I'm your biggest fan.
I need to thank Idolator commenter Will Hackney for helping me to articulate exactly what it is that Lady Gaga is doing, and why I love her. His comment on Idolator earlier this morning:
“I guess it just seems like all of the crazy stuff Gaga does is completely random, almost thoughtless. I don’t think there’s a method to the madness.”
Lady Gaga’s aesthetic project is to act out celebrity as a form of total impulse-control loss. Her entire raison d’etre is to do literally whatever pops into her head, no matter how ridiculous it is, in front of as many people as possible. She’s acting out the essence of what celebrity has boiled down to: unbridled self-interest with the expectation of a smiling audience who will reward you for it. And is she doing that unironically? HELL TO THE NO. She is 100% aware of how she is embodying current conceptions of what a famous person is or does; she’s just blowing them out to a literally absurd extreme. You show your p***y getting out of a limo? I’m going to get stage blood in my eyeball. You date a dirtbag? I date Kermit The Frog.
The reason Gaga pisses so many people off was best articulated by Morrissey: “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby.” Most people think that it takes a mountain of long-accumulated artistic credibility to be given the permission to act this crazy in public: Salvador Dali walking his anteater, for example, or in the music world, Madonna, who has a legacy of stone-cold classic pop hits. Gaga has four singles, and they’re pretty frothy if entertaining, so most people think she doesn’t have the right to be this baroque. But to those people I say: look around you! How many people in the lens of fame (or should I say The Fame) right now have any right to be there? 5%? 10%? But Gaga’s performance takes it as a given that there are no barriers to entry to celebrity: Act famous, be famous.
Lady Gaga isn’t just another symptom of the problem: she is a piece of art about the problem.
