

From freedom to ownness, though, requires that one endure a difficult step, as Gaga knows too well: “Freedom teaches only: Get yourselves rid, relieve yourselves of everything burdensome; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Rid, rid! That is its battlecry, get rid even of yourselves, ‘deny yourselves.’ But ownness calls you back to yourselves, it says ‘come back to yourself!’” It is only after becoming free that the egoist exclaims: “we are in search of the enjoyment of life!” This is an enjoyment that goes a bit beyond Madonna’s glamorous voguing, though, and it is for this reason that some troubles arise for Gaga’s liberties.

Lady Gaga is more likely to throw monkey wrenches into pop culture through intertextuality than to Romantically search for an originary tongue or muse, and it is these wrenches that help link the facets of her multiform artist’s persona. Any discussion of appropriation naturally leads to the artificial sense of the word, but intertextuality expands in Gaga’s work: readymade house beats typically avoided by American pop for not being radio friendly; constant outfit switches, collaborations with fashion icons or alluding to her fashion influences, in videos and at award shows; a language of sunglasses and eyewear—hers is an intertextuality couched in irony and anti-aesthetics, and opposed to the typical pop aesthetic, a dialectic of homage and disposability. As Beth Goodney notes in her examination of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”video: “Giving in to the allure of the pointless has a point: it is excess, and excessive reactions, which hold the possibility for undermining, deforming, and transforming normative ways of being and relating.” Instead of pop, which is rooted in the “automatic realm” of canned emotions, schmaltz, and sentimentality, Gaga’s pop realm is rooted in the “arbitrary, superficial, and aesthetic,” in the sunblaze of Madonna-esque dyed blonde hair, in the sparks from a bra made of fire, in the tableau of a lover set ablaze.

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video shows her being ripped from innocence by other women to be auctioned before the male gaze to the highest bidder, resulting in a spectacle where the male gaze is literally and figuratively destroyed. Gaga and Steven Klein’s “Alejandro” video, on the other hand, does away with the innocence-to-experience trope of “Bad Romance” by mixing religious imagery with a celebration of gay courage in the face of oppression; she is the here and now, sexual, a rejection of the dark realm of sexual repression. The scandalous depictions portray Gaga as completely fluid, a name written in water: the pure portal to the automatic realm transformed into something of an artistic “money shot.”

In her adherence to the present, to instanter appropriations and perceptions, and the satisfaction of the ego, in her rejection of medium and muse, Gaga insistently places herself, for better and for worse, at the opposite pole of the pop project. Pop attempts to reject art’s mimetic possibility through prefabricated sentimentality. Gaga changes (or rejects, destroys) pop by transgressing it’s bubble-gummy borders with art, with Friedrich Schiller’s serious play in music and image.

Until more of Gaga’s secrets are unraveled, it is through the lens of intertextuality and semiotic abstractionism that Gaga’s art is best experienced. Gaga’s video abstraction operates on the levels of syntax and sense, but rarely on the level of the word and sound itself, and the few exceptions in her output were more for the sake of satire than experimentation. Verses and modifiers attach themselves impiously to others, referents are removed, and at times, nothing more seems to be said than the fact that something is being said; but never is something more trying to be said, something beyond what is said.

This is not experience “transformed” into art (as it is with most artistic endeavors), or even a language that is experienced (as was the case with some Dadaists), but rather, experience as simply experience—something that is private, serious, amusing, abstract, unpoetic, excessive—and essentially incommunicable: a spectacle of the talking cure that provides no cure. And it is this lack of concern with, even refusal of, communication, this dismissal of the audience’s expectations, that ultimately makes Gaga spectacles of abstractionism Dadaist. “It is the thesis that disappoints us,” muses Lady Gaga in one of her interviews, “not its expression.” A language, even one of spectacle, does not have to communicate to affect, to engage, to provoke. In her discussion of the appropriation of Duchamp’s readymades by Gaga, Molly Nesbit cites Gaga’s understanding of Duchamp’s indifference, his rejection of “beauty” and taste: “He was looking for another kind of relation to experience.” The further Gaga moves toward Dada, the more she creates through contingencies, the closer she approaches Duchamp’s goal: a rejection of communication for another kind of relation to the language of spectacle.

If the work of another translates my dream, her work is mine. —Lady Gaga

However great the greed of my desire for knowledge may be, I still cannot take anything out of things that did not belong to me before; what belongs to others remains behind. How is it possible for a human being to be a thief or robber? —Madonna

Perhaps the most ticklish aspect of Gaga’s art is her often blatant, and much discussed, plagiarism and appropriation of Madonna. One will find that Gaga sometimes inverts tropes from Madonna, sometimes alters them, but most often, simply copies them. It is thus somewhat befuddling to read some of her typically egoistic and declamatory statements: “Music is a very beautiful thing, if only songwriters would write songs instead of depicting the songs of others.” Many blogs and reviews deride Gaga for being derivative: “Gaga, then, has invented nothing: she copies!” Gaga counters: “Copying apples, anyone can understand that’s stupid; copying society and pop’s machinery: that’s spectacle…The artist makes a choice, then imitates her choice, whose deformation constitutes Art; why not simply sign this choice instead of monkeying about in front of it?” As far as her music and videos go, the usage of readymade imagery leads to Gaga’s status as a pastiche or bricolage artist, which runs through all the stages of her career thus far.

Gaga’s egoism and confidence are ultimately a mask for her great precariousness, a dialectic running through all the divagations and contradictions of her work. Providing documentation for some of Gaga’s contingencies, especially those taken directly from Madonna, provokes two things: a need to take into account the increasingly primary element of appropriation that is a hallmark of art in the digital age and a reassessment of Gaga’s legacy as a Dadaist using these methods in several, often compartmentalized, fields to make a total art, including the performance spectacle of her private and public life, if even a distinction between them can be made any longer. Because almost all of Gaga’s art is created as a reaction—to events, to her contemporaries, to herself—these works need a fuller context. If Gaga is, in the end, a true barometer of the early twenty-first century’s spectaculo-plastic pop avant-garde, then one needs to know where the barometer is situated if one wishes to read it.

Anybody called Gaga is elegant, unbalanced and intelligent and certain to be right not about everything but about themselves. —Elton John

When I imagine a perfect artist, she always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity… —Jack Halberstam

Author Bio: Steve Halle is author of the collection of poems Map of the Hydrogen World (Cracked Slab Books, 2008) and the chapbook cessation covers (Funtime Press, 2007). His creative and critical writing has been published internationally in Jacket, Cordite Poetry Review, OCHO, Milk Magazine, Moria, Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), PFS Post, and Poets & Artists (O&S), among others. He edits the online poetry journal Seven Corners. He holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and is pursuing a PhD in English Studies at Illinois State University.

Reprinted material courtesy Marc Lowenthal, from I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocatio  by Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal, published by The MIT Press, ©MIT 2007.  

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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.

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Gaga Stigmata Updates

Gaga Stigmata was recently featured in an article by Victor P. Corona on Pop Matters. The piece, entitled "Gaga Studies," examines the ever-growing phenomenon of Lady Gaga as an academic subject. Corona also offers a defense against some of the most common criticisms of Gaga and her project. We wish to thank Davide Panagia for letting us know about this piece, and Victor P. Corona for crediting Gaga Stigmata. You can check out the article here.

Also, you can now officially "like" Gaga Stigmata on Facebook. We'll be using our Facebook page to keep our readers updated, and also to garner your opinions regarding various projects we're undertaking. There is also a discussion board available there for our readers to engage with one another, and ask the editors of Gaga Stigmata questions. Click here to "like" us on Facebook.

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