Comments

• • sarah beth@sarahma108

  

  sarah beth February 11, 2011 - 1:23pm

  I think the "point" of Gaga is that she's copying an originality that doesn't, and probably can't, exist. As has been pointed out about her appropriation of Madonna's sound and image:

  every generation must have its icons and the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations within which older people sneer at younger people’s tastes never does change anything. [...] Madonna was the queen of rip offs and [...] her cultural borrowings were almost never acknowledged and often fell within a long tradition of white absorptions of Black cultural innovations.

  No doubt Gaga is a brazen plagiarist ( I dunno about legal actions by or against her, but there are a few other interesting posts on the above-linked blog about Gaga's use of appropriation and "repeat" to blend subject and object, human and techonological, old and new media, "original" and adapted art). I'm not gonna argue her (or her label's) intent, but what I enjoy about it is the potential for popular exposure of "originality" as an origin myth: a story that defines some producers as the "original" innovators and erases the critical voices of all the work that then gets redefined as "not art."

• • sarah beth@sarahma108

  

  sarah beth February 13, 2011 - 12:27am

  Oooo! There's Gaga on my fbook too! (copyright law = yawn, but I'll always bite for LG) Rolling Stone has decided to weigh (cash?) in on Born This Way:

  "Born This Way" is more than just Gaga’s heavily hyped return to the radio: It’s an event, a statement, the most anticipatrended song in the history of recorded music, or at least since Britney’s "Hold It Against Me." It’s also primed to become the first Number One hit in history to include the word "transgendered." [...] You can complain all you want about the tip of the leather cap to "Express Yourself," which was just Madonna’s knock-off of the Staple Singers’ "Respect Yourself." But "Born This Way" is steeped in decades of gay disco tradition, with a heavy Seventies-style thump-thump from Patrick Hernandez’ 1979 classic "Born to Be Alive." (Fun fact: one of Madonna’s first professional gigs was as a back-up dancer on a Patrick Hernandez tour, and you can believe Gaga knows it.)

  1) "Anticipatrended" is a great word. Imma steal it.

  2) I didn't think there was much to take seriously about Gaga until last June, at the Queeriot Convergence in Guelph. After a day of neverending consent workshops for the ill-fated sex party (a staple [and running joke] of radical queer get-togethers: everybody wants one, but nobody can plan one), and an evening of listening to a spoken word-death metal duo that adapted amateur porn and a handheld circular saw as instruments (ouch, my ears), what packed the dance floor was... "Poker Face"? Really? Why? I think what queers love about Gaga is how she problematizes the "original copies" of the gender roles and social-sexual relations we appropriate and adapt to build our identites. It's great that we can make them work for us, in transformed and ironic ways, but it's also a nice "ha! take that!" moment to see how very constructed and copied the originals were to begin with, and to have that power "originate" in our fandom. Some complainy guy nailed it in the comments:

  She doesn't have real political convictions. She only declares her love for those who support her. If she'd had a massive straight following, she wouldn't have cared a bit about dedicating her songs to the outcasts or writing one specifically for them for that matter.

  But she doesn't have a massive straight following, complainy guy. So ha!

   

  (btw, im in ur internets, gayin up ur blog.)

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon February 14, 2011 - 10:16am

  Thanks for the article tip. (Bit weird to see it in a sausage party rag like Rolling Stone, but good for them, for a change.) The kind of radio station that plays Gaga most (in Canada, anyway) -- Z103 in Toronto, for example -- isn't just for "morning commuters" but targets (quite explicitly, if you read their fine print) pre-teen girls -- a demographic for which I'd say queer-positive and affirming lyrics like those in this song are welcome, given the overabundance of their polar opposite (sadly, on the same kind of station).

  From what I've seen on the dancefloor, Gaga's tracks work because she channels the semiotics you describe through huge lyrical drama, and musical samples of underground dance (again, like Madonna). The standout example is "Bad romance," with its homage to "paperback novels, the kind the drugstores sell" and its well-placed Juno Alpha "hoover" synth riffs. "Born this way" drops cues not just to disco's glory days, but to contemporary underground as well: the beat-drop at 1;50, in the middle of the second verse, is a little moment for dubstep, of all things. As for the lyrics, they exemplify the "strategic essentialism" we've been discussing: among the many queer lyrical references, "born this way" signifies the clear opposition that minoritized sexualities have had to deploy against the perception that sexuality is a "choice" (and therefore something one could change, or get sent to a "camp" for).

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon February 18, 2011 - 10:04am

  Update: I'll take this story about Lady GaGa's endorsement of a little Canadian girl who covered "Born this way" on Youtube as some solid evidence supporting my hunch here.

   

  

  The Youtube vid in question is pretty excellent.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG0wi1m-89o

• • sarah beth@sarahma108

  

  sarah beth February 18, 2011 - 3:00pm

  Oh, my heart. *Every* squish in the world for that young woman. And now it's going all over my facebook.

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon February 18, 2011 - 3:27pm

  Quoth Ferris Bueller, "life moves pretty fast." Check it out: the Lady and the girl are already collaborating.

• • Mark A. McCutcheon@mccutcheon

  

  Mark A. McCutcheon March 22, 2011 - 9:19am

  Another stellar cover from the musical youth! You go, kid!

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ftgv3BHd0

• • sarah beth@sarahma108

  

  sarah beth March 22, 2011 - 9:48am

  That kid is fucking adorable.

   

  Where's the AU LG research group? I thought you were gonna get on that.