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Lady Gaga, copyfighter?
Google search results for “Lady Gaga infringement”: 630,000
For “Lady Gaga copyright”: 270,000,000
That’s a lot of Intertubes about Lady Gaga and copyright. Sifting the results, though, turns up little by way of actual actions. She threatened to sue the maker of a "Lady Gag Gag" sex doll, for instance; and action against her has been threatened by an alleged co-writer.
(If anyone knows of other actions, please comment -- I just haven’t time to sift all two hundred and seventy million results!)
Rather more of the results have to do instead with Gaga's perceived lack of originality, pointing out rather obvious similarities between her image and music and those of Madonna, or, say, between her meat dress and Canadian sculptor Jana Sterbak's 1987 meat dress.
I had bristled, at first, that Lady Gaga so nakedly plagiarized the meat dress. But it now occurs to me that what she’s doing in music and fashion combined is oddly representative of today’s remix culture, in a political climate of ever more restrictive IP regulation. Lady Gaga, a major presence in both fashion and music now, is, in a way, bringing something of the copyright-indifferent business practices of the former -- in which "there's very little intellectual property protection" -- to bear on the copyright-mad business practices of the latter.
Maybe not intentionally, maybe just inadvertently.
In any case, the various productions and performances of Lady Gaga stand open to some very suggestive interpretation, as critical statements on the present state of tensions and negotiations between the corporate-backed hegemony of “originality” and the creativity of open appropriation.
- ▶ How Education Works, the audio book: now with beats
November 8, 2023 - 3:46pm
Jon Dron
Mark A. McCutcheon
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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:
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."
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:
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:
But she doesn't have a massive straight following, complainy guy. So ha!
(btw, im in ur internets, gayin up ur blog.)
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).
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
Oh, my heart. *Every* squish in the world for that young woman. And now it's going all over my facebook.
Quoth Ferris Bueller, "life moves pretty fast." Check it out: the Lady and the girl are already collaborating.
Another stellar cover from the musical youth! You go, kid!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ftgv3BHd0
That kid is fucking adorable.
Where's the AU LG research group? I thought you were gonna get on that.