GaGa Over GaGa

by Dennis Green

Okay, it's not the costuming or the wild makeup. It's not the panties and bra, the nudity and near nudity, not the machine gun tits. It's the wild imagination, and the way she captures the underbelly of American culture so well. And even as you're saying, "Hell no! Not ME!" you prove my point.

Wretched excess. Decadence. Filthy rich. My McMansion is bigger than your McMansion! A nation corrupt to it's very core. So of course we prop up corrupt dictators and oppressive, undemocratic, unrepresentative governments across the globe.

And Lady GaGa is capturing it all, and more keenly every day, more brilliantly with each new music video.

Her latest, "Alejandro!" is a true work of art. Yes, she sings well, and her dancing is sublime. And the choreography is sharp on the marks and athletic, even military in its precision. But the GaGa is up to something far more ambitious than song & dance. She's after the Zeitgeist itself, that beast that changes faces every minute. As do we.

"How?" she asks, "How, exactly are we a nation at war?" Well, the answer is that the war creeps into anything and everything we do -- from love to betrayal to departure, but especially to our very identity. With a face constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and a body to match, Lady GaGa shows us, step by step, what we've become. Marching in lockstep, faces frozen in mindless patriotic fervor, robotic in our every move.

"Don't call my name/don't call my name/Alejandro!" In a video produced almost entirely in black & white, this work of art will change the genre forever. Not since the early music videos of Duran Duran, in the 80s, have the times been so vividly portrayed.

And Duran Duran was obviously up to something altogether different, although the wretched excess has a distinct family resemblance. From the elegant denials of "Come Undone" to the manic strutting of "Wild Boys," the energy is there, but more civilized and muted. A much later, 2007 video by Duran Duran, "Falling Down," portrays the consequences of all that lovely decadence, in a Lady Rehab Hell.

In “Falling Down,” a young, fashion-forward and strung out alcoholic woman is dropped off by her boyfriend at the big, forbidding rehab hospital, and staggers inside, held up by the arms by two stoic orderlies. And inside, all the grotesque antics and horrors of detox are shown -- the medications spat in the doctor's face, the cat fights, the accusations, the spitz baths, the depression, the despair. And as she leaves, after 60 days in residency, her boyfriend hands her a glass of Champaign, and she raises it in a toast to her physician as she gets in the limo and is driven away.

But in GaGa's world, in OUR world, there is no rehab, no regret. The American Dream is invulnerable, and complete. A little menacing at times, perhaps, but not enough so to awaken us. She keeps on keepin' on, no matter how racy or scattered or gropey it gets, in situations that would leave most of us exhausted. No matter how many hands reach out for her, no matter how many heads are turned her way.

The message is always the same: Lady GaGa is available!

And yet, of course, she's really not. She is in truth as remote from humankind as any human can get, and she likes it that way. That way, she's safe from all those groping hands and metallic, menacing faces. And she is always in control.

She has taken the Madonna Model to it's current limits, which are no longer the limits set by frowning moralists and censors who were horrified by “Like A Virgin,” but only the limits of her own imagination. The limits of stagecraft, after all, are very few these days. The magic of computer graphics and now 3-D are virtually endless, so it's not just what dance steps she can manage, and what quick cuts in the edit room, but a whole broad panoply of illusions that can be realized.

And GaGa uses them all. In videos produced in tandem with her latest album, "Fame Monster," the outrageous ideas and techniques evolve, from "Love Game" to "Beautiful, Rich & Dirty," to "Telephone," where, in prison, the Lady G wears the latest in 25th Century prison dress and submits willingly to abuse from fellow prisoners and guards alike.

This set of videos evolve, as all those have before it, until the stage is set for "Alejandro!" And suddenly you realize that it's not Madonna at all who provides the inspiration! No...it's Michael Jackson! GaGa is the white, the female, the often near-naked version of the King of Pop! No coincidence that his attempted comeback and premature death overlaps with Lady's ascent to the very top of the charts...

Her poses are not "Vogue" at all, so much as the kinds of trademark moves Jackson was rightly famous for. He had his Moonwalk. She has her orgiastic, gang bangin' group grope. He had his fedora and one glittery glove. She has her Nun's costume and the machine gun bra. He could be, as in "Bad!" truly villainous, as she is in nearly all her recent videos, truly lethal to any man who comes anywhere near her. She gives "Femme Fatale" a whole new meaning, and it is Absolute!

I've read closely now several interviews with the Lady, in Interview and in Rolling Stone, and they confirm it all, these reasons I'm so taken by Lady G and her genius. She says about the title track of her next album, “That chorus came to me, like, I swear, I didn’t even write it. I think God dropped it in my lap. And I swear to you that I’m in a place now writing music where there’s this urgency to protect and take care of my fans.” I know the feeling.

So…you can make fun of her, as you probably did Madonna and Prince and Michele Jackson, especially when he was living in Fantasy Land and making millions. But examine for a moment your own life.

Are you straight, or are you twisted? Are you content with your life, or are you even mildly dismayed? These are the sorts of questions you will be asked when you go into Rehab. Not your problem? Good for you.

Meanwhile, as we get through it one day at a time, artists like Lady GaGa are shining that bright light on what the culture values. If our society is broken, if people are greedy, rude and unkind, if we value riches over the life of the spirit, materialism and decadence is what we’ll see.

©2010 Dennis Green