Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

V I C T O R P. C O R O N A

2008 RELEASE OF HER ALBUM THE FAME, LADY GAGA became the rst recording artist in history to have at least four number one hits from a debut album.1 Although The Fame and its 2009 expanded rerelease, The Fame Monster, earned positive critical reviews, Gagas artistic reputation is also closely tied to an endless stream of avant-garde fashion worn in her music videos, performances, and public appearances. Proclaimed to be the dening pop star of 2009 by Rolling Stone (Hiatt, Rise of Lady Gaga), Gaga won two Grammy awards in 2010 and was nominated for six a year later. She is followed by over seven million people on Twitter and was 2010s second most Googled celebrity in the U.S. Gagas success also led to an invitation to Queen Elizabeths annual entertainment gala and a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where she wore the rst hat designed by the architect Frank Gehry. Although her music and sartorial are follow in the tradition of artists like David Bowie, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Queen, Gaga has succeeded in creating a glam-pop aesthetic aptly described as neon noir (Weiner 2009), one that pursues a lasting presence in popular memory and celebrates a monstrous Otherness. In order to evaluate Gagas place in pop culture, this article explores the components of her distinct aesthetic, which can be described as a social imaginary (Castoriadis 1987) that upholds much of Warhols Pop Art vision yet twists it to reect contemporary anxieties. Her active quest to produce the memorable and celebrate the freakish highlights the degree to which pop spectacle has been affected by a period of unprecedented connectivity among consumers and cultural producers. The emphasis on creating the memorable reects a new urgency for
ITH THE

The Journal of Popular Culture, Early View, 2011 r 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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stars differentiation in a period of hypermodernity, an accelerated state of western capitalism characterized by the culture of the fastest and the ever more: more protability, more performance, more exibility, more innovation (Lipovetsky 35). From this perspective, postmodernitys progeny is a cultural landscape where any possible event of interest can be almost instantly tweeted, blogged, texted, uploaded on YouTube, displayed on social networking sites, and discussed on comment boards. The entertainment industries have reacted to this trend by recognizing that in a quickened state of cultural exchange, the diffusion and perception of a stars image are the most important building blocks of a career. Gagas pursuit of an enduring cultural presence responds to hypermodern pressures not by conjuring images of the sincere and earnest, as girl-next-door stars have traditionally done. Instead, her elaborate performances and sartorial experimentation are deployed to create visual impressions that are practically tailor-made for the age of viral marketing and generate expectations of ever grander spectacles. The urge to consciously make hypermodern memory in itself, however, does not fully capture Gagas aesthetic and its popularity. She complements this strategy by attempting to explicitly link herself to categories of individual Otherness. By celebrating the monster, the freak, or the mist in multiple expressionsnot tting in at school or being gayshe is able to build a sense of subcultural membership among fans while the catch-all liveliness of her music works to sustain mass appeal. On Ellen DeGeneress talk show, the host commented on Gagas uniqueness yet gently questioned the sincerity of her spectacle. She responded, I didnt t in in high school and I felt like a freak, so I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they dont feel alone (air date, November 27, 2009). In other interviews, she described her 2009 11 Monster Ball concert tour in terms of apocalypse and exorcism, while the albums songs were said to reect the demons with which she has wrestled throughout her life. In order to effectively contextualize such narratives of purgation and self-afrmation, it is useful to incorporate an understanding of what Castoriadis and others have dened as imaginaries. Mandoki wrote that they are known to be ctional and yet, like ction in literature, theater, or movies, we lend ourselves as willing accomplices to the worlds they offer hoping they can somehow transform the real

Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

through a utopic inversion (602). It is precisely this kind of attachment of the fan to a star that the entertainment industry actively nurtures. Marshall referred to the industry as an apparatus for the congealing of emotions and sentiments into recognizable sounds, images, and personalities that work to maintain the intensity of emotions (167), essentially, the business of selling imaginaries. Acknowledging this willful and revenue-driven construction of consumer attachment does not diminish the power of celebrities and their spectacles. Rather, hypermodern methods of disseminating celebrity spectacle illustrate that artice, if artful, can be even more compelling than the person behind the persona if it forcefully reects the sullied truths of contemporary life. Much of the literature on celebrity spectacle and American popular culture focuses on the Hollywood lm industry, which nurtured stardom as a matter of branding strategy. A star system served as a means for the early studios to differentiate themselves once they understood that a studio brand by itself was an insufcient builder of customer loyalty (Gamson 1994). Marshall also showed that it is difcult to understand celebrity culture without meaningfully conceptualizing the mass audience made possible by printing, sound, and motion picture technologiese.g., the production of sheet musicin addition to a certain democratic effervescence that these technologies helped to foster. As he noted, The images of possibility provided by lms, radio, and popular music represented an accessible form of consumption. The discourse that surrounded these celebrities provided the evidence of access to stardom (9). Dyer and others were correct to link celebrity success to the anxieties of the historical and social contexts in which fame is acquired. By framing Gagas aesthetic appeal in relation to the broader cultural landscape, a connection can be made to the turbulences thrown up by a hypermodern mode of culture production, a hyperculture in which entertainment is transformed from an occasional personal and group diversion to a way of life, occupying all the interstices between periods of work (Bertman 123). With the rise of todays technologies, fans can listen to their favorite stars on digital music players, watch music videos on camera-enabled phones, and discuss the latest news and images of celebrity exploits on Web sites often run by other devotees. As Herwitz notes, Increasingly today the forms of aesthetic appreciation cut across individual media, and are the product of many in particular

Victor P. Corona

concert (49), an observation not lost on pop stars eager to demonstrate the uniqueness of their identities. The remainder of this article will examine the mass appeal and subcultural allure of the aesthetic crafted by Gaga and her Haus of Gaga creative team, which she modeled after Warhols Factory and lled with close friends. Using previous theoretical work on celebrity, cultural commentary, and statements by the artist herself, the article will contextualize Gagas fame in a period where the pace of cultural production redenes how a recording artist can establish a presence that lasts more than the proverbial fteen minutes. Of course, the accelerated business cycles of creative industries in the postwar period have long caused concerns over the meaningfulness and originality possible in cultural production. Such pressures, however, may also generate new and innovative recombinations of aesthetic material in ways that may shock todays audiences but seem routinized in a few years. There are important cases where aesthetic recombinations of different performance modalities have led to new and enduring styles: The rock performance style emerged out of the conuence of black performance style with the need to express the sincerity of personality and individuality of the performer/star (Marshall 158). Therefore, it is possible that the kind of cultural bricolage with which Gaga is experimenting may ultimately open new and enduring terrains of theatricality in pop culture.

The Persistence of Memory?

The background of Lady Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, has been reported in numerous interviews and a biography published in 2010 (Herbert 2010). Growing up on Manhattans Upper West Side, she attended the elite Convent of the Sacred Heart on Fifth Avenue and later New York Universitys Tisch School of the Arts before leaving to pursue her career full-time. Despite having academic success, she has repeatedly stated that she felt isolated from other Sacred Heart students. Learning piano by the age of four, she wrote her rst piano ballad as a teenager and later began playing at open-mic nights at clubs. While building her career in the Manhattan club scene, her voice reminded a New York producer of Queens theatrical lead singer, Freddie Mercury, and bestowed upon her a name inspired by the bands

Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

nostalgic 1984 song, Radio Ga Ga. Aside from Queen, she has expressed her admiration for David Bowie, Boy George, Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Constantin Stanislavski, and Rainer Maria Rilke (his famous must I write? passage is tattooed on her left arm). Perhaps few stage names in pop culture are as ironic as Lady Gagas. Radio Ga Ga was a wistful lament of how radio was being displaced and made to appear antiquated by the novelty of television. By contrast, the fame of Lady Gaga and other contemporary pop stars has largely been sustained by technologies like Twitter, YouTube, and camera- and video-enabled phones with which fans can almost immediately capture and upload news and images of celebrity sightings. Etymologically, the expression going gaga has dual meanings of baby talk and adoration (Purves 147) as well as lunacy. In the case of todays pop stars, fans go gaga in part by compulsively using interactive technologies to connect to an artists aura and each other. In order to capitalize on this trend, industry leaders work to combine their resources with the power of viral marketing and drive the vigor and speed with which celebrity culture is consumed. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, Gaga has made shrewd use of new digital platforms, while still leveraging the clout of a major label, an institution deemed obsolete by many proponents of DIY [do-it-yourself] culture (Jurgensen 2010). Just as the television signaled the advent of the pop spectacle once larger audiences could see performances and not merely listen over grainy radio waves, the diffusion of digital media means that recording artists can tweet links to fan-made videos and make followers instantaneously aware of new images and promotional material. Given that Gaga has released albums titled The Fame and The Fame Monster, it is not surprising that she is preoccupied with the performance of celebrity and the construction of a lasting artistic legacy. As she told Rolling Stone, My true legacy will be the test of time, and whether I can sustain a space in pop culture and really make stuff that will have a genuine impact (Hiatt, Rise of Lady Gaga). But Engel Lang and Lang draw a valuable distinction between recognition and renown in the building of artistic reputation. According to them, recognition reects the respect of an artists peers, while renown is measurable by how well a person is known outside a specic art world and depends on the publicity that only critics and dealer promotion pro-

Victor P. Corona

vide (84). In terms of peer recognition, Gaga is reported to be friendly with artists like Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Marilyn Manson, although she is usually reluctant to describe her relationships with older artists. The more provocative elements of Gagas avant-garde project are balanced by her collaborations with more conventional peers like Beyonce. Gaga and her Haus advisers understand that in order to build renown, her image and music should have ties to other modes of aesthetic appreciation. At a benet for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, she wore a hat made by Frank Gehry and performed on a piano painted by the artist Damien Hirst. At the event, she told the New Yorker, The objective is to always be making something that belongs in a museum. Even what Im wearing right now (Goodyear 2009). A few months later, at Queen Elizabeths annual Royal Variety show, Gaga was suspended from a swing and played a piano balanced on spindly dark legs that evoked the nightmarish landscapes of Salvador Dal and Tim Burton. As she explained to the London Times, I dont wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music (Barber 2009). Gagas attention to the constant articulation of her aesthetic, especially for fans in attendance at her concerts, should not be casually dismissed. Vannini, among others, rightfully champions Denzins reshifting of the question of aesthetics to the actual moment of experience, that which is found at the genesis of experience itselfthe existential moment of interpretation of ones lifeworld (48). Indeed, a central feature of Gagas vision is her Warholian celebration of pop culture, which has been derided as low-brow kitsch created purely for the consumption of the undiscerning masses. By contrast, her ofcial Web site biography states, Pop culture is art. It doesnt make you cool to hate pop culture, so I embraced it and you hear it all over The Fame. But, its a sharable fame. I want to invite you all to the party. I want people to feel a part of this lifestyle (ladygaga.com). In elaborating this as one goal of her enterprise, Gagas music seeks to bridge what theorists have understood as the Bourdieusian distinction between a subeld of art where the highest reaches of symbolic capital are controlled by a small avant-garde and one where an aspirant, bohemian avant-garde claims to shun even symbolic capital (Hesmondhalgh 215). In this regard, Gaga has made repeated references to Andy Warhol, the Pop image-maker described by one philosopher as the artist

Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

laureate of the American soul (Danto 131). Like Gaga, Warhols body of work reects a desire to tinker with the aesthetic power of the core symbols of American culture. While musing about how the White House would be decorated if he were elected President, Warhol wrote, Can you see the Blue Room with Campbells Soup Cans all over the walls? Because thats what Foreign Heads of State should see, Campbells Soup Cans and Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Thats America (15). Gagas afnity for the enigmatic Pop artist can be read as an appreciation for an artistic vision that can both champion and twist the iconography of pop culture through a variety of media. As she told the Guardian, I strive to be a female Warhol. I want to make lms and music, do photography and paint one day, maybe. Make fashion. Make big museum art installations. I would be a bit more mixed-media than him probablycombining mixed media and imagery and doing more of a kind of a weird pop-art piece (Barton 2009). The Warholian inuence on Gagas music can also be traced to her desire to rmly install pop music in the realm of ne art. She stated, Theres been a lot of damage done over the past 30 years with artists saying that pop music sucks. Its lowbrow, manufactured, fake, plastic. They say we need to go back to the real music, so weve had to listen to some really depressing singer-songwriters and indie-rock bands (Hobart 2008). In order to pursue enduring reputations, other artists have also crafted amboyant identities that pushed the boundaries of theatricality. Relevant cases might include the Beatles Sgt. Pepper guise, Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines, Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana, Beyonce as Sasha Fierce, and David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, although there is signicant variation in the degree to which these personas have been incorporated into the performers artistic repertoires. The important point to highlight here is that this kind of theatricality can be used as a challenge to established denitions of identity and expected forms of behavior. As Auslander noted, Glam rocks central social innovation was to open a safe cultural space in which to experiment with versions of masculinity that clearly outed social norms (228). Theatrical alter-egos can also be seen as efforts to express an exaggerated version of what Adler and Adler referred to as the celebritys gloried self. This identity emerges as the result of a person being the focus of intense interpersonal and media attention, leading to their achieving celebrity (299). These authors, however, were primarily

Victor P. Corona

concerned with exploring the detrimental side effects of such a self, including a growing disregard for the concerns of the precelebrity self, e.g., detachment from family, and the rise of an unstable dualism between the pre-celebrity self and the gloried self (306). In her own displays of hypermodern theatricality, Gagas fashion is a fundamental visual instrument in her quest to be seared into popular memory. For a May 2009 cover of Rolling Stone, Gaga wore an outt made of plastic bubbles. A scene of the video for her Bad Romance single features Gaga strutting in massive, glittering green armadillo heels designed by the late Alexander McQueen, at whose October 2009 fashion show the song premiered. At the 2009 American Music Awards, she was tted with an illuminated headdress, top, and heels made to resemble bones, while the 2010 Grammys opened with Gagas duet with Elton John while both wore glittering vestments covered in ash. Elements of other dresses have included plush gures of Kermit the Frog and Hello Kitty. Other performances were conducted while wearing black, geometric shapes resembling bat wings, clear plastic crystals protruding from her shoulders and hips, and red lace with a blond hairpiece made to resemble a halo. The London-based milliner Philip Treacy has designed some of her more memorable headpieces, including hats in the form of a sparkling lobster and a black, leathery telephone. The deployment of avant-garde fashion in the creation of a hypermodern star should not be easily overlooked. As Mandoki claimed, It may be frivolous, supercial, semantically empty, trivial, and imsy; it nonetheless materializes urban values of fantasy, originality, novelty, and creativity (612). For Lipovetsky, hypermodern culture is the fullest expression of a society of fashion in which the cult of the new is asserting itself as an everyday and widespread passion (37). While most celebrities craft some sort of sartorial identity, Gaga is always clad in apparel usually seen only on Fashion Week runways. Such public displays confront the strictures of fashion binding on the rest of the population, the vestimentary regimes [that] delineate the circumstances in which a style might be deployed, as in clarifying the situations in which different types of attire are appropriate or not . . . (Corona and Godart 14). Gagas aesthetic challenges the potency of such regimes and afrms the hypermodern imperative of individual self-expression that is evident throughout venues in Manhattans club scene (Colman 2010).

Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

In this devotion to fashion, there are echoes of Evita Peron, the wife of Argentinas controversial populist leader Juan Peron, and the tie between her maintenance of a loyal political base in the urban poor and working classes and the glamour of her persona. In postwar Argentina, Her followers memorized the details of her every change of dressthe ttings, the designers, the gold lame, the hats, mantillas, even a tiaraand never tired of the rainbow of images that spread over the media of the time and continued glowing in the huge full-colored photographs of magazines still dedicated, twenty-ve years later, exclusively to her (Taylor 76). It was perhaps tting that the 1996 lm adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical should feature Madonna in the starring role. Indeed, the Queen of Pop regnant is said to have vigorously campaigned to play the role of a South American woman who rose from poverty and obscurity into the limelight of fame and power. Ironically, although Evita would come to be swathed in Cartier and Dior, her destitute followers were known as descamisados, shirtless ones. Like Evita, both Madonna and Gaga understand the power of high fashion to sustain popular imaginaries, whether they be in the service of a pop stars legacy or the political agenda of populist reformers. As Mandoki noted, Fashion opens up the curtains of social imaginaries to a stage where each and everyone is invited, like Cinderellas at the castle of Prince Charming, to the world of glamour and masquerade. It is all a matter of adequate attire (600). Because apparel and appearance sustain the imaginaries tied to a stars aura, it is perhaps no coincidence that Evita, Madonna, and Gaga, like the inimitable icon Marilyn Monroe, are all brunettes-cum-blondes. When the image of someone like Gaga becomes so closely associated with spectacle, the question of authenticity inevitably emerges. Vannini and Meyers have explored this problem in the cases of pop stars Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears, respectively. Vannini analyzes online consumer reviews and offers an excellent account of how the authenticity of pop-punk star Avril Lavigne was belied by her ability to play the guitar and the extent to which her entire artistic persona was carefully managed by Arista as those of any other popular persona (55). Along similar lines, Meyers examines the authenticity of pop princess Britney Spears and the obsessive interest in her failed marriage and child-rearing ability. Meyers noted, The never-ending quest for the real celebrity bestows upon her persona heightened cultural signicance that is disseminated through all forms of celebrity media

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(896). The question of authenticity is rendered almost meaningless, however, given that the stars day-to-day life is thoroughly consumed by the mechanics of performing. Meyers concluded that being Britney can never really be an ordinary experience. She is constantly followed by paparazzi, spends much of her life either preparing for or performing on stage, and rarely has a moment to herself away from her fans or her entourage (902). Gaga has avoided the authenticity dilemma by afrming that she is the persona she inhabits on stage. Unlike other successful female singers like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, her stage presence does not use any version of her birth name. In early 2009 she claimed, The largest misconception is that Lady Gaga is a persona or a character. Im noteven my mother calls me Gaga. I am 150,000 percent Lady Gaga every day (Scaggs 2009).

The Monsters Within

Since her rst albums release in 2008, Lady Gaga has enthusiastically played with the trope of monstrosity. Her rerelease of The Fame with new tracks, The Fame Monster, includes a song titled Monster that describes a male love interest with evil eyes who, she sings, ate my heart and then he ate my brain. Her 2009 10 tour is called The Monster Ball, a term that evokes the monsters ball tradition of English jailers in which they would celebrate on the night before a prisoners execution. She consistently addresses her fans as my little monsters, a term which they eagerly use among themselves. The word monster is thereby used to indict past relationships and fame and to celebrate the products of that fame, her fans. Monster becomes a metaphor for the maddening swirl of images, anxieties, and fads in hypermodern life. As Gaga explained to Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times, Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves. I guess what I am trying to do is take the monster and turn the monster into a fairy tale. Gaga offered additional explanation in an interview with Rolling Stone: Each one of these songs on my album represents a different demon that Ive faced in myself, so the music is much more personal. I dont write about fame or money at all on this new record. So we talked about monsters and how, I believe, that innately were all born with

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the monsters already inside of usI guess in Christianity they call it original sinthe prospect that we will, at some point, sin in our lives, and we will, at some point, have to face our own demons, and theyre already inside of us. (Hiatt, Inside the Monster Ball) One of the best examples of this narrative in Gagas aesthetic is probably the video for the rst Fame Monster single, Bad Romance. The video was made by the lm director Francis Lawrence, whose movies include Constantine (2005) and I Am Legend (2007), both of which feature ghoulish characters. The Bad Romance video is built around a story of sex slavery in which Gaga is sold to the Russian maa but ultimately destroys the man who purchased her. Animals are used to lend a bestial avor to the video, which includes a furless cat, a furless bat and a taxidermied rat used as hairpieces, mounted antelopes on the maosos bedroom walls, and a coat whose train ends in the head of the classic polar bearskin rug. The dance moves recall the clawed ngers of the dancing undead in Michael Jacksons Thriller, while one set of costumes appears to be inspired by Maurice Sendaks Where the Wild Things Are. The lyrics make reference to the lms Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window, directed by the master of cinematic macabre, Alfred Hitchcock. The video concludes with Gaga lying beside the charred skeleton of her buyer, her chest emitting the electric sparks that vanquished her captor. In popular culture as a whole, the blending of the beautiful with the monstrous is a well-established motif. The contrast of beast and beauty is used to provoke a reckoning with prevailing ideals of appearance, tolerance, justice, and sexuality. As Ingebretsen argued, Monsters show us what happensto them, certainly, and possibly to us as wellwhen the always vulnerable line between civility and incivility fails. In the language of Aristotle and the ancients, monsters are monere, and monstrare, warnings and demonstrationssigns and Portents (26). Rock stars like Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, and Marilyn Manson also built their careers through a keen sense of the power of the morbid spectacle to attract audiences and provoke media chatter about their albums. The popularity of the Twilight lms and television shows like The Vampire Diaries and True Blood also highlights the renewed vigor of the monster motif in pop culture. The image of the monster in memorable music videos has also been successfully deployed in the past. One of the most popular songs of all

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time, Michael Jacksons 1983 Thriller, had the star himself taking the forms of werewolf and zombie. Mercer has astutely captured how the Thriller videos depiction of monstrosity was inextricable from the overall development and perception of Michael Jacksons sexual identity (werewolf as hypersexual, zombie as antisexual). As Mercer noted, Jacksons transformation into a werewolf (albeit one with feline features) is triggered by his coy comment to the female love interest, Im not like other guys (308). Experimentation in music video imagery alone will not garner commercial success, although it is certainly a powerful mode of expression: Videos are often lled with surrealism; they represent avant-garde lmmaking that serves to associate the popular star with the style and romantic connotations of the innovative artist (Marshall 163). Gaga, however, puts a distinct take on the trope of monstrous Otherness. Weiner has described how Gaga debuted already-deled, in stark contrast to the purity ascribed to Britney Spears before the story of her virginity and its loss became mainstream news. If, as Dyer argued, successful stars touch upon certain social resonances, then Gagas lyrics and videos have successfully touched upon a hypermodern disenchantment and appetite for the raw that continues to be fed by entertainment formats like reality television. Gagas rst hit, Just Dance, is essentially about being drunk at a club but remaining condent in a happy conclusion to a night of drunken stupor. Gagas Grammy-nominated hit, Poker Face, deals with her bisexuality and desiring a woman while she was with a boyfriend, while LoveGame raised eyebrows with her reference to a phallus as a disco stick. The playfulness and earthiness of earlier pop stars is passed over in favor of a more realistic sense of youthful urban revelry. The song Beautiful, Dirty, Rich recalls her period of drug use as a struggling upstart in New Yorks club scene. Even her bubbliest video, for Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say), is an homage, via pastiche, to her ItalianAmerican roots, complete with her sitting on a Vespa in front of Guidos Meat Market and serving spaghetti and meatballs to her husband. Gagas aesthetic vision is perhaps most vividly elaborated in her 2009 10 Monster Ball tour, which she calls a truly artistic experience that is going to take the form of the greatest post-apocalyptic house party that youve ever been to (Hiatt, Inside the Monster Ball) and has been described by a Canadian theater critic as at least twice as

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entertaining and innitely fresher than any stage musical written over the last decade (Nestruck 2009). Relating the sold-out Monster Ball concerts to the success of the Twilight lms, Andrew Lloyd Webbers The Phantom of the Opera, and Michael Jacksons Thriller, a New York Times theater review claims that Gagas show turns the conventions of pop stardom into a fully realized gothic musical that aims for the commercial sweet spot at the intersection of horror and romance (Zinoman 2010). A broader audience was exposed to Gagas neon noir imaginary during a live performance of her song Paparazzi at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where a Romanesque stage draped in pink and white was the site of a bloody simulation of her demise. In the video for the single, she is thrown from a balcony by a lover trying to ensure that paparazzi capture a photograph of their embrace. She somehow survives, fatally poisons the lover, and is arrested at the conclusion of the video. While the song itself deals with being a fan obsessed with a male rock star, the video features images of dead women that recall Hol lywoods most famous murdered ingenue, the Black Dahlia. The story was continued in the nine-minute video for the 2010 Telephone single. In the video, Gaga is jailed in a Prison for Bitches until she is bailed out by Beyonce. Together they poison a diner full of people and escape in the Pussy Wagon featured in Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill lm. Throughout the video, Gaga and Beyonce are adorned with essential artifacts of Pop America: soda cans, leather jackets, American ags, cowboy hats, and, of course, a telephone. Rather than subsume these dark displays into another brooding, moody celebrity demeanor, Gaga claimed that the Frida Kahlo-inspired Paparazzi performance on MTV was actually an attempt to preempt the tale of a tragic celebrity demise that has now become a xture of pop lore, as in the deaths of Princess Diana, Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe. Gaga told Elle, I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public, I can somehow cure my own legend. I can show you so youre not looking for it. Im dying for you on domestic televisionheres what it looks like, so no one has to wonder (Purves 147). Using a performance of the song Paparazzi to comment on the insatiability of the public gaze is interesting given that photographers images so often capture stars as they perform the most mundane of activities, like shopping for groceries or walking their dogs. The images captured by paparazzi therefore lie in a gray area that

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rubs out the Durkheimian separation of the sacred (stars and their glamor) and the profane (the drab, everyday lives of the nonfamous). Casting aside this sacred/profane division, Gagas vision may prove that the more important delineation in hypermodern pop culture is between the monstrous and the merely mundane. One benet of this branding strategy is the ability to solidify the degree to which Gaga can associate subcultural membership with her music and thereby activate enduring allegiances. As Marshall describes: The stars cultural power depended on a very close afnity with a specic and loyal audience. The star, then, was actively engaged in the construction and differentiation of audience groups, in terms of style and taste, and in authenticating their elevated position. The popular music star, more than other forms of celebrity, had to be a virtual member of his or her own audience in order to sustain his or her inuence and authenticity, and the commitment of the fan (161). The power of the monster motif lies in being able to attract other self-identifying outcasts to her music and aesthetic, an effort that Gaga hopes will ultimately empower them to express the monster within them. The possibility of self-empowerment via a celebration of ones Otherness is a powerful function of public and televised spectacles. For example, Smit praises the display of children aficted with muscular dystrophy during the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, claiming that the event actually offers power and agency to the children themselves (688). In a comparable way, when interviewed by Barbara Walters as one of the most fascinating people of 2009, Gaga claimed that she hopes to liberate her fans from their fears so that they can create their own space in the world (air date, December 9, 2009). Like other female pop stars, Lady Gaga marshals her femininity in her performances. An open bisexual, she vigorously defends the gay community and, despite explicitly gendering her stage name, has at times mischievously fed rumors that she is a hermaphrodite. The careers of other female pop stars demonstrate the challenge of negotiating this aspect of the celebrity identity. Judy Garland, for example, embodied three distinct identities that struck a cultural chord: the allAmerican small town girl-next-door; the personication of showbiz good humour and bezazz; the neurotic woman (Dyer, A Star Is Born 132). Garland thereby captured key elements of what Britney Spears,

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Beyonce, and Courtney Love each represent individually. An alternative rock star of the 1990s, Alanis Morissette colored her display of femininity with a seething rage aimed at former lovers and authority gures before undergoing an artistic transformation that yielded songs like In Praise of the Vulnerable Man and Giggling Again for No Reason. More recently, Britney Spears cultivated a girl-next-door identity before a torrent of news about premarital sex, drug use, and irresponsible parenting largely deated her rise. By contrast, Gagas teasing lyrics, shocking outts, and outrageous comments at concerts warp the kind of sexualized performance introduced by Madonna, who famously attracted attention by writhing on the ground in a wedding dress and celebrating sadomasochism in the music video for the song Erotica. Yet despite Gagas distinctive mark on pop music early in her career, she is not storming the gates of American cultural mores. She had a rather conventional, afuent upbringing in Manhattan in a two-parent household. Despite being an open bisexual, she told Elle that within ten years she hopes to be married with children (Purves 172). In contrast to celebrities who are estranged from parents, Gaga repeatedly talks about being close to her family and states that she wrote the song Speechless from The Fame Monster as a way to convince her father to undergo heart surgery. Her own career narrative proudly proclaims that her upward trajectory was respectful of the appropriate conventions en route to stardom: I did this the way you are supposed to. I played every club in New York City and I bombed in every club and then killed it in every club and I found myself as an artist. I learned how to survive as an artist, get real, and how to fail and then gure out who I was as singer and performer. And, I worked hard (ladygaga.com).

Conclusion
In September 2009, the author stood not far from the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards in Manhattan and spotted someone wearing a glittering gold mask and a wide-brimmed black hat. The gure slowly meandered past camera ashes and ascended a small stage to be interviewed, just a sidewalk away from the evening trafc owing uptown on Sixth Avenue. Nearby, a young woman muttered, That has

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to be Lady Gagaonly she would wear something like that. The onlooker was correct. It then became evident that Gagas escort for the evening was Kermit the Frog, whom she repeatedly kissed while being interviewed on MTV. Presumably, Gaga would have been pleased to hear the onlookers statement. She would have likely taken it as evidence that she had successfully established an easily recognizable identity on a cultural landscape brimming with performers desperately trying to stand out. In order to begin unpacking the meanings behind the aesthetic actively constructed by Gaga and her creative team, this article has argued that her unique spectacle says much about the hypermodern pace of cultural consumption and the heightened requirements for longevity on the public stage. As Engel Lang and Lang wrote, Survival in the collective memory is closely tied to the survival of tangible objects that recall the deceased (80), to which those living in the age of Google, Twitter, and YouTube would add video, photos, and tweets diffused via the BlackBerrys and iPhones always ready at the consumers side. It remains to be seen, however, if Gaga can continue to surpass the quality of intimate strangers (Schickel 1985) that inevitably characterizes the celebrity fan encounter, based as it is on a fundamental asymmetry of knowledge (Ferris 28). Also, Gaga is not without her vehement critics, who see only empty spectacle and pompous airs without any substantive content. Wondering what the late Claude Levi-Strauss would have said about Gaga, a Newsweek music critic wrote, The problem with Gaga is that she refuses to add any concrete value, while also wanting us to think she has something to say (Colter Walls 57). Although she has publicly acknowledged the criticism that she is only a pretentious attention grabber, Gaga projects condence that her little monsters are meaningfully connecting with her aesthetic and are now spreading the book of Gaga around the world (Barber 2009). As early as 1998, scholars began lamenting the rise of a hyperculture that today Gaga best represents, whether or not she also criticizes elements of that culture. Bertman, for example, bemoaned the idea that each successive invitation to superciality and transience becomes a further distraction, keeping us from pursuing the quest for deeper and more enduring truths (47). Given that, for him, hypercultural devices included pagers and microwaves, one can only imagine how egregious he would nd music-playing, email-enabled camera

Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

17

phones and the connectivity they provide. Today, it appears that even the recession will not slow the culture of the fastest. A sociocultural context inundated by information only emphasizes the urgency with which stars seek to activate and sustain mass interest and fan loyalty for reasons other than visits to drug clinics (Lindsay Lohan), adoption litigation (Madonna), unseemly sex scandals (Tiger Woods), wardrobe malfunctions (Janet Jackson), or a sudden, suspicious demise (Michael Jackson). Bertman and other critics might instead nd solace in the idea that the dizzying pace of hypermodern culture may ultimately augment the effervescence enabled by celebrities, the power to provide some sense of communitycommon idols, if not common ideals (Schickel 275). As the rst hypermodern pop music star, Lady Gagas brand of celebrity emerges during a period beleaguered by recession and war, a time that yearns for the occasional glimpse of the sublime. The advent of hypermodernity has only heightened the persistent longing for the spectacle of stardom as a ready escape from the tedium of everyday life. With organized religion in decline throughout much of the west, celebrity culture has become a means of social integration in a context where the public secretly longs for that rare charismatic gure whose auratic values are not reduced but magnied. The desire for someone around whom to make a cult gets greater and greater (Herwitz 134). To sustain such devotion, however, a captivating voice, an ingenues smile, and dizzying dance moves may no longer be enough. A hypermodern cult seeks a grander pose, a more thorough means of dazzling the spectator and holding her attention via an array of images and media. It is this role that Lady Gaga seeks to ll. The Manifesto of Little Monsters pronounced at her concerts declares, It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future.

Note
1. The Jackson Fives rst four singles, also hits, were spread across multiple albums.

18 Works Cited

Victor P. Corona

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