The new year is a time to reflect on the issues and ideologies that have shaped our lives over the past year, which is why I will spend my next 600 words on Lady Gaga, who ruled 2009 with her parade of costumes and chameleon “pa-poker face.” She was a simultaneous symbol of the ultra-feminine and the androgynous. She spent the year posing nude for magazines and gyrating for audiences, but she still managed to garner praise from feminist author Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com. In a December interview with Bigthink.com, Valenti acknowledged Lady Gaga as “a new model for feminism.”
In her light-speed rise to the top, she’s been held up next to the legends of edgy pop: David Bowie, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. I’m honing in on a rather different, possibly blasphemous parallel: Bob Dylan. This isn’t an aesthetic comparison — it’s not that I necessarily want or expect the world to continue its love affair with Gaga for another fifty years — but both musicians are masters in turning fame into performance art.
If I’ve learned anything from Bob Dylan, it’s that a true sellout isn’t owned by anyone. Dylan went electric, all the while jeering at audiences and journalists who felt betrayed. Dylan became a “born again” Christian, and Dylan did advertising for Victoria’s Secret. Despite all of these egregious digressions from his original palette of politically loaded folk music, Dylan still garners unconditional veneration from music critics and concert audiences. He’s managed to maintain the public’s gaze by running away from a definable authenticity.
If Gaga’s fame is her art, it’s an elusive masterpiece for public discourse. Not only are we unable to define her personal values, but also the public seems unsure of her natural appearance or, at times, her gender. In an interview on a British talk show, in response to recent gossip-blog allegations that she might actually be a hermaphrodite, Lady Gaga said, deadpan, “Well I do have a really big donkey dick.” I can’t imagine America’s sweetheart Taylor Swift or single diva Beyonce dealing with the hysterical rumor-mill with such cool confusion, which is why Gaga may escape the often short lifespan of the modern pop diva. She’s made no promises about the basic components of her identity, so it would take a truly heinous rumor to actually check her reputation.
So, about Jessica Valenti’s respect for Lady Gaga as a new icon for feminism. Lady Gaga gave feminists a moment — and just a moment — of righteousness when she got snarky with a Norwegian journalist about double standards in the music industry: “If I was a guy, and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hand grabbing my crotch and talking about how I make music because I love fast cars and fucking girls, you’d call me a rock star,” she said. “But when I do it in my music and my videos, because I’m a female… you say that it’s ‘distracting.’ I’m just a rock star.”
Yet, in the same interview, Gaga refused to accept the feminist label, because “I hail men, I love men, I celebrate American male culture: beer, bars, and muscle cars”— a comment that has angered the feminist blogosphere for its blatant, stereotyped association of women’s rights with man-hating.
While sparking an alluring discourse on gender and sexuality, Gaga is a name that can be neither demonized nor co-opted, a fact especially frustrating to people (me, admittedly) with definable ideological agendas.
Whenever I find myself asking: “Is Lady Gaga good for feminism?” I return to a particular image that, I think, transcends value judgment and enters the realm of rock and roll. In the final moments of her “Bad Romance” music video, Lady Gaga power poses in platform stilettos, transparent lingerie, caked-on makeup that is oh so Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a regal, polar bear-hide cape, as flames rise up from the bed behind her where her bad lover sat moments before. Is she powerful or desperate for attention? Is she ugly or beautiful? Does she mean anything? All I know is that I can’t look away, and that’s the fine art of pop.
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