Happy New Year to all of my multitudes of fans, friends, and lovers! Yes, all seven of you! I am here, back in sunny Los Angeles, thank god, because winter is so overrated that it’s not even funny.
Anyhow, I took a bit of a holiday break from this blog, mostly because not much goes on in Portelginland that’s worth blogging about. I missed my semi-annual letter to Santa post, but rest assured, there’s a thank you letter to Santa in the pipeline, because this year I managed to actually get everything I could ever have wanted for Christmas (except for a unicorn, but what else is new?)
ANYHOW, I really want to jump right back into my regularly scheduled musical dress blogging, because somebody once told me that the only way I would ever become a CBC radio celebrity was if I actually blogged regularly and kept this project going. So I am going to start off the new year on a timely and surreal note, with a series of disconnected meditations on Lady Gaga.
i) I first heard of Lady Gaga from my students last year in the LGBT Pop class. I got a dozen papers about Poker Face (typical thesis statement: “This song is kinda gay, or something,” only less grammatically correct). And so I went onto The Internets to find out what the fuss was about, and watched the video and was completely baffled because the song was sort of weirdly unpleasant and the video was kind of ugly. So I immediately dismissed Ms. Gaga as alluring, but not my cup of tea UNTIL ONE DAY when I was poking around her youtube channel and found a video transmission wherein she proclaimed that she was from outer space and was going to save the world with fashion and glamour and sequins, or something. I can’t actually find the clip in question anymore. But anyhow, that was the moment when I realized that she was a hilarious genius, and from that moment on, my fascination with Ms. Gaga has bordered on obsession.
ii) The thing I like the most about the Bad Romance video (apart from all of that Alexander McQueen gloriousness) is when Gaga and her retinue of zombie dancers flail awkardly around the dance floor. I like it because that is basically how I dance, so seeing my particular dance aesthetic thus represented makes me feel less like an uncoordinated awkward person, and more like someone who could potentially appear in a music video.
iii) We are reaching a point where the avant-garde and the massively popular are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. I like this a lot.
iv) What do you think of the vocal stutter that appears in so many Gaga songs? It’s all over the place. This is actually a serious question and I’m wondering what people think. I just submitted a Gaga abstract to a conference, and in the paper I will theoretically write, I want to talk about that stutter. Sometimes it’s, liked, auto-tuned in or something and sometimes it’s, you know, the pa-pa-pa-poker face thing. I have my own theory, but I’d like to hear what others think.
v) How ridiculous would she have to get before she got too ridiculous? I am just so happy that there is a pop culture phenomenon out there right now that is so completely absurd and challenging, and yet I heard her playing on the radio at Tim Hortons in Parry Sound, Ontario, and she is my 13 year old cousin’s favorite singer.
vi) Dear Lady Gaga: ”Funny” is not an appropriate rhyme for “funny,” as heard in the lines “Met somebody cute and funny, got each other and that’s funny,” but I will forgive you for it just this once because I like your style. (My illustrious roommate has suggested “Got each other, look a bunny” as an alternative. You should considering hiring him for your production team.)
vii) The Fame Monster, with its eight nuggets of sparkling awesome, arguably works better as an album than The Fame, which could have been edited down a little because it sometimes gets a bit redundant (much like certain David Lynch films).
viii) Thank you, Lady Gaga, for introducing the phrase “paper gangster” into my vocabulary. I don’t want one of those either.
xi) There is a lot of rather pronounced idiocy in Lady Gaga’s oeuvre, but it is very self-aware idiocy. For instance, the song “Boys, Boys, Boys” (sample lyric: ”Baby is a bad boy with some retro sneakers, let’s go see The Killers and make out in the bleachers”) is profoundly stupid. But you can’t get that stupid without knowing you’re being that stupid, right? So actually it’s brilliant. That is my official scholarly opinion.
x) Once upon a time, in a Women’s Studies class way back in my undergrad, it was Madonna day. We were talking about La Isla Bonita. The prof suggested that La Isla Bonita would never fly anymore (this would have been in about 2003 or 2004) because we had just experienced that surge in Latin popstars (think: Ricky Martin, J-Lo, Shakira) who were doing it for realz and not just appropriating (and I would be interested in debating this particular theory as it is interesting but I can see some holes in it. But that is another blog post for another time). Now, it is 2010, and we have Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” which opens with a spoken monologue in fake Spanish accent and has lyrics that are mostly nonsense with the names Alejandro, Fernando, and Roberto repeated ad nauseum, possibly just to sound fake Spanishy? Difficult to say. Is pop music cyclical, and have we come full circle, back to La Isla Bonita? Difficult to say. Is it politically incorrect that I really love both songs? Probably.
xi) Here is a picture of me in a silver and blue lame space dress, which I inherited from a drag performer, and which is obviously what I would wear if I was ever to meet Lady Gaga. I am standing in front of a rare space ficus. This is the one and only time I will be featuring myself as a model on this blog, and it’s only because I’m too tired to care, so eat it up, kids:
