Pop with an Image on Top

She calls herself Lady GaGa. It's a crown of a name that reminds me of other Ladies—among them Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment, Lady Fortune, Lady Philosophy, and ... Lady Fame. Her last album, released three days ago, is titled "The Fame Monster" and the one before that "The Fame." I think there was a wasted opportunity on the latter. Imagine how scrumptiously tautological her CD would have been had she christened it "Lady Fame" instead: four four-letter words on a piece of plastic with four sides. How dizzingly cool is that?

But back to GaGa. I've been thinking about her because one friend asked me the other day, "Why is she mainstream? She's so freakish."

After looking through her videos again, hearing her songs isolated from the videos, and then reading the lyrics isolated from the music, I'm convinced that she is a very tame fame monster, decidedly un-freakish.

First of all, she sings, like everybody else, about love, or some version of it—attraction, lust, etc.—and its attendant complications. Her latest hit is called "Bad Romance." Lyrics here. Part of the refrain: "I want your love and / I want your revenge / You and me could write a bad romance." (It's another take of Catullus's imperishable odi et amo, "I hate and I love.") I don't see anything weirdly alienating about these or other lyrics. There are some strange turns of phrase, like "leather-studded kiss in the sand," but that's not strange enough to be off-putting for most people. The same goes for her music, a usual offering of throbbing, glittery pop.

It is GaGa's image that sets her apart. She is, ultimately, a high fashion performance artist. But her images aren't that strange because they borrow on visual vocabularies we already know. Her videos read like bizarre Vogue fashion spreads in perpetual motion. They are filled with somewhat odd (but never ugly) things. For "Bad Romance" she collaborated with designer Alexander McQueen; his racous, otherwordly heels are everywhere in the video. GaGa even has a sequence wearing a geometric, money-colored outfit by McQueen that's as shiny as coins. The echo here might be Ginger Rogers donning a skimpy coin costume in "Gold Diggers of 1933." Decay, decadence, and desire are all wrapped into one package; it's an aside that meshes in with the video's general mood of conflict and confusion.

Lady GaGa's videos have traces of contemporary artists in them (e.g. Matthew Barney)—and this at least shows that she's a student of this art and wants her pieces to be seen in a somewhat similar light. But her images seem so tame and mousy next to those by the likes of Barney. (Just type in Cremaster Cycle into YouTube, or click this, and you'll understand.) And Lady GaGa has at least once directly riffed off the work of a contemporary artist. Art blogger Paddy Johnson noticed that when GaGa performed "Bad Romance" at the end of a recent Gossip Girl episode, her giant-dress-and-three-ladder stunt was eerily similar to a work of art by Dana Karwas and Karla Karwas, Party Dress, exhibited this fall at the Dumbo Art Under the Bridge Festival. This amounts to stealing an idea, and it certainly won't get contemporary artists to warm to GaGa.

Note that in GaGa videos, you never see her making music. That's too authentic or earnest or plain; she is a master of fabrication, artifice, show. She doesn't tell a story of heartache plainly. She tells it through strange, polished images. And to tell it she happens to choose a character that's quite in vogue now: the femme fatale. After all, today's hottest prince charming happens to be a vampire named Edward Cullen. And in some worlds, such as that painted by Edvard Munch, the vampire and the femme fatale are one and the same.

But note that Lady GaGa is a femme fatale who starts out as vulnerable and ends up victorious. In "Paparazzi" her lover wrongs her, she sheds some tears, and then she merrily poisons him—and in the process regains her immense fame. In "Bad Romance," for every flash of her as a sexy conquerer, we see her soft, doe-eyed, with a halo of light pink hair. She's half-naked and crying in a tub while two very mean automaton women drag her out of the tub so she might later dance in a diamond collar before a host of creepy men, bidding on her. The bridal dress Lady GaGa wears when walking toward the man who bought her (and toward the marriage bed) is a brilliant symbol of her as a vulnerable femme fatale. Her dress is a bride's, but the train is made of a polar bear's snowy hide, snarling head included at the back. Watch the video for yourself to see how she is ultimately victorious. Hint: It involves a spit-fire bra.

What's most curious about Lady GaGa is that her videos suggest that the video a musician makes is just as important as, if not more important than, the song he or she writes. The word "musician" in this context doesn't fit. It's old hat. "Performer" and "artist" are more apt and more common parlance anyway. Lady Gaga marries the terms as a performance artist—granted, a second-rate one that's pretty tame, but she's pushing music further into the realm of images, and that's a fascinating trajectory to watch, especially when she's wearing whimsical hats. As the Romans said, mirabile visu!

(P.S. For those interested in a terrific history of fame, try 'The Frenzy of Renown" by Leo Braudy.)

(P.P.S. h/t to Paul Champaloux for reminding me about Lady GaGa's hat collection!)