Lady Gaga/Parodic Pop

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.  

Faster, Furiouser

Last night Laura and I went with our friend Tony to see the newest installment of The Fast and the Furious.  If I was reviewing this movie for a newspaper or similar publication I would give it one star (take your pick out of how many) simply out of pity for the cadre of earnest B actors whose careers must not have panned out as planned and thusly reunited for this exercise in boredom.  However, that’s not what I’m doing.  Instead, I’d like to comment on the film as an exercise in postmodernism, as such, it is moderately successful but still disappointing.  (I’d give it maybe two stars out of four or five when looking at it this way.)

 

I’m not going to bother defining postmodernism here, but basically postmodern films may tend to be self-conscious/self-reflexive, have non-conventional story telling (non-linear for example), be filled with allusions, have affectionate critiques of pop culture, and/or countless other elements.  That’s not comprehensive and people will certainly disagree, but films like Go, pretty much everything by Quentin Tarantino, or even the Shrek movies might arguably fall into this category.

 

The Fast and the Furious series generally deserves to be classified in this category, I think, because it is just so over the top.  Everyone in the films is stronger, more agile, more beautiful, and more sexualized than could ever happen in real life.  A perfect example of this is the beginning of The Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift.  Though all the characters are ostensibly in high school, they all must actually be twenty-somethings who spend all day at the gym.  In the case of the women, they also must avoid anything resembling food.  Compound that with ridiculous violence, impossible car chases, and the blatant emphasis on the objectification of the human body, and the film becomes a delicious entry into and commentary on the genre of car chase/heist/underdog movie.  The rest of the film gets bogged down with futile attempts at plot and character development, but the beginning scenes (ten to fifteen minutes or so) are worth watching.

 

This isn’t to say I endorse the values presented on screen in Tokyo Drift, but rather to say that the film is so over the top that it can’t help but be ironic.  It ups the ante so far that it seems to be asking if upping the ante is really such a good thing in the first place.  This ironic commentary certainly goes over the heads of the teenage boys who are the film’s target audience, but it at least allows the film to entertaining to people outside that demographic and to stimulate a conversation about appropriate representation contemporary society.

 

This irony is what the newest Fast and the Furious is missing.  The movie starts out with the old gang trying to rob a fuel truck in Latin America.  The scene is appropriate for the genre, but very much by-the-numbers.  People do incredible, impossible things, but never with relish or zest or in a way that seems remotely new.  Subsequently, the scene seems to set the tone for the rest of the film.  Everyone goes about the business of stealing and killing and having sex and whatever, but there’s no joy in any of it.

 

Part of the problem seems to be that the film is downright confusing.  Not that plot matters in this sort of movie, but everyone kept referring to everyone else as “my brother” or “the ex-girlfriend.”  I couldn’t remember a single thing about the earlier films, because lets face it, they’re not very memorable (with the exception of Tokyo Drift’s beginning), so I couldn’t tell who was doing what.  Thus, it took me about half the movie to work out a mental framework of what the relationships were and until then the action was relatively meaningless.  Perhaps the filmmakers could have had the characters just introduce themselves to the camera at the beginning, or have shown some sort of family tree-like image that explained it all.  Then I could have happily forgotten the details but still have known who to root for in the car chases.  As it was, I kept asking myself if I should want Vin Disel or the other guy to win. 

 

The other problem with the movie was that the action itself seemed so ordinary.  For example, the car chases through underground tunnels on the US-Mexican border were insufferably long.  I’m sure they seemed awesome in the script, but on film they just seemed like someone’s home video of the Indian Jones ride at Disneyland.  All I wanted was for it to end and get back to something at least marginally interesting.

 

In the end, the film had many of the hallmarks of a postmodern action flick and for those reasons might be worth taking a look if you’re really into that.  On the other hand, those hallmarks were presented without much affection or joy.  I’m not saying every movie has to be as relentlessly self-conscious as Tarantino’s stuff, nor that it needs to be comedic like, say, Hot Fuzz.  It would just help if the filmmakers understood the irony of what they’re doing.  When Vin Disel is asked by a thuggish adversary if he’s “taking to the boss,” let him be a smart aleck once in a while instead of just looking like he’s confused.  If there’s going to be tons of hot women (“hot women” is how they are credited in the end titles) making out with each other, consider what that might mean and how it might be ironic.  Ultimately, doing any of these things would make the movie far more engaging, and a lot more fun.  Maybe next time they can make The Faster and the Furiouser and start getting some of these things right.