At last year’s MTV awards show, Gaga staged a barbaric spectacle where she was seemingly crushed to death by a falling chandalier, after which her bloodied body was hoisted up to dangle limply above her piano. On her current tour, she appears to be killed by a psychotic stalker, who gnaws her throat as the blood pours down her chest. Monster claws and other horror-movie regalia are a Gaga staple. Several of her videos feature murders og men - by rat poison or by being burnt alive from Gaga’s flame-throwing brassiere. Her Bad Romance video ends with the tableau of Gaga prettily gloating on a bed next to the incinerated skeleton of her victim. The grisly mix of sex and death is sick, symptomatic of Gaga’s alienation from her own body - another example of which is her promise to reveal the title of her next album tattooed on her body next New Year’s Eve. A Washington Post article described Gaga at a gay-rights event last year as “looking slightly embalmed.” Yes, Gaga is like Norma Desmond entombed in her own deadly cult of self. The layer of plastered make-up without which she never leaves her room makes her resemble the waxy, mummified saints under glass in Italian churches. It’s no coincidence that Gaga’s Telephone video, her longest to date, is set in a prison. Gaga has a bunkered mentality, as if she can’t escape the burden or rigid limitations of her own assumed personality. Rootless, she carries her own detention camp around with her, typified by a tattoo on her arm with the death date of an aunt she never knew.

Insurgent performers have often captured the spirit of a generation, from Frank Sinatra driving bobbysoxers wild and Elvis Presley lewdly gyrating his hips, to the Beatles waking people up with a bang after their dreary upbringing in the conformist, postwar 1950s. International idols have always been springtime spirits of infectious energy, symbols of a new dawn. Among the magnetic presences in music today are tigresses of charismatic sensuality or gamines of buoyant charm - Beyonce, Shakira, Rihanna, Nelly Furtado. Never has there been a breakthrough mainstream performer like Gaga who obsessively traffics in twisted sexual scenarios and solipsistic psychodramas. All the frantic, flailing arm moves imposed on her by professional choreographers can’t desguise her essential depressiveness and spiritual paralysis, registered in her videos in her often inert torso. With her garish costumes and piano playing, Gaga is often compared to Elton John. But Elton never tried to present himself as a sexual athlete. On the contrary, his sequined costumes were self-satirising, meant to amuse and render him harmless. And Elton’s co-written original songs were well-constructed populist hits that won a huge, multi-generational audience, and are still on the radio after 40 years.

Like Boy George (another of Gaga’s claimed models), Elton sang feelingly, even souldfully (as in the tender Your Song), which Gaga does not. Furthermore, Elton’s supple piano work was superior to anything Gaga has shown thus far. For example, in her video of her performance on BBC1 last year of an acouistic peformance of Poker Face, Gaga is pleased as punch with her ostentatious fusillade of empty flourishes, which are embarrassingly unsupported by the song itself.

Another leading performer whom Gaga has claimed as an influence is David Bowie. Welcoming Gaga to her TV show in Los Angeles last year, Ellen DeGeneres went off on a servile, stammering encomium in which she
implied that Gaga had surpassed Bowie - an idiocy that should have been instantly punished by a lightning bolt from Zeus. Bowie at his height in the early 70s was one of the great avant-garde artists of the 20th century. He was the brilliant heir to Dada and surrealism. And in his daring gender-bending, he was a warrior for sexual liberation and for a redefining of the psychic fluidity of sexual orientation. Gaga does not belong in Bowie’s company.

Another inspiration regularly cited by Gaga is Andy Warhol, whose code of fame and celebrity she has adopted. Warhol would certainly have endorsed Gaga’s relentless marketing of appropriated material, exactly as he transformed newspaper photos of stars and politicians into brightly coloured silk-screens. But comparisons are less convincing of Warhol’s Factory to the Haus of Gaga, the style team whose leading figures are Matt Williams and Nicola Formichetti (the true inventors of her look). In person, Warhol was modest and recessive; the theatrical denizens of the Factory were not hidden backstage as cogs in a commercial machine. Many of Warhol’s superstars were authentic misfits, products of New York’s bohemian and beatnik underground in the 1950s. They were edgy and sometimes self-destructive, including the bold-as-brass drag queens (Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling) who cross-dressed when it was dangerous to do so.

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions. She should relax and snap back to her real genre, which is closer to vaudeville or musical comedy in the bantering Bette Midler style. Right now, with her spindly physique and wobbly moves, Gaga sometimes seems overwhelmed by her frenetic production, like Citizen Kane’s terrified, feeble, reedy-voiced mistress pushed out onto the stage of Salammbo. She wants to have it both ways - to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion. Joplin, far more cruelly ostracised in her Texas home town than Gaga ever was in Manhatton, chanelled the profound emotions and raw technique of black blues singers, backed by virtuosic psychedelic guitars.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality - as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.

Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators. It is a world of blurred borderlines - between childhood and adulthood as well as between parents and children. The young waver between dependence and independence and are slow to leave the comforts of home. Old family hierarchies have broken down. Gaga, for example, gets drunk with her parents and calls her father her “best friend.” She startlingly said this summer: “I’ve been in my father’s arms for two weeks wishing him happy Father’s Day.”

There are blurred borderlines between the sexes: gender is now alleged to be fabricated rather than biological; so everything is a pose. Thus Gaga welcomed the rumour about her being intersex and converted it into a fashion statement. Casual “hooking up” blends friends and lovers, with sex becoming merely an excuse for filial hugging. Borderlines have blurred too between public and private: reality-TV shows multiply; cell-phone convesations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina. In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away.

Camille Paglia
Professor of Humanities and Media Studies, University of The Arts in Philadelphia.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece