She’s pretty blunt about being an entertainer with more interest in fashion and staging than music. If you want to look for her roots, look at Nancy Sinatra, not Bowie. It’s never about the singing, although Gaga can actually sing. It’s about the show. The thing about popular music is that the only criterion for success is popularity.

No, not writery enough. Besides who needs clarity when you have words?

And I love that all people can be divided into Rabid Mouth-Breathing Lady Gaga Fans and Rhodes Scholars. That way it’s super easy to know who to sterilize and who to shower with free diamonds and gold deblumes.

I don’t listen to Gaga, but come on–if 3,400 words of fairly straightforward cultural crit breaks your head, then you’ve got bigger issues than your chosen brand of pop.

For me, the key lies in this video, also posted on Boing Boing a while ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM

The young Stefani Germanotta, despite being a talented musician, saw fame and fortune going undeservedly to those who offered spectacle and titillation, while she languished in tiny local gigs.

Like a comic-book super-villain, she invented a new secret identity, stealing her targets’ “powers” and becoming a cruel mockery of the people she held in such contempt.

By escalating the state of pop-culture dysfunction, she forces her enemies into a game of chicken, where they have no choice but to rise to her every ridiculous challenge.

Lady Gaga is Stefani’s revenge on pop music.

True/Slant doesn’t seem to have linked to the original article but it’s an economical bit of writing that makes its point about Gaga with an argument that’s well-formulated and nuanced in ways Dery doesn’t seem to want to bother addressing. I’d highly recommend you all read it both to enjoy and to have a more complete picture of the debate going on here.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/04/27/090427crmu_music_frerejones

As for biting quip #6, “no one ever grows up dreaming to be a critic.” That’s true #6–most people who become “critics” only do so after a life of experiences, intellectual inquiry, and reflection about how the world works. Many more people grow up with the infantile fantasy of being worshiped as a pop star, which is kind of what Gaga is all about.

I’m sorry but this Gaga thing just doesn’t have any presence, to my sensibilities at least.

Howabout answering the hard question, of what is the appeal of Lady Gaga? Why is she selling millions? Sure, you could go with “The public likes trash” but why then doesn’t (admittedly trashy) garage rock have a bigger listening base?

Spending pages on justification of why you don’t like something doesn’t make you a great wordsmith, it makes you boring.

More to the point, those who think I’m Dennis Miller for Derrideans won’t be convinced by any argument to the contrary anyway, I suspect. It *is* interesting to note that this debate reboots itself virtually every time BB links to one of my screeds. In the past, I’ve world-wearily dragged myself to the debating table, feeling every one of my thousand years, to point out that: It’s. a. frickin’. POLEMIC. people. The authorial persona is an assumed one. You know, for levity? Like Swift? Like Mencken? Like Vidal? Like Taibbi? Like Hitchens?

Not saying I’m fit to shine their thesauri, just saying that all the Captain Earnest calls for less meanness toward the Lady Herself miss the point entirely. It’s in the nature of the genre to be waspish and hyperbolic. You may not look for such qualities in your essayists, in which case, there’s always Roger Rosenblatt. Or Andy Rooney. Or Gail Collins.

Regarding matters of style: Yes, the sentences are long. Tell it to Proust. Yes, there are more far-flung allusions, references, op cits, and ibids than midges on a hot summer day. Tough darts; that’s part of the fun. The rest of the culture condescends to you, treats you like a ruminant herd; I respect your intellect enough to assume you’ll be flattered by the assumption of historical, cultural, and critical literacy, and all you can do is cavil about all the heavy lifting you have to do with the OED, or hours spent slaving over a hot Google? Come ON, guys; this is Learning Annex stuff. You should see what handgun drills with Avital Ronnell or Gayatri Spivak are like.

To those who argued with what Burroughs would call “a mineral calm,” prosecuting the point that I’m needlessly recondite, roundabout, et. al., I would simply say that style has its own politics. If you prefer prose that reads like a PowerPoint presentation, Malcolm Gladwell is never far from the point of purchase. I’m not your man.

Dery makes the argument that the high glam of the 70s was a response to dowdiness and drab–that Gaga doesn’t have dowdiness and drab to respond to in our slick, glitzy, mediated age. For this reason, he says, she is unexeceptional.

But where glam responded to the banality of pop and folk, Gaga responds to the homogenous sheen of contemporary mediated pop. Dery is right that the pop music of today is all about bling and showbiz; he even acknowledges that it is uniform for all its screaming about standing out. Gaga seems to leverage the notorious personalities of the past for exactly that reason; she is a hilarious manifestation of it’s-all-been-done-before. A personality jockey, if you will. Dery mistakes this for being an unironic participant of the machine.

Moreover, her ability to connect with her audience comes from a smart reading of a sophisticated gag culture. She is informed by a culture that was unavailable to previous glam artists, and one that largely communicates in the parlance of shared media experience. She plays with video production in Telephone, making Beyonce a puppet both literally and figuratively. The technique might as well come from YouTube, but it serves as commentary on manipulative production and artist control. In the same video, she turns the game Cooking Mama into a a vehicle for spousicide. She transforms the age-old ballad of carnal hunger into an ode to pulp horror gluttony with Monster. In the age of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the mashed-up content has an audience, and that audience is clamoring for tickets to see Andy and Marilyn do Tim and Eric.

Each generation of artists has the privilege and responsibility to create the intersection between contemporary interest and previously-laid foundation. As a species, our primary mechanism for coping with change is generationally-transformed technology; the arts do not transcend this reality. As a send-up of the last 50 years of popular culture, Gaga does something really interesting with the normal cycle of reiteration.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

Cheers.

But in all seriousness, I see the spectacle as nothing short of depressing. As far as her music goes, it’s easy to defend or dismiss either way. It’s above average by pop standards, there’s no getting around that; but by any other standards it’s pretty bland. Especially if you have more than 4 gigabytes of non-radio tunes on your hard drive. What strikes me about her as a phenomenon, is just how inoffensive and unclever her approach to pop-art actually is. It might be too early to blast her for not living up to the influences she seems to compulsively namecheck every time she’s pressed for substance, but it’s not hard to list at least a few artists who have been dwarfing her intellectually in the pop world even in their own trial runs. How about The Residents? Or what the KLF did in the british music industry? Warhol (love him or hate him) had real, influential artistic theories. Bowie was a bombshell on the fashion world. Calling yourself a pop artist or even just heavily implying that you’re pulling off some sort of cultural terrorism without ever making a real statement is kind of sad. When you have to rely on the rationalizations of your vapid fans for artistic credibility, it might be time to reevaluate whether or not you’re actually accomplishing anything other than a fat bank account and the memetic status of your persona.

So… I’m not sure that’s a compliment.

I like her shoes.

I hope she’s having fun and laughing all the way to the bank. There’s no use hating her. Hopefully she can use her fame and riches to say something substantive with her talent later on.

As far as Mark Dery’s article is concerned, I’ve always believed that a large vocabulary is like owning a classic car – you have to take it out for a spin every one in a while so people know that you have it.

Lada Gaga is undeniably a triumph of pop culture. She’s popular, and she’s outrageous while not being self destructive. (How many pop stars can you say that about?) Be happy to have a daughter like her.

Don’t really care much either way about her music though. It’s pretty irrelevant, really.

And “rockism”? Decrying the new for the sake of the old, just cause? You might as well call it get-off-my-lawn-ism, for all the water that word holds. Besides, labeling yourself, basically, old and out of touch right off the bat makes the whole article hard to swallow. Dery’s cranky. We get it. No need for him to dress it up with some faux-intellectual term.

Granted, Poker Face is no Bohemian Rhapsody. But it’s no Laughing Gnome, either, so to discredit Gaga entirely because she has idols like any kid (though I’ve never heard her invoke the name of Marc Bolan or Bryan Ferry, so the tangent about glam seems extraneous) is plainly stupid. Of course she’s going to emulate her heroes until she finds her own footing, it’s what everyone does.

Queen I is an intelligent mash of Zeppelin and The Who, Bowie’s early stuff is Dylan-esque crooning mixed with the theatricality of Anthony Newly. Guys like Dery, in charge at places like Rolling Stone, did everything they could to nip their careers in the bud in the name of Clapton and Jagger. But it didn’t work; they just tried harder, just like Gaga has done in the face of all her criticism.

There’s a Gaga for every generation, and whether she lasts depends on her talent, not her publicity. It’s the only factor that separates the Bowies from Boy Georges. Maybe she has it, maybe she doesn’t, but audiences do like her. I’m not particularly enthralled with her movement–if anything, I think she’s not outrageous ENOUGH–but some people worship her … doesn’t that count for anything?