> While trawling the web, I gather he came across to the interivew with MIA
> who bitches about Lady Gaga who is often compared to MIA - which makes MIA
> mad because her stuff is so contentless and all about shilling products.
>
> As MIA says in the interview: "She models herself on Grace Jones and
> Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She's
> not progressive, but she's a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I
> fucking do!"
(Alright this evolved into a longer post than I meant it to, clearly something was bugging me! But since a great pop-culture debate is threatening to break out in another thread too, I'll post anyway.)
There's been a bit of an eruption in a corner of the internet I read after Mark Dery wrote a piece a week or so ago saying basically what MIA said - Lady Gaga was a weak, bland and 'not not dumb' iteration of glam, Grace Jones etc.
Pop that's weak, bland and 'not not dumb' is not exactly newsworthy, but he was motivated by the fact that Gaga has become something of a totem for Popism and Madonna replacement in cultural studies essays everywhere.
Then he got slammed in comments and replies elsewhere for alleged misogyny. For example,
------------- "Musicians Derry admires are described in masculine terms (fine art, intellect, lack of emotion, “predatory”), and contrasted with feminized (superficial, flighty) and female pop icons... He trivializes the popular, mainly by associating it with socially devalued femininity/females (old white women: Versace and Minelli) and other indexes of insufficiently masculinized mass culture (Perez Hilton, the later Human League)..." etc. etc. - http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-gender-and-misogyny-in-mark-derrys.html -------
And e.g.:
----------- "Derry’s claim that Gaga lacks “cultural literacy” is laughably unfounded, given the constellation of references – visual, musical and lyrical – in her work; yet, having it both ways, he tries to counter any argument that Gaga knows exactly what she’s about by dismissing her references as only this, mere references. She’s simply name-dropping, as all women do, not having the intellectual rigour to connect up her signposts with – to stretch a metaphor – that great Enlightenment highway of learning, as so wonderfully displayed by Queen (Queen? The most leaden and retrograde of all glam-rock bands) as they prog on about faeries. Please, Mark, could your tactic be any more shopworn?" - http://populardemand.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/taking-it-all-in/ --------------------
Now I'm sympathetic to certain elements of popism, e.g. as represented in Carl Wilson's great book on Celine Dion - the Bourdieuesque point that the construction of our taste can't be understood in isolation from our class, race, gender positions. And therefore we should think again about our snobberies, be a little reflexive about why we hate what we hate, etc. Indie self-regard fully deserved the kick in the pants it got from popism.
But I don't think it follows that we ought therefore develop a taste for everything popular, or that critics of this or that piece of pop are just expressing class, gender or race prejudice. The 'it's her factory' writer (first response quoted above) seems to do this:
------------ "I’m adamantly pro-pop, pro-feminist, and see the two stances as intimately intertwined (you will be able to see the theoretical workings-out of that stance in my forthcoming book, which should come out late this summer). Given these two commitments, I’m solidly Team Gaga." - http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-gender-and-misogyny-in-mark-derrys.html --------------
Art has form and content that can't be reduced to an essence of the demographics of its producers and consumers. It expresses stuff, however obliquely, about experience and how we ought to experience, and as such arguments about it have real content too. Even though, as with ethics, we're never going to find some ultimate foundation by which to justify our taste, we're still arguing about something worth arguing about when we try to generalise our tastes into universals. (Anyway, surely that's part of what makes debates over this or that bit of pop culture so fun and also infuriating.)
It seems to me that those who find 'resistance' in the pop charts (which does not, of course, necessarily follow from the argument about the class etc. construction of taste) want to have their cake and eat it: not only is it popular, liked by all the right kind of people (not elitist-intellectual-masculinists), but the content is also politically right-on:
--------- "This is not an invocation to dumb (in its double-definition as both stupidity and muteness) but a claim for the autonomy of female pleasure: unaccountable, irreducible to a Cartesian mind/body split and to masculine “intellectualism”; forever in excess of patriarchal rationality. The song itself creates this space of autonomous female pleasure in its Eurodisco stomp, its headlong rush to move, to dance, to be out on the dance floor, and the ringing telephone will not induce the woman to leave her female friends one moment sooner. In a re-staging of ‘Paparazzi’s central gesture, Beyoncé tips poison into a male patron’s drink, and Gaga slaughters half a diner with her sandwiches: as Robin writes, the duo “reject the gendered imperative for care work”, the expectation that women will provide sustenance to the rest of the world.
"We will not speak your language. The “me” of patriarchy, the whole and indivisible self, splinters into the “me-eh-eh-eh-ehh” of ‘Telephone’, irreconcilable and uncontrollable..." - http://populardemand.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/taking-it-all-in/ --------------------
Whereas I want to have my Bourdieu cake and eat it with Adorno. Maybe that's not coherent either. But anyway, Lady Gaga really just plain sucks.
Mike Beggs