A few weeks ago Lady Gaga released a new controversial music video for her single Telephone. Among fans the nineteen-minute long clip has been celebrated as an extraordinary work of art and even most of the art critics agree that Telephone is an artistic celebration containing excellent visual extravaganza. I noted a big discussion started both in the online and in the offline world about Gaga’s clip. Especially now Time Magazine elected her one of the most influential artists of 2010. I must reckon that her songs are catchy but I don’t really perceive her music as a work of (the always difficult to define concept of) art. Funny enough if I’d use the same argument as Cyndi Lauper did in her piece for Time I’d come to the opposite conclusion:
An artist’s job is to take a snapshot — be it through words or sound, lyrics or song — that explains what it’s like to be alive at that time.
To me Lady Gaga does not reflect at all what it is like being alive in 2010. I think we’re living in a prosperous time where the individual can have all the space he wants, he isn’t bound to his phone or whatever other institution. It isn’t a really good argument though, because with Lauper’s definition art would become entirely subjective and therefore would loose it’s value as soon as you stepped out of the culture-boundaries.
Anyhow, my original intention of this post was not to criticize Lady Gaga at all so excuse me.
As I stated in the beginning I’ve noted a huge discussion going on about her work. There are so many people that detest everything she does, and yet, there are so many people that love what she does. Whenever the two meet in the verbal arena it seems like both parties have their own language and don’t understand each other. I got interested in why they fail to comprehend the opposite opinion and I think the answer lies way beyond the ‘this is art and this is not’ classification. But first, the video itself!
Back in the Dark Ages we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have synthesizers and we didn’t even have compact discs, mp3′s or vinyl. Leave alone we would have Lady Gaga. Five hundred years ago it would have been socially and technologically impossible for Lady Gaga to exist, for if she’d have managed to release a video on KnightTube (the Dark Age predecessor of YouTube) she was probably condemned of being a witch. Five hundred years later though social and technological evolution have made the existence of Internet artists such as Gaga possible. Could we say that the force of biological evolution which was first identified by Darwin also drives other processes? Such as societies and technologies?
There certainly seems to be an ever-lasting progress when it comes to… almost everything. But what causes change then? Along the way there have been certain revolutionaries that tried to bring a shift in the current moral world view. In the Dark Ages it was very normal to kill people who fit the profile of ‘witch’, in this day it isn’t normal anymore so somewhere along the road someone or something led to a change.
In the case of the witches there perhaps was a leader who said: ‘no we can’t do this anymore,’ at first there might’ve been some struggle; there might have been an anti-witch league that protested against this new leader, but if there has been their influence wasn’t noted. Progress in the social sphere.
We travel to the 18th century, where we meet J.S. Bach who is still very popular for his entire repertoire. Whenever Easter draws near his St. Matthew Passion is conducted numerous times and often said to be a genuine masterpiece. Knowing this I was quite surprised when my father (who I trust to an infinite extent when it comes to classical music) told me that back in the day when Bach’s Passion was conducted for the first time everyone thought it was way, way, way too jolly and that the extravagant choirs were horribly out of place. And look how the Passion is criticized now.
Bach was a revolutionary, over the years he completely changed the way people listen and experience classical music.
And now the central question: is Lady Gaga a revolutionary as well? Is she able to shift the moral tools we use nowadays to assess music and music videos? She is criticized by a lot of people so I’d say ‘check’ to that one. Real revolutionary work has quality which assures it from being remembered a few decades into the future. And this is where my fear for Lady Gaga starts.
Visually and audibly her video is agreed to be stunning and probably ground breaking, morally speaking. Gaga’s costumes have what it take to shift boundaries. The general visual is brilliant as well, you can watch the video thrice and still notice new things. The social part of it gets a little worse, killing an entire diner without any real reason is, and will be, morally abject but I’m willing to see through that. The intellectual aspect is much worse though. The lyrics she produces don’t make any sense and there’s one dialog between her and Beyoncé that gives me the shivers:
Beyoncé: You’ve been a very bad girl. A very, very, very bad girl Gaga.
Gaga: Hmmhmm honeybee. – long pause – Sure you wanna do this honeybee?
Beyoncé: What do you mean ‘am I sure’?
Gaga: You know what they say: ‘once you kill a cow, you’ve got to make a burger’.
Beyoncé: You know Gaga, trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it’s broke…
Gaga: …but you can still see the crack in that motherf***er’s reflection..
I wasn’t able to find any intellectual quality in there. What point does Gaga want to make? That clichés sell?
Not all music has to contain intellectual quality. But I think that an artist won’t make it to the twenty-five-year boundary if he bets all his money on visual extravaganza and good beats. But who said Lady Gaga was meant to be the next Bach?
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