Lady Gaga is a joke. Not a joke like she’s-so-bad-she-shouldn’t-be-taken-seriously, or a joke like a comedy act (like Flight of the Concords). No, Lady Gaga is a joke in the sense that her career is a carefully plotted parody of popular music. And lest I be unclear here, I love that about her.
The Lady Gaga aesthetic is infused with doses of playfully self-referential pop culture packaged in typical dance pop. If the music itself appears fairly superficial, so does just about everything on the mainstream side of that genre. However, Lady Gaga’s music brings a bizarre added element to the mix. For example, the lyrics for “Just Dance” include lines like “How does he twist the dance?/Can’t find a drink, oh man/Where are my keys? I lost my phone.” The rest of the song pretty much keeps up the same tone, but the point is that it isn’t just about the triviality of teen love or losing a boyfriend or whatever, its about losing phones and keys. Its about forgetting the name of a club. Its about all sorts of extreme trivialities that are just too superficial to be taken seriously. This isn’t Britney Spears singing about whatever Britney Spears sings about, but rather Lady Gaga making fun of whatever Britney Spears sings about.
Other songs take on pop music’s biggest theme: sex. For example, take “Love Games” which includes the lyrics “Lets have some fun, this beat is sick/I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.” Repeat over and over and you get one of the most deliciously idiotic choruses I can think of. Yet that’s exactly what Lady Gaga does and the result is simply too ridiculous to be accepted at face value. Instead, this song is a kind of absurd postmodern crescendo more common to silly mainstream hip-hop than teen driven dance pop.
It’s only natural that the current music environment would produce someone like Lady Gaga. After Roy Lichtenstein, for example, comic books would never be the same and eventually the medium turned out Watchmen as both a self-commentary and the best example of itself. Similarly, Lady Gaga both epitomizes pop music while exposing its frivolities. Once someone like Britney Spears (among others) appears completely naked in a music video there isn’t really anywhere to push the envelope except into either straight-up porn or postmodernity. Lady Gaga goes postmodern then (though some might argue that postmodernism and porn have a lot in common).
Other recording artists have attempted what Lady Gaga is doing, but to varied results. A group like Flight of the Conchords certainly shows affection toward and understanding of popular music, but still get written off as a “comedy act.” Other bands produce isolated crititques of pop culture, but devote their careers to making more traditional music (for example Mates of State have an excellent video that parodies the conventions of rap music videos). What makes Lady Gaga stand out, on the other hand, is that she produces music that appeals to pop fans while still including a deeper, more critically engaging layer. (Even if that layer is critically engaging because of its uber inanity.)
Obvioulsy Lady Gaga isn’t Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol. She isn’t another Madonna or even Britney Spears. Still, she has managed to produce marketable music while operating in the distant shadow of these early pop art predecessors. In this sense she may have more in common with Stephen Colbert or Sacha Baron Cohen/Borat/Bruno as she blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, music and postmodernism. Still, that’s enough for me to lean toward the speaker and start tapping my foot every time I hear her music on the radio.
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