Puke On Gaga – Honoring Vomit

By Rachel Clark

In this short film, used both as an opening to the second act of the Monster Ball tour and previously exhibited within the SHOWstudio exhibition “Inside/Out,” Gaga is first seen elegantly dressed in a Marko Mitanovski gown. Standing atop a small marble podium in a plain studio setting, her all white costume and stony expression are reminiscent of the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome. The sharp constructs of Gaga’s dress, whilst shifting gracefully in the breeze of a wind machine, reflect the textual carving of fabric in Renaissance masterpieces such as Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” In an unflinching, powerful stance, Gaga embodies these two celebrated canons as a perfectly constructed object, stationed in homage to fine art and high fashion for the twenty-first century.

Yet, within seconds, the image is disrupted. We hear Gaga scream “Make it Stop!” on the overlaying soundtrack as her legs are reversed, thereby challenging the previous illusion of the ideal, and forcing its reassessment in the wake of this now divided human body. She is at once a beautiful object and a physically fractured human subject as the statement “I’m A Free Bitch” begins to permeate the disco beat soundtrack. These two declarations provide a subtle commentary to the visual discord. “Make It Stop!” is screamed like a battle cry, functioning as a catalyst for the corruption of the harmonious opening scene. The classical quest for visual perfection is abandoned in favor of the twisted image Gaga becomes. In this disruption, Gaga is freed from art’s confining rules regarding the beautiful and logical, and becomes capable of embodying the monstrous and fantastic in its place.

The title “Puke On Gaga” is taken from the film’s following segment, wherein the New York performance artist Millie Brown is seen straddling a now seated Gaga, vomiting a stream of sparkling, luminous paint upon her. Significantly, Brown is dressed in all black, wearing an outfit that fans of Gaga will associate with her pre-Gaga Stefani Germanotta Band stage attire. Gaga has also previously referenced Stefani Germanotta in the video for “Telephone,” where she cast her younger sister as her younger self.  The effect in this case is that we bear witness to Stefani Germanotta vomiting on Lady Gaga.

Some have suggested that the vomit should be interpreted as an act of disgust, an expression of a repressed disappointment felt by Germanotta that her past identity had to be erased in order to achieve worldwide success as Lady Gaga. It could be that this is an act of rebellion against the superficiality of the Lady Gaga construction, but then, how does this sit with Gaga’s frequent refusal to separate these two personas? As she herself often attests, Stefani Germanotta was always Lady Gaga: “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.”

Modern artists have frequently explored their relationship to their own bodily fluids. Marcel Duchamp upturned his urinal, Piero Manzoni canned his “Artist’s Shit,” and today, Millie Brown performs by vomiting rainbows of colored milk onto blank canvases in order to “use [her] body to create art in a way that challenges people’s perception of beauty.

In a literal act of artistic regurgitation, Brown/Germanotta turns her insides out, and splatters the superficially ideal image of Gaga with the glittering colors of her interior self. There is no medium of creation other than the physical body in this moment. Against the traditions of formal art training and beauty, which the unwavering Gaga-as-sculpture represents, there are no words, no consumable images, only a visceral demonstration of the potential of turning what is inside us into an artistic act.

In Gagavision 43, Gaga states, “the creative process is fifteen minutes of vomiting … it all happens in fifteen minutes this giant regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings, then I spend days, months, years fine tuning. But the idea is you have to honor your vomit, you have to honor those fifteen minutes.” What does it mean to honor one’s vomit? Why does Gaga feel affinity with what would be an abject act? The answer, I believe, lies in the physicality of the act itself. Our bodily expulsions are the most primal of life experience, and we are often powerless to control them. When our bodies reject these fluids, they are forced outside ourselves as we are forced outside of ourselves when we observe them. As Julia Kristeva has argued, they are made by and of us, yet they embody an entire otherness in their gross exterior existence. To observe the abject is to briefly rupture consciousness, as the many paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity come to dwell upon a terrible truth of physical existence. To honor one’s vomit is to honor the power of this realization: that we can never escape bodies, that before culture we are animals, and that understanding is not akin to reality. This sensation, a compelling leap into deep thinking and primal repression, has been described by Giles Deleuze as a “discordant accord,” and its potential to create a collision of the senses can be understood as central to the world’s most affective works of art. Via a stream of shimmering blue Gaga invites us to find this artistic potential inside of ourselves, and regurgitate our own thoughts and feelings without shame or regret.

As we hear Gaga scream “Make It Stop” once again, the film cuts to a close up of Gaga eating a raw bovine heart. The story goes that Nick Knight challenged her to do this as means of externalizing the traumatic fears she faced concerning her father’s heart surgery. The effect is a conceptual reversal of the previous image of externalized artistic creativity, as we watch Gaga devour the symbolically laden internal organ.

One must not only produce to create art, but also consume: such is the cyclical nature of creativity. In her first V Magazine column, Gaga asserts the necessity of consumption to inspiration: she considers the act of re-appropriation as both transformative and radical. In Gaga’s interpretation, the creation of art is marked with violence and suffering, as illustrated in the grotesque images of self-induced vomiting and eating raw flesh. As tears of blood are seen to run down her cheeks as she bites, her voice is heard listing the names of tragic beauty queens in what is both a tribute to the damages of fame and a testament to its immortality.

The final scene shows Gaga in the studio being decorated, powdered, gagged, and bound by Matty Dada (the creative director of Haus of Gaga at the time of filming). Gaga retains her silent, objective composure, becoming the passive puppet of fame that the world’s superstars are commonly imagined to be whilst her image is physically developed by a rough-handed assistant. Her alteration by the hands of Dada becomes gradually more aggressive, the connotations of bondage increasing as Gaga is bandaged, blind-folded, braced, and strapped to pieces of wood that imitate the hoisting of a figure onto an easel, or even crucifix. Again a theme of immortality emerges, and the famous vessel becomes an icon of worship. Gaga has adopted religious iconography across her oeuvre, and here, once again, we find fame fashioned as a new religion and Gaga suffering for the love of her fans.

This construction via an act of extreme styling represents the modern-day public persona. Manipulated to the point of abstraction, Gaga objectifies herself as a celebrity, whilst casting a shade of violence over the ritual of getting done one’s “hair and make-up.” Beauty and pain go hand-in-hand for women the world over, but Gaga pushes the boundaries of these expectations, forever forcing confrontation with unspoken truths through her elaborate performances of celebrity such as this.

In all, the film’s sequence works to remind us of what we often forget – that our sense of reality is a fragile construction. She challenges first the classical notion of beauty, severing it with a simple twist of her legs, before “honoring her vomit” across the ideal object and staining it with her creative juices. In the final scene, we see the literal process of beauty being constructed, but it is rendered exploitative and disabling. This seemingly innate sense of what makes another person attractive is one of the many false truths our lives are constructed upon, and Gaga pushes us to examine what thought really is. By tapping into the Deleuzian “discordant accord,” she liberates her Little Monsters by making these strict social expectations ridiculous, and by offering art as a means of salvation. The real art here is not the beautiful mannequin the viewer is first introduced to, or her final subtly Christ-like transformation, but the artistic regurgitation upon them. By honoring our vomit, we confront our subjective existence within the raw meat of our bodies and recognize that it is only through imagination and creative expression that we can be free.

Author Bio:

Rachel Clark is a 22-year-old Cultural Studies postgraduate student, BA Hons in Art History and Museum Studies, with a keen interest in contemporary art, memory studies, and postmodern theory. She is currently based in Leeds in the North of England. As an avid fan of techno and electro, Gaga isn’t her usual cup of tea, but she was ‘enlightened’ by her dear Mum, who took her to see the Monster Ball live – She’s been a little monster and proud ever since!

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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.

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I Wanna Take A Ride On Your Disco Egg! - "Born This Way" Preliminary Thoughts & Discussion

By Roland Betancourt, Eddie McCaffray, and Meghan Vicks

Meghan Vicks: Let’s begin with our thoughts about the song “Born This Way.” How does the song’s form work with, or against, the song’s message? In what ways does the song follow in the tradition of “celebrate yourself” anthems past, and in what ways does it break from that tradition? How does the song compare to Lady Gaga’s music from The Fame and The Fame Monster, and what does it indicate about the direction of Gaga’s project? I’m sure we’ll come up with more points and questions to analyze regarding the song, but for now let’s start here.

Eddie McCaffray: What I noticed immediately about the song were the lyrics - they make a point of saying exactly what it is people are accepting about themselves and others. There’s a long tradition of anthemic love-yourself songs that, for better or for worse, don’t make any explicit reference to anything of which someone might be intolerant. That’s fine, but for me it comes off as an attempt to cash in on all the good press and good vibes of such a song without risking the alienation of any potential part of a fan base. But this song isn’t like that - it makes references to God’s acceptance, to a “different lover,” and turns the LGBT(A) roll-call into a real litany. In a similar manner, when Gaga says “black, white, or beige” she’s departing from the cliche (which is to sing something like “black, white, or blue”) and taking the issue of race seriously. There’s room for joy and power and celebration, but there isn’t room for levity. It’s stunning that she could fit “. . . gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered . . .” into an up-tempo club-banger, and it’s wonderful that she wrote a song about tolerance that intolerant people can’t sing.

Besides that, I think the pretty-simple nature of the song sort of goes along with the simplicity of the message. It has a pounding beat and some very fun synth stylings flowered around it, but musically as well as lyrically the song is about just one thing. I also like the implications of “there ain’t no other way”; there’s a somewhat-understated note of militancy in the song. The song isn’t afraid of making very clear just what it expects people to accept, and it isn’t afraid of saying that intolerance is not an option.

And, finally, the intro seems like she is extending a hand to the religious community. “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-i-m,” as some have suggested, is a nod to Christians. The song isn’t about attacking anything besides intolerance, and if your religion can pass that very basic litmus test, then this is an anthem for you to celebrate your identity with as well - there are people out there who have their sights set on organized religion, people who aren’t treating it fairly just like some members of some organized religions aren’t treating others fairly. That’s not ok with this song either.

Meghan Vicks: Immediately upon the song’s release, Twitter exploded with people drawing comparisons between Madonna’s “Express Yourself”/“Vogue” and “Born This Way,” and many criticized Gaga for copying Madonna. While I don’t think that the song is an exact copy or blend of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” I do think that Gaga is purposely taking cues from Madonna (as she is always taking cues from those that came before her), and placing vocal and lyrical nods to her throughout “Born This Way.” That Gaga adopts and adapts what her predecessors have done is no secret; in a recent interview with Vogue she said,

It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people. David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance. I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to - from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono - but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit. I was born this way.

She was born this way - from a genealogy of musicians, artists, and performers; significantly, she was cut - organically fashioned - from the cloth of the performer. “Born This Way” is no different; it’s also a product, or the offspring, of a long genealogy of anthemic, empowering songs that call on people to express themselves, love themselves, be themselves. So with “Born This Way,” Gaga’s rewriting Madonna’s message for a more radical agenda. As Gaga sings in the song’s opening lines, “My momma told me when I was young that we’re all superstars,” so Madonna sang nearly two decades earlier, “You’re a superstar, yes that’s what you are!” Madonna, of course, is a type of mother figure for all pop-starlets; when Gaga sings “we’re all superstars,” she’s singing as one of a generation who grew up listening to Madonna’s message from “Vogue” and “Express Yourself.” In a way, given the song’s message, it absolutely needed to sound a bit like Madonna’s; but, given the 21st century context, it needed to be more straightforward (as Eddie talks about above) and also way more radical.

Musically, the song combines disco with a solid rock beat, which I read as a merging of the gay culture with the mainstream. If we think about “Born This Way” as a gay anthem, then the musical composition of the song is pretty brilliant: Gaga has taken heavily from the arsenal of gay club music and created a rock song. Or, she’s turned a rock song into a disco ball fixture. It’s a very glittery rock song! Or tough-as-nails disco. In either case, musically “Born This Way” is a type of oxymoron that makes hetero-rock just as queer as disco, and homo-disco just as mainstream as rock. It’s an incredibly interesting musical vehicle in which to house the message of her song: that we’re all equally beautiful - black, white, beige, gay, straight, transgender … 

Roland Betancourt: Well, I think that in this song we are seeing a definite shift in the trajectory of Gaga’s work. I do not want to sound like there is some strict evolutionary model or a chronology that I wish to impose on Gaga, but there have been definite patterns in her work. I believe many of us can recall the early Gaga period, where she relied heavily on her collaborations with Space Cowboy. This was the period that was inaugurated by “Just Dance” and witnessed songs/videos such as “Poker Face” and “Love Game.” We then had a change with “Paparazzi” that has lasted much into the present, however, I would say that after the “Alejandro” music video things began to shift - mainly aesthetically and visually. “Born This Way” places this shift into the musical realm and ties in directly to the thematic issues that have been developing in her work about homosexuality and gay rights.

What is of first note is what Meghan is referring to as the Twitter-comparisons to Madonna, which I would also refer to as a more widespread outcry to the song. Looking at Gaga’s history though, we find “Just Dance” to have many similar parallels to “Born This Way.” In many ways, “Just Dance” serves as the jumping dance song that everyone wants to sing along and dance to, but not the song that you particularly see as revolutionary. Nevertheless, in “Born This Way” we encounter lyrics that are antithetical to the inconsiderate hedonism of “Just Dance.” I think the brilliant part of “Born This Way” is that she’s produced a song that we are already tired of hearing. The comparisons being made to Madonna, for example, may seem valid at first, but every time I have compared the songs they don’t really seem to be there. Sure there are some similarities that seem to be riffs on one another, as Meghan suggests above, but the song actually has less similarities than it would seem. Gaga has produced an uncanny song in the Freudian notion of the term, where it seems all too familiar yet also wholly foreign.


Eddie McCaffray: And what’s so great about the foreign-lodged-within-the-familiar is that it provokes rediscovery of the world - if not in Freud, in Heidegger and Shklovsky. To keep this concept in line with the aesthetic of “Born This Way,” only a continual process of self-(re)creation will keep one meaningful to oneself. Accepting the categories and patterns offered by the world in a simple rote mimesis - the primary risk of conformism - renders one a simple colony of that world. But Gaga’s play with and reappropriation of all manner of cultural symbols, combined with this message of radical (self-)acceptance, calls Little Monsters to keep themselves uncanny, to maintain the tight-rope walk of foreign and familiar within their own plastic souls. 

Meghan Vicks: How did the first performance of “Born This Way” affect and/or reflect the song’s message? 

Eddie McCaffray: Let’s take it at face value: she was born this way, on stage, in front of fans and in the middle of pop-culture pomp-and-circumstance, surrounded by elite dancers, in a crazy costume, singing a huge pop song, out of a giant plastic glowing egg/womb. As has been dealt with at length before, Gaga is created by fame, born in the spectacle that she does not assume but which she becomes - the spectacle isn’t something of which she is a prerequisite, it’s what makes her possible. She can only hide in plain view.

This is an idea that she discussed in her Sixty Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper just before the Grammys. Honesty is important to her personally and as a part of her relationship to the people who look up to her, enjoy her music, and so on. At the same time, who can live on camera all the time? As Cooper says, her costumes are “not only attention-getting, but attention-directing.” Gaga tells him that she “art-directs” every moment of her life in order to combine honesty, privacy, and constant total exposure. This is a central part of her project in general and the message of this song in particular: in the modern world, it is impossible to hide. We are all constantly skewered by a myriad of controlling gazes. Resistance is futile. Rather, self-expression - the active, conscious, joyful engagement with these gazes - is the escape from the downsides of such a life. In creating ourselves, especially in creating ourselves in the ambitious, powerful, faux-self-confident way that a rock star might, we create breathing room, cracks and crannies in our personas in which to live. This is beyond “fake it till you make it”; faking it is making it. As in her Grammy appearance, performance is present at the birth of Lady Gaga and all her Little Monsters. It is the egg, Lady Gaga the product.

Roland Betancourt: I have often been attracted to Gaga’s work in the manner that it reflects on the medium, which is a self-reflexivity that has been very important to contemporary art historians in the past 30 years - perhaps less so today. My article on Jo Calderone for the upcoming Gaga Stigmata book reflects on these issues. In particular, I have been fascinated by the place of the viral in Gaga’s work, but a notion of virality that exceeds its traditional discussion and looks more to the body of the artist. “Born This Way” ends with an interesting line, “Same DNA, but I was born this way.” This presents a complex issue. Same DNA as whom? Contemporary society sees DNA as a very essential building block and we constantly attempt to construct identities by virtue of it. Often we have stories in the news regarding the emergence of DNA evidence that absolves prisoners of crimes or identifies lost relatives. We like to constitute our fundamental identities on this biological code, and our daily identities on viral, binary-coded images - via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. This co-mingling of essences suggest that Gaga shares a certain coded identity with someone, but differs in nurture - she was birthed in a different manner.

The fact that her performance included a birthing from an egg before an audience, as Eddie has just pointed out, plays with the very notion that I addressed when discussing Jo Calderone and which Meghan discussed in her “Anatomy of Change” essay. Gaga’s birth is a performative visual act - I mean that in both senses of the word “performative.” Yet at the same time she partakes an essence with someone, perhaps her fans, perhaps other misfits, other outcast monsters, or perhaps even humanity?

Her “organ” - perhaps one big visual pun! - was surrounded by faces on globes and haloed by glassy test-tube-like lancets. It reminds me 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.

There was a sense of some sort of laboratory-musical setting, a place where, through the dispersal of song, a viral reproduction could occur. Where others, through sound, could be infected or cloned as Lady Gaga - same DNA, different births. 

To play with the Madonna references (both the singer and the Virgin Mary), Gaga said in a recent interview for the upcoming Vogue, “I wrote [‘Born This Way’] in 10 fucking minutes … And it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” Her use of the term “immaculate conception” is quite loaded. On the one hand it points to Madonna’s own work and supports the notions of a Mother-Daughter/Madonna-Gaga relationship that Meghan has set forth. On the other hand, it cites the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit in the flesh of the Virgin through the performative speech act of the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel. Recalling Gaga’s Alexander McQueen 2010 VMA dress, one sees an image of an annunciation on it.

Specifically, it is the image of the Angel Gabriel holding the Latin text of the Annunciation on a sheet of parchment that visually manifests the oral pronouncement of Gabriel that enacts the incarnation. The image being used is the Renaissance Annunciation by Stephan Lochner for the Altar of the Three Magi in Cologne.

But in Gaga’s dress, as far as I can tell, the Virgin is absent. The direct object of the annunciation is missing, placing Gaga in the role of the receptacle for the body of Christ. It is her flesh from which shall be molded the salvation of humanity, and most importantly, this process occurs through sound, through proclamation. It was later that night, while wearing the meat dress, that Gaga sang a portion of “Born This Way” for the first time and thanked God and the gays. When asked who she thanked more, God or the gays, she replied, “I thank them both equally, because they made one another.” Certainly, what we find here is this notion of co-creation and co-constitution that Gaga has defined as so crucial to the fame. Nevertheless, as a good Catholic school girl, Gaga surely knows the opening of the Gospel of John that posits the relationship between God and the Logos (the Utterance/Word/Verb: aka Christ) as co-existing and co-eternal with God. Therefore, she posits the gays as a communal force, one that is bound by a suffering on behalf of mankind, as if bearing the brunt of their sins and treacheries. Is this not the type of idea that the song advocates? A notion of community, unity, and power that comes through the fire of abuse? “Don’t be a drag - just be a queen.”

All these trends, notions of DNA, and Immaculate Conception, however, focus on the central notion of conception and birth, the idea of self-production and performance, which is seen as the crucial and fundamental postulate of 1990s self-esteem/identity-politics rhetoric. The idea of “being yourself” and, as some may want to compare, “Expressing Yourself.” Nevertheless, I would argue that Gaga’s focus goes directly to the issue of the performance itself. Just as the Virgin served as a model for Christian artists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance because she presented the body from which the image of God was formed, the material substance, so Gaga plays a similar ontological role. It is in the closing lines of the song, regarding DNA, that the stripped dancers unite and dance entwined and form the “monster paw” that Gaga proclaims at the beginning of the song.

The idea of self-creation is seen here within a rhetoric of the self and community that is radically different from the “individual” of the 1990s, which was structured on this unique, quasi-isolated “I.” Many of us were fed the myth that you could exist as a quasi-island of self-defined identity. In Gaga, however, the message seems to be the same, but the rhetoric presents the notion of a dividual - a person that exists within a community, linked through networks and self-images. What this song and the Grammy performance re-iterate within Gaga’s corpus is that the identity politics of the past have been radically shifted, and that the self is constituted within a network of images, just as Gaga defines herself within the networked images of pop-culture. What we wish to attack in Gaga through comparison merely stresses the radical shift in how the eye/I is constituted via one another in contemporary society. 

Eddie McCaffray: Right! Maybe you could argue that the kind of identity Lady Gaga invokes is a kind that is inextricably tied to the hyper-media post-pop world in which we live. She’s a twisted reflection, an unsanctioned amalgamation, a satirical-partisan-celebrant; she doesn’t articulate a unique inner code, but bends the world back on itself in a distortion that remains essentially her own because of the act of its creation. Not expression but refraction.

Meghan Vicks: You guys are absolutely brilliant, but I need to talk about Gaga’s shoes and shoulders (this is so fucking typical: the men talk about science and religion, the women talk about clothes!). Did you see her shoes!? I haven’t yet been able to find a picture that shows a closeup, but her shoes were amazing. They were nude, and they looked like they were an organic part of her body - as if her legs had flippin’ sprouted stilettos! And her ankle bones protruded just as her shoulder bones did. It looked like she had reshaped, or regrown, her body in such a way that she now rocks shoulder pads that actually are her shoulders. As I wrote about earlier, the line between fashion and the body has blurred to such an extent that the distinctions between the two no longer exist: her shoulders have become her shoulder pads, and her feet have become her heels.

As Eddie talks about above, she’s corporeally born this [visual, performative] way: in fashion, on the stage, through a performance. The shoulder pads, in particular, are incredibly important in the scope of Gaga’s oeuvre. When she designed the blue outfit that she wore for “Poker Face,” she explained, “I knew I wanted it to be futuristic, so I thought shoulder pads cause that’s my thing. But I wanted it to be a new shoulder pad.” Hyperbolic shoulder pads have been a staple of Gaga’s work, so much so that they’ve evolved to become a part of Gaga’s body. They also, as Gaga indicates, signify something futuristic; in the case of the “Born This Way” performance, Gaga is reborn among a new race of humans (see the horns protruding from the cheekbones, the forehead, and the shoulders) who are are organically made from flesh and fashion, and reality and spectacle.

But for a song and a message that is so futuristic, the performance and the costuming feels very primordial and organic - not as space-age or typically futuristic as Gaga singing “Poker Face” with her video glasses, for instance, or as Gaga’s fire-shooting bra. And the performance is not nearly as hyper-consciously aware of its own performativity as much of Gaga’s earlier work is. So it is futuristic in a paradoxical way that calls to mind origins, beginnings, and birth.

We’re still dealing with monsters, though. Absolutely beautiful from one angle, and grotesque from another. As Roland and I were discussing on the phone earlier today, the bone structure that Gaga is playing with is aesthetically gorgeous from the frontal perspective, and monstrous from the profile. Look at Gaga’s face in these posters for Born This Way that have been plastered all over NYC:

 

From the front, Gaga has the desired bone structure of a model: incredibly high cheek bones, cat-eyes, arched brows, very thin. But from the side, the aesthetically beautiful becomes grotesque:

But the grotesque is always figured positively in Gaga’s aesthetic that embraces freaks, monsters, and queers. So again, as “Born This Way” is both disco and rock (sparkly rock, hard-core disco), so the costuming is beautifully monstrous. She’s turned the monster into a model, and vice versa.

Other points to consider and analyze:

• The gospel-esque outro of “Born This Way”
• “Born This Way” choreography
• Gaga’s hair during the performance
• Gaga, the Mother Monster, who hatches from an egg
• Gaga’s entrance on the Red Carpet in an egg, incubating
• Other topics of the Sixty Minutes interview: quotes, clothes, coffee-slurping, fake diamond
• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor quote during the performance (Gaga’s organ solo)
• Gaga's shout-out to Whitney Houston as inspiration for Born This Way
• Gaga's hat!

Dear Readers!

Please add your thoughts, analyses, and questions to the comments below. Let’s make (another) discussion, little monsters!


Bios:

Roland Betancourt  is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in art history and anthropology. 

Edmund McGraw McCaffray is a PhD student in History at ASU who also did not feel like wearing clothes or foundation today.

Meghan Vicks is a doctoral candidate of Comparative Literature, currently writing her dissertation “Narratives of Zero: Writing Upon Nothing in Modern and Postmodern Literature.” She is co-editor of Gaga Stigmata, and blogs at http://onlywordstoplaywith.blogspot.com.

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