I have had a weird relationship with the whole Lady Gaga hype machine. I listened to The Fame back in January and thought it was a moderately enjoyable Madonna-esque bit of dancy pop. I listened to it on and off for the next eight months or so and then was stunned to realize that it was the biggest thing in pop music for the year this side of Taylor Swift. All of which is to say: I am REALLY not tapped into popular culture.
I’d like to think that gives me some unique insight into the music, as opposed to just the story of Lady Gaga. And maybe it does. But all I can really say is that I think she is the Madonna for the 21st century. Which, on its face, sounds like the least insightful thing anyone has ever said. But hear me out…
What a lot of people fail to remember is that Madonna was shocking to people in the eighties. Shocking because of what she said, and how she acted. But also shocking because of how much genuinely powerful stuff she manage to extract from what was (let’s face facts) pretty standard musical fare. The thing about Madonna is that by all rights she ought to have been a flash in the pan, but was so capable of re-vitalizing, re-inventing, and re-positioning herself that she became a massive phenomenon.
Based purely on The Fame, it’s easy to read Lady Gaga as an imitator. It’s a nice enough record, and “Poker Face” is legitimately an awesome song, but it doesn’t seem to contain the depth or the hidden layers that made Madonna bigger than herself.
However, on The Fame Monster, Gaga reveals herself to be far more than a simple copycat. She doesn’t just exist in the wake of Madonna; she is post-Madonna. This isn’t a simulation, it’s the real thing. It’s a record from someone who is fully aware of her place within the litany of pop starlets, who is using that fact to propel herself beyond it. It’s not an imitation, it’s a genuine re-enactment of the form that Madonna pursued.
It’s dark and ugly and more than a little bit disturbing. It’s also an almost perfectly pure slice of pop sugar. And somewhere in between those two lies a confusing and impossible set of songs.
I’m normally not one for the argument that bad music is actually clever music because it’s intentionally bad. The sentiment of “no, see, it’s clever because it’s a commentary about how bad most popular music is!” is the mark of someone who isn’t interested in art but is enormously satisfied with crap culture.
However, I think Lady Gaga is doing something far more sophisticated. Because the point is not that her songs are bad. It’s that they’re very good, but wholly characteristic (almost archetypal), essays on the culture that makes them possible. What you’re supposed to read into them, I think, isn’t the obnoxious faux-pomo sense of “gee, isn’t our culture vapid?”
It’s really the opposite. She doesn’t want to make the thoroughly obvious point that most of what passes for popular culture is bereft of depth or meaning. That’s true, of course, but by it’s very nature is a totally banal commentary. Any clown can accuse bland culture of being bland. It’s far more interesting to jump headfirst into it and, in so doing, reveal just how much horror and weirdness it actually contains.
And that’s what makes a song like “Bad Romance” so fascinating. It Madonna-esque not because it sounds like her (although it does) but because it demands that we look at ourselves in this moment, rather than tracing our lives backward into an infinite depth of pop culture without depth. It’s weird and strange and so perfectly immanent. And it manages to be all that while also simultaneously giving you a transcendent chorus. It lifts you even while it drags you down. It’s a recognition that the heaviest weights we burden ourselves with are the ones we don’t have to carry. It’s also a brilliantly constructed pop song – as it would have to be for any of the rest of this to work.
Similarly, there’s “Alejandro” which could almost come from Abba and “Speechless,” a pleasant but seemingly pretty straightforward – almost insipidly so – pop ballad. But in their midst is “Monster” which puts each one into a different context. Where those two perform the role, “Monster” calls attention back to the scars and bruises that we’ve all trained ourselves to ignore.