Friday 12 March 2010

The evolution of the genocidal super-diva



Lady Gaga's latest music video has me once again swinging between awe and revulsion. What am I supposed to think about this woman? She's so shiny that no amount of nudity or lady-humping can make her genuinely erotic, but I kind of like the irony of that. There's something endearing about her preposterous habit of beginning performances clad in cumbersomely huge haute couture and ending them nearly nude. She seems fairly self-mocking despite having rapidly risen to super-diva status. However, I can't help but find something a little troubling about her nasty habit of KILLING people.

In the video for Bad Romance she is drugged by women, dances for the viewing pleasure of men who bid on her, and then kills the man who placed the winning bid for her affections by setting him on fire.

In Video Phone with Beyoncé, she dances for male voyeurs with cameras for heads. Beyoncé is taking care of apparent male prisoners with bags over their heads. Beyoncé and Gaga go on to use a variety of flourescent projectile weapons to kill a few of these men.

In Paparazzi her male lover throws her off a balcony, leaving her with several injuries. All of this is photographed by paparazzi. She recovers from her injuries and has a lesbian orgy. Meanwhile, the unexplained dead bodies of many women are shown scattered elegantly in various parts of her mansion and its surrounding gardens. Then she poisons her male lover dead.

In Telephone, she is locked up in a prison populated entirely by sexy lesbians, where she passes the time having lesbian orgies, watching catfights and taking part in synchronised dance routines, which butch lesbian security guards watch through cctv while perusing lesbian dating sites. Amid all of this someone is trying to contact her, much to her displeasure as she would like to be left to enjoy the orgies. Nevertheless, she is bailed out of jail and driven away to the desert by her lover Beyoncé, in a Pussy Wagon. Beyoncé chides her and feeds her a sandwich in a provocative manner. They then go to a diner and murder a huge number of people, including Beyoncé's ex-lover, by poisoning the food.

Clearly there's a theme of lesbian orgies, voyeurism and murder here, but I can't quite figure out what's being implied. Any ideas?

3 comments:

  1. I didn't realise you inhabited the blogosphere. Nice blog. :)

    I can't help taking the view that the lewd shenanigans going in Gagaland implies that the "creative" brains behind these videos assume vamped up ultraviolence, sapphic sleaze, and misogyny is OK when presented in ironical hipster terms.

    You can justify any brainless, attention-seeking drivel nowadays when its presented under the guise of irony. Or satire. Or another get-out clause.

    Nope, not a Gagafan!

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  2. I can't help but agree with you there, although I still find it all kind of enthralling. I do wonder which is stronger, the misogyny of, "Girls go wild with sexual abandon and end up killing people," or the misandry of, "Men are always sleazily watching us, they deserve to be poisoned/shot with crossbows/set on fire"

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  3. By the way, thanks for the encouragement!

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