Rogueish
Beyoncé, Gaga, Heterosexism, Feminism and Other Things
12/17/11
So I’m in the middle of a Facebook debate with a friend of mine about Beyoncé that was basically provoked by this article, which he agrees with and has led him to broadly assert that Beyoncé “affirms heteronormative heterosexuality as the sole way for girls to assert their sexuality.” That seemed overly reductive to me, and we’ve been bantering back and forth about it. Figured I’d rather compile what I wrote somewhere easier for me to locate than someone else’s Facebook wall. However, I’d be interested in hearing the rest of y’all weigh in on this. Is B thoroughly tied into heteronormativity? Moreso than your average pop or R&B star? Less so? Should she really be, as the article suggests, embracing Gaga-esque positions in her music?
Robin James has written a bunch of great stuff about pop, gender, and race, and Beyoncé specifically, and this post on “Single Ladies” even more specifically.
it's her factory: The Gender Difference That Race Makes, The Race Difference That Gender Makes, And The Race/Gender Difference That Music Makes: Joe Calderone, take 2→
09/01/11
So how does Joe establish “musical authenticity”? First, in his monologue, Joe establishes himself as part of the “depth” to Gaga’s “surface”: Gaga “is theater” and Joe is “just the rehearsal.” He’s the “real life” behind her “mere” performance. Obviously the kinging complicates any claims to personal “real-ness”, but in terms of musical authenticity, it’s precisely the performance that is considered more or less “real” (i.e., we’re not contrasting music as performance when with real life, but different musical performances as varyingly authentic). Second, (and this is what most people are picking up on) Joe does not make use of elaborate costumes, staging, or dancing. He seems to be “just about the music” rather than “mainly about the image.” This read is, of course, totally incorrect: the kinging shows that the supposed “directness” of Joe’s musical presentation is actually at least if not more INdirect and mediated than Gaga’s performances. Nevertheless, Joe’s performance is clearly thought to be more intimate, more “purely” musical, than Gaga’s.
Third, Joe’s performance of musical masculinity associates him with established hip-hop “legends,” and distances him from other men of color, who generally perform avowedly “pop” music. In the same way that “hip hop” is seen as more authentic and more “masculine” than pop, Joe is seen as more authentic and more masculine—and also less white—than Gaga.
The Facade of Glory
06/20/11
None of this should be a surprise, though, if you listened to the album. Part of the problem is that Born This Way is so cluttered it actively undermines any overarching thesis you try to nurture into it — anything can make 75% sense. Almost everyone’s (rightly) mentioned the triumph in every song, but that’s only the edge of the story; there’s triumph, but it’s desperate, performed and as apt to crumble as Gaga’s storyline. Alex Macpherson wrote that Born This Way” was composed of songs designed to make the listener feel strong, invulnerable and 73 feet tall.” It’s accurate, but only just; these songs are more like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands. There’s too much talk of tears on the album, of facing love gone turncoat and facing death with stolen glory, for any strength to be unqualified. For all the rah-rah gravitas Lady Gaga gives her Monsters, there’s something truly monstrous about Born This Way: something small and ugly lurking behind the corners and constantly clawing forth its tendrils. And in its presence, all of Gaga’s showy self-regard, gunk of ideas, cranked-high BPM and dingy subject matter are just boards and plaster straining to keep it shut away.
This is very right. I do think Gaga is pretty self-aware about this, though; there’s a fairly consistent move back and forth between celebrating all this artifice for giving her the ability to construct the 73-foot tall Gaga, and disgust at the kind of twisting of herself this involves (“Scheiße be mine” vs “I wish I could be strong without the Scheiße, yeah”). So I guess I maybe disagree a bit with the conclusion:
That’s been beyond the artifice all this time, and if it took a lot of drama and failure to break through the junk-barrier of Catholic exploitation and cured meat dresses and sonic stupidity, perhaps it’s for the better.
What I find most interesting about Gaga is the (tragic?) sense she gives that the “Catholic exploitation and cured meat dresses and sonic stupidity” aren’t just barriers, but are barriers that she needs in order to get beyond them.
“Scheiße be mine”
05/29/11
Finally dredged up from my memory what “Scheiße” has been reminding me of. From The Invisibles (v. 3, n. 8), during a visit to the Marquis de Sade’s experimental community:
It appears that some brave individuals are working with the “sick” alien material that accompanies negative contact with the “other side.” It brings illness and fevers and they call it “Feeding the Beast.” … Panning for gold in the archetypal dung of the human unconscious….
“It’s visions of death camps, biological filth, demonic types of sexuality, inhuman technology. We abused one another, we experienced psychotic, morbid states of shame, disgust, greed, fear and power…. But the experience cured my shyness and my anorexia. And the lump I had in my left breast is gone completely.”
Remember when the internet crowdsourced a list of samples on Daft Punk’s Discovery?
05/18/11
We should do that, except with “stuff from c. 1995-2005 that songs on Born This Way kind of sound like.” For instance, is that a fleeting moment of Whigfield’s “Think of You” in the chorus of “Bad Kids”?
(Of course, Discovery is itself something that “Edge of Glory” sound a bit like.)
Why does “Born This Way” have such terrible lyrics?
02/14/11
That they are terrible is not, I think, in any doubt; but most people seem to have just taken this as a brute fact, when it really needs explaining. Lady Gaga has written lots of songs, none of which are close to as clumsy as “Born This Way.” I wonder if the issue here is that she’s writing in a new idiom, one that prizes transparency and personal intimacy, and writing is not a transferable skill. I have what I think may be an inaccurate memory that Judith Butler prefaces her first book with an apology for the clumsiness of the final chapter, which represents, she says (in my memory, if not in fact), her first attempt to write about feminist theories in which she has a personal investment which isn’t present in the more abstractly philosophical discussion in the rest of the book. Perhaps Lady Gaga finds herself in a similar situation.
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
02/13/11
I was going to make a joke on Twitter about how I was waiting for the Dave Audé remix of “Born This Way,” until a Google search revealed that there apparently really are people waiting for the Dave Audé remix. The reason the very idea of a Dave Audé remix is funny, though, is that he is the master of the generic gay club banger, but “Born This Way” is already the most generic possible gay club banger.
This is why people who think they are criticizing “Born This Way” by finding more and more tracks that it sounds like are missing the point. If it just sounded like “Express Yourself,” that might be a problem; but sounding like “Express Yourself” and “Waterfalls” (already an unexpected combination) and “Ooh Aah Just a Little Bit” and “What a Girl Wants” and about 80 other things emphasizes that it is generic in the sense of universal or all-embracing; it’s perfectly anthemic musically in the way the lyrics strive rather clunkily to be.
