> I think this piece (on Gaga, anorexia, and ingestion) is a particularly
> good defense of Gaga's interestingness:
>
> http://populardemand.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/taking-it-all-in/
>
> On Gaga's indebtedness to Madonna, there's what's shaping up to be an
> interesting series of posts on Madonna, Beyoncé and Gaga in relation to
> afrofuturism here:
>
> http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2010/09/announcing-series-of-posts-on.html
I mentioned these pieces last time we went Gaga here. As a sociology undergrad in the 1990s I think I developed an allergy to the kind of cultural studies that finds 'resistance' coded into pop music, just waiting for an expert exegesis. I often like the writing of both these bloggers, but I find this kind of reading rather forced:
"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..."
It's the pop-historical significance attributed to Gaga, and her totemic status among popists - with the implication that if you don't like Gaga you don't like pop - that irks me, and without all this I think I'd just be indifferent.
Mike Beggs