The first time I paid attention to Lady Gaga (really paid attention: watched her; mused on her; dissected her willingly) was when she killed herself. It was her breakthrough live performance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where she performed “Paparazzi,” a song that equates the bloodthirsty hounding of her lover-to-be to the relentless lens of the paparazzi.
Ever the extremist, Gaga made sure the metaphor worked twice over, by famously ending the set with her own death, hanging bloodied, surrounded by dancers-turned-pariahs with theatrical bulbs flashing—a victim of the fame.
This was, of course, only shortly after her first album had been released, and its artistic statement was muddied by the fact that Lady Gaga had only recently achieved even a semblance of the fame she claimed to be falling victim to. Here, Gaga was giving us the dramatic finale to her entire mythology as a pop artist—all before we’d even gotten a chance to fully digest her.
Has there ever been a more postmodern performance in mainstream media than that of the Icon as Martyr, before even being established as either? It was clear that a performer with a true knack for zeitgeisty self-promotion had been born.
And just in time, too. With the official death of monoculture (Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson, Michael Jackson, most of the Beatles), the state of pop culture had been in a heady tailspin for the better part of a decade, making it almost impossible to imagine a time where a single person could dominate more than just momentary conversation. Multiple sources are to blame: declining revenue in a time where the culture is expected to be free; the speed of the Internet and the faster rate of overturn and backlash; Warhol’s retort that “everybody will be famous for 15 minutes” proving to be alarmingly prophetic.
So when Lady Gaga entered the scene in 2008, and when she commanded the scene in 2009, and when she became the scene in 2010, it felt like we had collectively found the icon that had eluded us for most of the aughts. Finally, someone understood the culture’s scope and could take the shift and embrace it wholly as part of her identity, both mockingly and self-serious.
Lady Gaga, who performs Jan. 17 at HP Pavilion, is the first pop superstar to be born during the decade of hysterical celebrity culture.
Madonna used the then-growing paparazzi syndicate to her advantage, creating a shock-and-awe campaign everywhere she went; Britney was a victim of the lens, proving once and for all that the act of observation will inevitably change that which is being observed. But it’s Gaga who is the true byproduct of the 24-hour news cycle, where celebrity news has become both personal and political; where tabloids are read as religious texts; where fame and infamy are no long mutually exclusive.
Her influence is undeniable. Lady Gaga has morphed the state of music and the state of pop culture as it exists now. She has, of course, been aided by this era’s refusal to build anything particularly new, rehashing a series of images with some semblance of history, recycling it until it can vaguely be recognized as both something familiar and something radical. Gaga has been aided by this, and has cleverly referred to her body of work as an extension of pop art, which is, by its very nature, about recycling the familiar until we find something new in it.
.Lady Gaga: The Queen Of Extreme in San Jose
