The Edge: Finding Glory in the Transience of Creativity

By Chris Hershey-Van Horn

This is the third piece in our series on the video for “The Edge of Glory.” Click here for the first piece, and here for the second.

“… art gives birth to new art. There is no chicken or egg. It’s molecular. Cells give birth to cells…The past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.” –Lady Gaga, V Magazine

The year is 1992. The setting: a Renaissance-style piazza in the Seventh Regiment Armory at East 67th Street and Park Avenue, New York. Inside are three stages, each featuring male and female supermodels dressed in gold-studded black leather, bell-bottoms, and neo-classical prints (NY Times).

People Magazine

The halls are filled with three hundred dinner guests, including the likes of Calvin Klein, Anna Wintour, Ken Natori, Liza Minnelli, and Spike Lee. In only a few hours, the stages will feature a very different kind of entertainment: Puff Johnson, Trilogy, Soul System, and Lenny Kravitz. After diner, an additional four hundred people arrive to watch the show, dance, and eat pasta at midnight. Their host? None other than Gianni Versace.

Gianni Versace. Photo by Irving Penn for Vogue, September 1990.

It was the first time a rock n’ roll concert and a fashion show had ever appeared together in the same venue (Interview). The event was called Rock ‘n Rule, and was planned as a benefit to raise money for AIDS research. That same year, Gianni designed Elton John’s album art as well as the costumes for his tour world tour, the “Versace Signatures” exhibit was featured at the Fashion Institute of New York, and Gianni released his final collection (Versace.com).

The year is 2011. Lady Gaga styles black and blonde hair, gold-studded black leather and heels as she dances feverishly along the fire-escape and sidewalk of a New York City apartment in her “Edge of Glory” video. It is almost a decade since the sounds of Gianni’s visionary extravaganza blazed through the walls of a gigantic fox-Renaissance piazza of that iconic city. But his work and his legacy, as well as the legacy of other influencing factors in Gaga’s life, are re-imagined and reborn through “The Edge of Glory.” This essay seeks to explore the circularity of creativity, its particular transience, and how this affects our understanding of and what it means to be “on the edge.”

Any Little Monster will tell you that Gaga wrote this song as homage to her grandfather after he passed. As she told Ryan Seacrest on Kiis FM, “My grandma said Joey [her grandpa] just go. And we left the room and he died. And I remember he just gave this look to her that said ‘I won.’ Like I’m a champion. So the ‘Edge of Glory’ is not just about falling in love or about dying, but it’s about being on the glorious edge of that glorious championship of your life.” By featuring such icons as Gianni Versace, Clarence Clemons, and New York City, Gaga champions the “glory” of these icons of creativity, showcasing their work, the inspiration she draws from them, and proving one maintains creative or influential immortality even after death.

In Lady Gaga’s first column in V Magazine’s special Asian Issue, Gaga writes, “Glam culture is ultimately rooted in obsession, and those of us who are devoted and loyal to the lifestyle of glamour are masters of its history. Or, to put it more elegantly, we are librarians.” This act of vestimentary devotion is one grounded in a kind of drudging of history, in a constant pulling-up of the old, like a librarian pores over old books. In this way, the glam identity, according to Gaga, is rooted in a supreme awareness and constant calling forth of the historic register. It is interesting to point out that Gaga’s idea of a revolutionary glam identity that deliberately regresses fashion’s timeline seemingly stands in sharp contrast to Donatella Versace’s notions of the same topic. In an interview between Donatella Versace and Lenny Kravitz, Donatella says:

I have so many pieces in the archives that I could put right out on the runway and they’d be perfect…But for me, it doesn’t make sense today. You can play with it for one season, but it’s not going to be revolutionary. I think we should move forward, not back. To define the era we live in is very difficult. How do we define it? We define it by music.

Donatella’s quote betrays an interesting contradiction: archival pieces can function both “perfectly,” while still inappropriate in the context of today’s world; as “we should move forward” in design, we relinquish the pieces of old, even as, perhaps many years later, those pieces begin to function easily amongst styles of today.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that the music of “The Edge of Glory” becomes that very mechanism that bridges time – that facilitates the inclusion of such old fashion in a new context and allows us to “move forward.” By deliberately merging fashion and music not only in “The Edge of Glory” video, but also in all of her performances, Lady Gaga is able to avoid the problem that Donatella poses, and create a cohesive creative space for her glamour. Lady Gaga’s work, then, functions much in the same way as Gianni Versace’s Rock ‘n Rule: defining fashion through music.

Let’s consider Gianni Versace’s role in the video. All of the clothing Gaga wears in “Edge of Glory” originates from Versace’s final line (Gaga Fashionland, Formichetti). It is no coincidence that the collection Gaga chose to wear was Gianni’s last; in a way, this collection marked the final expression of Gianni’s creative livelihood. If we consider the song’s thematic “edge” as the last moment of life before death, and the fact that the song is featured last on the album, it seems that “The Edge of Glory” is distinctly concerned with the final display of one’s creativity. By re-contextualizing Gianni’s work through the video, Lady Gaga/Lady Librarian dusts an old book off its shelf and proudly reads from it. Thus, the life of Fashion, of “Glam,” as Gaga calls it, is circular. Fashion is ever-evolving. A line is replaced by another, season replaces season; the fleeting nature of fashion embodies the transient nature of existence. But the “edge” of Gianni’s creative genius becomes simply the “edge” from which it will transform into another iteration of creativity. The “Edge of Glory” is not a death at all, but a rebirth.

I’m on the edge of something final we call life…

But the birth was not finite, it was in-finite…

Clarence Clemons’ role in the video is similar to that of Gianni’s. With regards to Clemons’ saxophone-playing in the album, Gaga says, “I didn’t just use the saxophone in [the album] and ‘The Edge of Glory’ for the sake of using the saxophone – it’s an instrument that means something to me and my childhood” (8, Popjustice). In a similar vein, when explaining the Born This Way album to Stephen Fry, Lady Gaga says, “I wanted it to be…like how I experienced music when I was young.” Clarence Clemons functions both as a symbol and as a real figure from Gaga’s personal history, her childhood, as well as an icon situated in the fabric of music history. Like the archival Versace clothing in the video, Gaga reintroduces Clemons into the fray of the current, presenting his identity in a way that pays homage to his and music’s past, and simultaneously re-imagining him for today. Gaga tells Popjustice, “You will be saying, ‘I love the saxophone, the saxophone in ‘The Edge of Glory’ is so genius.’ You will compare every saxophone you ever hear to the one you hear in ‘The Edge of Glory’” (14, Popjustice).

I’m gonna run right to the edge with you…

When I first heard the saxophone in “The Edge of Glory,” I must admit I compared it to every sax-solo I had heard previously. It was a regressive experience. Here, Gaga implies that the sax-solo in her song has a distinctly progressive quality, such that every sax-solo we hear after “TEOG” will be compared to the one in her song. Gaga explicitly states, the song “redefines the saxophone in modern, digital-era Top 40 music” (14, Popjustice). Thus the circle completes itself: one that is as simultaneously self-referentially reductive as it is progressive, as Gaga seeks to inculcate this old-as-new quality of pop in the realm of music at large.

Finally, let’s consider Gaga’s love affair with New York City. The video’s setting is a New York City apartment, not unlike the one in which she lived when she was still a struggling artist on the Lower East Side. Gaga dances about its fire-escape, sweeps her hands across its brick, lays against it, humps its railing, and even kisses the ground beneath it in the climax of the bridge of the song.

Gaga presents her symbolic “love-affair” with the city literally, personifying New York City by outrageously and deliberately making-love to it. As the city of her birth, literally and creatively, it rightfully serves as the way-point of her evolution.

Anderson Cooper interviewing Lady Gaga on the steps of her apartment.

At the beginning of the video she exits her apartment window, returning to it in the final shot. As Gaga has said in many ways before, she tells Fry, “I…see myself as in an endless transformative state.” The frames are nearly identical, except that by the end of the video, Gaga has removed her sunglasses and her shirt, symbolizing her creative transformation. She exits the world as a new iteration of herself, completing another cycle of creative evolution.

Lady Gaga has crafted “The Edge of Glory” to serve as a sonic prolepsis, heralding the ongoing and future evolution of not only her own image and creative identity, but also that of the creative industries of music and fashion at large. The video rejoices in the transience of these creative mediums, while acknowledging that they never truly die, arriving in a variety of contexts repurposed and redefined. Gaga sings, “I’m on the edge of something final we call ‘life’ tonight. / Alright! Alright!” She celebrates the finality of it because it is the death of one form of life, and the death of one form marks the advent of another. Such is the nature of rebirth, creative or otherwise: we’re on the edge of a threshold, not a sheer drop.

Author Bio:

Chris Hershey-Van Horn (@RCHVH) is a senior English and American Literature Major at Middlebury College. This is his second article for Gaga Stigmata. Comments of his are also featured in “Critical Discourse & Facebook: Analyzing Lady Gaga on Germany's Next Top Model.” He is one of the co-founders of the literary journal of video game aesthetics and narrative, The Journal of Interactive Narratives (@InteractiveNarr) and currently works as a PR intern at Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. The little free time that isn’t spent writing about Gaga is spent writing his memoir.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Read More

Apotheoses of the Queen Mother: The Virginal Monster

By Chris Hershey-Van Horn

The following piece is the tenth in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way” presents a wealth of meaning-laden imagery, the majority of which arguably resides within a symbology fundamentally correlated with the iconography of Queen Elizabeth I – the so-called “cult of Elizabeth.” Yet, I would argue that Gaga turns the apparatus of Elizabethan iconography on its head: she functions as a “nega” or “anti” Queen Elizabeth, insofar as Gaga’s mechanism of gendered expression inversely parallels that of the Queen’s. She does so on multiple symbolic fronts. In this piece, I first examine how Gaga initially establishes herself referentially (if not reverentially) to the Queen in the opening seconds of the video. I then explore the concept of the “grotesque” female in sixteenth century England, the many ways in which the Queen sought to actively distance herself from such negatively-gendered associations, and how Gaga conversely embraces and refigures the concept of the “grotesque” female for the twenty-first century.

The opening images of Lady Gaga in the video for “Born This Way” contextualize her within the distinct aesthetic of Queen Elizabeth I. Following the brief frame of the silhouetted unicorn, the camera pans downward and zooms in on the celestial embodiment of Gaga. She sits poised atop a crystalline throne, her upper body draped in a seemingly endless display of opulent jewelry, cuffing her neck in a tall collar of diamonds. Our gaze is drawn immediately toward the top-middle of the frame, where a large black cross – its horizontal axis encrusted in diamonds – perfectly intersects her large, beehive hair, and joins with a diamond tiara about her bangs. Behind her, an exaggerated, butterfly-shaped headdress merges with the ray-like spokes of blue and purple crystal prisms. The headdress, the tiara, the hair, and, of course, the throne, evoke a regal aesthetic, which, although futuristic, distinctly draws upon the imagery of Elizabeth I.

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Elizabeth I (the “Ditchley” portrait), (ca. 1592)

Artist Unknown, Elizabeth I (the “Rainbow” portrait), (ca. 1600-1603)

The butterfly-shaped crystalline headdress evokes the Queen’s iconic elaborate headdress as seen in the “Ditchley” portrait and, most famously, the “Rainbow” portrait. The cross on Gaga’s hair links her well-known employment of religious symbols with the underlying religious symbology of the Queen as “the Virgin Queen,” and emphasizes the Christian references in the song’s lyrics (“captial H-i-m…God makes no mistakes,” and the quietly spoken “church” that can be heard in the background). Furthermore, Gaga, or rather, “Mother Monster” as she refers to herself in the opening line of the video, connects herself linguistically to the Queen “Mother,” and again, the Marian “Virgin Queen.” Yet, as we will see, this connection is fundamentally paradoxical.

Before we can delve into comparative analysis, I must concede a point. It would be a fallacy to posit an overall view on the cult of Elizabeth and her varied and extensive iconography. As the ever-expanding mass of scholarly work attests, it is no simple task to do discursive justice to the religious and (to use Susan Frye’s term) “engendered” imagistic framework with which the Queen presented herself over her prolonged rule. As Louis Montrose argues in The Subject of Elizabeth (2006), “the iconography of the Elizabeth cult was not a unified and coherent system but rather was hybrid and improvisatory – therefore unstable and potentially contradictory,” as it “drew upon various sources in varying combinations at different moments in the reign, to suit the tactical circumstances of particular occasions” (104). The task of unpacking Elizabeth’s iconography and the extensive symbology associated with “the Virgin Queen” teems with a sheer enormity of accounts and artifacts, of contradictory and even unsubstantiated material. In short, her image cannot be wholly or manifestly delineated; it is amorphous insofar as it exists and existed during her reign as ever-changing in her eyes, as well as in the eyes of her countrymen. Arguably, the examination of Lady Gaga’s extensive iconography presents an equal challenge for similar reasons. Heeding all of this, I believe it is still intellectually advantageous to consider at least a smattering of images within the context of the pervasive sixteenth-century concept of the “grotesque” female, as it pertains to the Queen and Lady Gaga’s music video.

In Peter Stallybrass’s article “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed” (1986), he explains the concept of the “grotesque” female, and how this notion influenced ideas and ideals of gender in Renaissance England. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body, Stallybrass explains, “the grotesque body is ‘unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits…[and] emphasizes those parts of the body ‘that are open to the outside world,’ ‘the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose’” (124). He goes on to argue that it was a commonly held societal belief, as purported by several Renaissance writers of the time (such as William Whately and Norbert Elias), “that the woman’s body…is naturally ‘grotesque’” (126). Unlike men, women, by physiological default, were cursed with a kind of reprehensible permeability, a leakiness of the body, if you will. The only solution to this “natural” problem was containment, to make the woman into an “enclosed body, [a] closed mouth, [a] locked house” (127).

Not surprisingly, virginity was inextricably linked with the concept of the “grotesque” – as a way of alleviating the grotesque, of containing this “reprehensive permeability.” This is why, at least on one level, Queen Elizabeth I strove to carefully craft and painstakingly maintain her image as the “Virgin Queen.” As a woman of great power and publicity, there was simply too much at stake; in the eyes of the public at large, the Queen would debase herself and be unfit to rule were she to be perceived as a “leaky vessel.” Susan Frye, in her book, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (1996), puts it eloquently.

Elizabeth could never rely on others to provide her with an iconography that would be palatable, much less powerful…She also needed a category that would be familiar to her society but that would place her beyond the restrictions usually imposed on women…she needed a category of virtue that she herself would define, that would assign God, rather than her subjects, to be her judge and thus assert her legitimacy. (15)

Elizabeth found this “legitimacy” in “the long tradition of anomalous female figures, including Diana, Astraea, the vestal virgins, and the Virgin Mary” (15). Since virginity – especially one symbolically tied to divine or mythologized female figures – was considered a “hortus conclusus” that could negate feminine permeability, it could also repudiate subsequent ridicule that the Queen would face as a part of her “naturally grotesque” gender. Her famous statement, made a mere month after her coronation, that by the end of her reign she will have “lyved and dyed a virgin,” is testament to her personal agency, and to the importance with which she regarded the establishment of her ideal virginal image. Stallybrass explains that as a female, “she could be the idealized beloved, to whom was ascribed the devotion of amatory discourse. But, on the other hand, she belonged to an anomalous category, being both mother of her people and virgin” (133). The Queen was playing something of an elaborate balancing act of engendered signification to appease her people and assert her legitimacy, despite and paradoxically in conjunction with her womanhood.

Examples of her idealized image can be seen in much of her portraiture. The Siena, or “sieve” portrait (ca. 1580-83), makes use of a literal sieve held in the Queen’s left hand. It evokes her “grotesque” permeability, as fundamental to her womanhood, while putting it in direct contrast with her conservative attire. In this way, according to Montrose, the sieve, a “contradictory icon, one that must represent the properties of impermeability and (selective) permeability simultaneously” serves to potentially “[displace]…the Queen’s sexuality” insofar as it highlights the Queen’s conservative and constrictive manner of dress (124-5).

Artist Unknown, the Siena “sieve” portrait, (ca. 1580-83)

In her “Born This Way” video, Lady Gaga also asserts her legitimacy as the symbolic progenitor – the divine mother and overseer of her people, who constitute a “new race within the race of humanity” through the fundamentality of her womanhood. Yet, to the extent that Queen Elizabeth I symbolically “contains” her “grotesque” body, Lady Gaga embraces it, makes it profoundly blatant, even exaggerates her “grotesque-ness” in a vivid display of orifices, bodily fluids, and excessive vaginal drippings. Gaga is relentless in her show of leaky bodily goop – the essence of herself, her vagina, her womanhood.

Gaga’s nude zippered bodysuit furthers the iconographic model of the cult of Elizabeth. Much like the aforementioned Siena portrait pictured above, Gaga’s tightly-zippered body conflates restriction with access. As the camera slowly pans up and down her body, it quickly jumps between short frames of Gaga slowly and mechanically moving as she gyrates her hips, robotically raising her arms up and down, and groping herself. Notice how she is by-and-large rendered immobile, unable to move from her position by the stock-like contraption bracing her neck. The contraption horizontally spans the entire width of the frame. Furthermore, the zippers on her body literally underline her breasts and vagina, emphasizing her womanhood and sexuality. However, the fact that these zippers are closed reinforces the containment of the body, specifically her biologically-stereotypical “female” components. Similarly, the last frames of zippered-Gaga involve an elaborate effect in which the camera rapidly pans from a centrifugal and repetitious frame of her face to a similar frame centering on the vaginal crotch zipper. All of this – the methodical and constrained choreography, the constrictive suit, the camerawork – can be viewed as a caricatured Elizabethan-cult model of virginal and womanly paradox, which mocks the “solution” to the “grotesque” woman. Gaga reiterates her sexual purity through her closed-up-ness, while artfully calling attention to her body as a stark canvas lined with, and perhaps, defined by, its sexuality.

Yet, her status as a deity does not diminish. Perhaps it is because of the elaborateness and the sheer extent of her “grotesqueness” that fix her in a godly realm beyond. Indeed, her psychedelic vagina resembles more of a colorful venus flytrap than anything even remotely human. It is comic and alien, an orifice seemingly unique to the divine Mother Monster. It is also miraculous, functioning as a kind of infinitely-birthing tract. In fact, Gaga forgoes the traditional notion of conception, as there is no evidence of any inseminating force. She is not the Virgin Mother, but Mother Monster. Certainly, associations with the Virgin Mary still underlie the image of celestial Gaga in this video. The abundance of religious references in the song and video suggest that Gaga’s progeny are not the result of Gaga alone. Like the Queen, she is not God, but rather godly, positioning herself over her people through divine and bodily legitimacy.

Therefore, “Born This Way” serves as a celebration of the “grotesque” through apotheosis. No longer is the body a point of shame; rather, it is a unique, divinely powerful, and humorous creative force. Lady Gaga’s display of exaggeratedly messy biological processes renders her divine; her abject serves as one of the defining characteristics of her transcendent power. In these ways, Gaga’s musical manifesto defines her own conception of motherhood and self-identity within a visual matrix of symbolic paradoxes in the vein of the Queen’s iconography. As the cult of Elizabeth blends together sexuality, gender, and physiology with the purity of the regal and ethereal, so Mother Monster is both the ultimate virgin and the ultimate mother. She is a symbolically defined “Queen Mother” figure who asserts power and influence through the infinite celebration, the infinite birth, and the infinite display of the body, and whose offspring subsequently assert their own legitimacy and power through the rejoicing of their own acceptance and self-identity. Unlike the Queen who withholds her identity within her iconography, Mother Monster’s “grotesque” identity is embraced as a means of empowerment.

Writer Bio:

Chris Hershey-Van Horn is Senior English and American Literature major at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. He is currently in the midst of writing his thesis, which, ironically or not, is a memoir. He is also an intern at Les Figues Press in his hometown, Los Angeles, and plans to move there after graduation.

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

Read More