Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga

Victor P. Corona, Ph.D.

Department of Sociology
Columbia University

Forthcoming, Journal of Popular Culture

With the 2008 release of her album The Fame, Lady Gaga became the first
recording artist in history to have four number one hits from a debut album.1
Although The Fame and its 2009 expanded re-release, The Fame Monster, have
earned positive critical reviews, Gaga’s artistic reputation and pop culture presence
are also closely tied to an endless stream of avant-garde fashion worn in her music
videos, performances, and public appearances. Proclaimed to be the “defining pop
star” of 2009 by Rolling Stone (Hiatt, “Rise of Lady Gaga”), Gaga was discussed in
11,500 stories in the mainstream media as of November 2009 (Smillie) and won two
Grammy awards in 2010. She is followed by almost seven million people on Twitter
and was 2009’s most Googled image. Gaga’s success also led to an invitation to
Queen Elizabeth’s annual entertainment gala and a performance at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where she wore the first hat designed by the
architect Frank Gehry. Although her music and sartorial flare follow in the
tradition of artists like David Bowie, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Queen, Gaga
has succeeded in creating a glam-pop aesthetic aptly described as “neon noir”
(Weiner), one that pursues a lasting presence in popular memory and celebrates a
monstrous Otherness.
In order to evaluate Gaga’s place in pop culture, this article explores the
components of her distinct aesthetic, one that can be best described as a social
imaginary (Castoriadis) that upholds much of Warhol’s Pop art vision yet twists it
to reflect contemporary anxieties. Her active quest to produce the memorable and
celebrate the freakish highlights the degree to which pop spectacle has been
affected by a period of unprecedented connectivity among consumers and cultural
producers. This emphasis on creating the memorable reflects a new urgency for
stars’ differentiation in a period of “hypermodernity,” an accelerated state of
Western capitalism characterized by “the culture of the fastest and the ‘ever more’:
more profitability, more performance, more flexibility, more innovation”
(Lipovetsky 35). From this perspective, postmodernity’s progeny is a cultural
landscape where any possible event of interest can be almost instantly tweeted,
blogged, texted, uploaded on YouTube, displayed on social networking sites, and

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discussed on comment boards. The entertainment industries have reacted to this
trend by recognizing that in a quickened state of cultural exchange, the diffusion
and perception of a star’s image are the most important building blocks of a career.
Gaga’s pursuit of an enduring cultural presence responds to hypermodern
pressures not by conjuring images of the sincere and earnest, as “girl-next-door”
stars have traditionally done. Instead, her elaborate performances and sartorial
experimentation are deployed to create visual impressions that are practically
tailor-made for the age of viral marketing and generate expectations of ever
grander spectacles. The urge to consciously make hypermodern memory in itself,
however, does not fully capture Gaga’s aesthetic and its popularity. She
complements this strategy by attempting to explicitly link herself to categories of
individual Otherness. By celebrating the “monster,” the “freak, or the “misfit” in
multiple expressions—not “fitting in” at school or being gay—she is able to build a
sense of subcultural membership among fans while the catch-all liveliness of her
music works to sustain mass appeal. On Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, the host
commented on Gaga’s uniqueness yet gently questioned the sincerity of her
spectacle. She responded, “I didn’t fit in in high school and I felt like a freak, so I
like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in
me to hang out with and they don’t feel alone” (air date, 27 November 2009). In
other interviews, she described her 2009-2010 “Monster Ball” concert tour in terms
of “apocalypse” and “exorcism,” while the album’s songs were said to reflect the
“demons” with which she has wrestled throughout her life.
In order to effectively contextualize such narratives of purgation and self-
affirmation, it is useful to incorporate an understanding of what Castoriadis and
others have defined as “social imaginaries.” Mandoki wrote that they are “known
to be fictional and yet, like fiction in literature, theater, or movies, we lend
ourselves as willing accomplices to the worlds they offer hoping they can somehow
transform the real through a utopic inversion” (602). It is precisely this kind of
attachment of the fan to a star that the entertainment industry actively nurtures.
Marshall therefore referred to the industry as “an apparatus for the congealing of
emotions and sentiments into recognizable sounds, images, and personalities that
work to maintain the intensity of emotions” (167), what is essentially the business
of selling imaginaries. Acknowledging this willful construction of consumer
attachment does not diminish the power of celebrities and their spectacles. Rather,
hypermodern methods of disseminating celebrity spectacle illustrate that artifice,
if artful, can be even more compelling than the person behind the persona if it
forcefully reflects the sullied truths of contemporary life.
Much of the literature on celebrity spectacle and American popular culture
focuses on the Hollywood film industry, which nurtured stardom as a matter of
branding strategy. A star system served as a means for the early studios to
differentiate themselves once they understood that a studio brand by itself was an
insufficient builder of customer loyalty (Gamson). Marshall also showed that it is
difficult to understand celebrity culture without meaningfully conceptualizing the
mass audience made possible by printing, sound, and motion picture
technologies—e.g., the production of sheet music—in addition to a certain

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democratic effervescence that these technologies helped to foster. As he noted,
“The images of possibility provided by films, radio, and popular music represented
an accessible form of consumption. The discourse that surrounded these
celebrities provided the evidence of access to stardom” (9).
Dyer and others were correct to link celebrity success to the anxieties of
the historical and social contexts in which fame is acquired. By framing Gaga’s
aesthetic appeal in relation to the broader cultural landscape, a connection can be
made to the turbulences thrown up by a hypermodern mode of culture
production, a “hyperculture” in which “entertainment is transformed from an
occasional personal and group diversion to a way of life, occupying all the
interstices between periods of work” (Bertman 123). Through the development and
diffusion of today’s technologies, fans can listen to their favorite stars on digital
music players, watch music videos on camera-enabled phones, and discuss the
latest news and images of celebrity exploits on websites often run by other
devotees. As Herwitz notes, “Increasingly today the forms of aesthetic appreciation
cut across individual media, and are the product of many in particular consort”
(49), an observation not lost on pop stars eager to demonstrate the uniqueness of
their identities.
The remainder of this article will examine the mass appeal and subcultural
allure of the aesthetic crafted by Gaga and her “Haus of Gaga” creative team, which
she modeled after Warhol’s Factory and filled with close friends. Using previous
theoretical work on celebrity, cultural commentary, and statements by the artist
herself, the article will contextualize Gaga’s fame in a period where the pace of
cultural production redefines how a recording artist can establish a presence that
lasts more than the proverbial fifteen minutes. Of course, the accelerated business
cycles of creative industries in the postwar period have long caused concerns over
the meaningfulness and originality possible in cultural production. Such pressures,
however, may also generate new and innovative recombinations of aesthetic
material in ways that may shock today’s audiences but seem routinized in a few
years. There are important cases where aesthetic recombinations of different
performance modalities have led to new and enduring styles: “The rock
performance style emerged out of the confluence of black performance style with
the need to express the sincerity of personality and individuality of the
performer/star” (Marshall 158). Therefore, it is quite possible that the kind of
cultural bricolage with which Gaga is experimenting may ultimately open new and
enduring terrains of theatricality in pop culture.

The Persistence of Memory?

The background of Lady Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, has been reported in
numerous interviews and a biography published in 2010 (Herbert). Growing up on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she attended the elite Convent of the Sacred Heart
on Fifth Avenue and later New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts before
leaving to pursue her career full-time. Despite having academic success, she has
repeatedly stated that she felt isolated from other Sacred Heart students. Learning

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piano by the age of four, she wrote her first piano ballad as a teenager and later
began playing at open-mike nights at clubs. While building her career in the
Manhattan club scene, her voice reminded a New York producer of Queen’s
theatrical lead singer, Freddie Mercury, and bestowed upon her a name inspired by
the band’s nostalgic 1984 song, “Radio Ga Ga.” Aside from Queen, she has
expressed her admiration for David Bowie, Boy George, Judy Garland, Michael
Jackson, Grace Jones, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Constantin Stanislavski, and Rainer
Maria Rilke (his famous “must I write?” passage is tattooed on her left arm).
Perhaps few stage names in pop culture are as ironic as Lady Gaga’s. “Radio
Ga Ga” was a wistful lament of how radio was being displaced and made to appear
antiquated by the novelty of television. By contrast, the fame of Lady Gaga and
other contemporary pop stars has largely been sustained by technologies like
Twitter, YouTube, and camera- and video-enabled phones with which fans can
almost immediately capture and upload news and images of celebrity sightings.
Etymologically, the expression “going gaga” has “dual meanings of baby talk and
adoration” (Purves 147) as well as lunacy. In the case of today’s pop stars, fans “go
gaga” in part by compulsively using interactive technologies to connect to an
artist’s aura and each other. In order to capitalize on this trend, industry leaders
work to combine their resources with the power of viral marketing and drive the
vigor and speed with which celebrity culture is consumed. According to a Wall
Street Journal analysis, Gaga “has made shrewd use of new digital platforms, while
still leveraging the clout of a major label, an institution deemed obsolete by many
proponents of DIY [do-it-yourself] culture” (Jurgensen). Just as the television
signaled the advent of the pop spectacle once larger audiences could see
performances and not merely listen over grainy radio waves, the diffusion of digital
media means that recording artists can tweet links to fan-made videos and make
followers instantaneously aware of new images and promotional material.
Given that Gaga has released albums titled The Fame and The Fame
Monster, it is not surprising that she is preoccupied with the performance of
celebrity and the construction of a lasting artistic legacy. As she told Rolling Stone,
“My true legacy will be the test of time, and whether I can sustain a space in pop
culture and really make stuff that will have a genuine impact” (Hiatt, “Rise of Lady
Gaga”). But Engel Lang and Lang draw a valuable distinction between recognition
and renown in the building of artistic reputation. According to them, recognition
reflects the respect of an artist’s peers, while renown “is measurable by how well a
person is known outside a specific art world and depends on the publicity that
only critics and dealer promotion provide” (84). In terms of peer recognition, Gaga
is reported to be friendly with artists like Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Marilyn
Manson, although she is usually reluctant to describe her relationships with older
artists. The more provocative elements of Gaga’s avant-garde project are balanced
by her collaborations with more conventional peers like Beyoncé. Gaga and her
Haus advisers understand that in order to build renown, her image and music
should have ties to other modes of aesthetic appreciation. At a benefit for the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, she wore a hat made by Frank Gehry
and performed on a piano painted by the artist Damien Hirst. At the event, she

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told The New Yorker, “The objective is to always be making something that belongs
in a museum. Even what I’m wearing right now” (Goodyear). A few months later,
at Queen Elizabeth’s annual Royal Variety show, Gaga was suspended from a swing
and played a piano balanced on spindly dark legs that evoked the nightmarish
landscapes of Salvador Dali and Tim Burton. As she explained to the London
Times, “I don’t wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music”
(Barber).
Gaga’s attention to the constant articulation of her aesthetic, especially for
fans in attendance at her concerts, should not be casually dismissed. Vannini,
among others, rightfully champions Denzin’s re-shifting of the question of
aesthetics to the actual moment of experience, that which is “found at the genesis
of experience itself—the existential moment of interpretation of one’s lifeworld”
(48). Indeed, a central feature of Gaga’s vision is her Warholian celebration of pop
culture, which has been derided as low-brow kitsch created purely for the
consumption of the undiscerning masses. By contrast, her official website
biography states, “Pop culture is art. It doesn’t make you cool to hate pop culture,
so I embraced it and you hear it all over The Fame. But, it’s a sharable fame. I want
to invite you all to the party. I want people to feel a part of this lifestyle”
(ladygaga.com). In elaborating this as one goal of her enterprise, Gaga’s music
seeks to bridge what theorists have understood as the Bourdieusian distinction
between a subfield of art where the highest reaches of symbolic capital are
controlled by a small avant-garde and one where, “an aspirant, bohemian avant-
garde claims to shun even symbolic capital” (Hesmondhalgh 215).
In this regard, Gaga has made repeated references to Warhol, the Pop
image-maker described by one philosopher as the “artist laureate of the American
soul” (Danto 131). Like Gaga, Warhol’s body of work reflects a desire to tinker with
the aesthetic power of the core symbols of American culture. While musing about
how the White House would be decorated if he were elected President, Warhol
wrote, “Can you see the Blue Room with Campbell’s Soup Cans all over the walls?
Because that’s what Foreign Heads of State should see, Campbell’s Soup Cans and
Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. That’s America” (15). Gaga’s affinity for the
enigmatic Pop artist can be read as an appreciation for an artistic vision that can
both champion and twist the iconography of pop culture through a variety of
media. As she told The Guardian, “I strive to be a female Warhol. I want to make
films and music, do photography and paint one day, maybe. Make fashion. Make
big museum art installations” (Barton). The Warholian influence on Gaga’s music
can also be traced to her desire to firmly install pop music in the realm of fine art.
She stated, “There’s been a lot of damage done over the past 30 years with artists
saying that pop music sucks. It’s lowbrow, manufactured, fake, plastic. They say we
need to go back to the ‘real music,’ so we’ve had to listen to some really depressing
singer-songwriters and indie-rock bands” (Hobart).
In order to pursue enduring reputations, other artists have also crafted
flamboyant identities that pushed the boundaries of theatricality. Relevant cases
might include the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper guise, Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines, Miley
Cyrus as Hannah Montana, Beyoncé as Sasha Fierce, and David Bowie as Ziggy

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Stardust, although there is significant variation in the degree to which these
personas have been incorporated into the performers’ artistic repertoires. The
important point to highlight here is that this kind of theatricality can be used as a
challenge to established definitions of identity and expected forms of behavior. As
Auslander noted, “Glam rock’s central social innovation was to open a safe cultural
space in which to experiment with versions of masculinity that clearly flouted
social norms” (228). Theatrical alter-egos can also be seen as efforts to express an
exaggerated version of what Adler and Adler referred to as the celebrity’s “gloried
self.” This identity emerges as the result of a person being “the focus of intense
interpersonal and media attention, leading to their achieving celebrity” (299).
These authors, however, were primarily concerned with exploring the detrimental
side-effects of such a self, including a growing disregard for the concerns of the
pre-celebrity self, e.g., detachment from family, and the rise of an unstable
“dualism” between the pre-celebrity self and the “gloried self” (306).
In her own displays of theatricality, Gaga’s fashion is a fundamental visual
instrument in her quest to be seared into popular memory. For a May 2009 cover
of Rolling Stone, Gaga wore an outfit made of plastic bubbles. A scene of the video
for her “Bad Romance” single features Gaga strutting in massive, glittering green
“armadillo heels” designed by the late Alexander McQueen, at whose October 2009
fashion show the song premiered. At the 2009 American Music Awards, she was
fitted with an illuminated headdress, top, and heels made to resemble bones, while
the 2010 Grammys opened with Gaga’s duet with Elton John while both wore
glittering vestments covered in ash. Elements of other dresses have included plush
figures of Kermit the Frog and Hello Kitty. Other performances were conducted
while wearing black, geometric shapes resembling bat wings, clear plastic crystals
protruding from her shoulders and hips, and red lace with a blond hairpiece made
to resemble a halo. The London-based milliner Philip Treacy has designed some of
her more memorable headpieces, including hats in the form of a sparkling lobster
and a black, leathery telephone.
The deployment of avant-garde fashion in the creation of a hypermodern
star should not be easily overlooked. As Mandoki claimed, “It may be frivolous,
superficial, semantically empty, trivial, and flimsy; it nonetheless materializes
urban values of fantasy, originality, novelty, and creativity” (612). For Lipovetsky,
hypermodern culture is the fullest expression of a “society of fashion” in which “the
cult of the new is asserting itself as an everyday and widespread passion” (37).
While most celebrities craft some sort of sartorial identity, Gaga is always clad in
apparel usually seen only on Fashion Week runways. Such public displays question
the strictures of fashion binding on the rest of the population, the “vestimentary
regimes [that] delineate the circumstances in which a style might be deployed, as
in clarifying the situations in which different types of attire are appropriate or not”
(Corona and Godart 14). Gaga’s aesthetic challenges the potency of such regimes
and affirms the hypermodern imperative of individual self-expression that is
evident throughout venues like Manhattan’s club scene (Colman).
In this devotion to fashion, there are echoes of Evita Perón, the wife of
Argentina’s controversial populist leader Juan Perón, and the tie between her

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maintenance of a loyal political base in the urban poor and working classes and
the glamour of her persona. In postwar Argentina, “Her followers memorized the
details of her every change of dress—the fittings, the designers, the gold lamé, the
hats, mantillas, even a tiara—and never tired of the rainbow of images that spread
over the media of the time and continued glowing in the huge full-colored
photographs of magazines still dedicated, twenty-five years later, exclusively to
her” (Taylor 76). It was perhaps fitting that the 1996 film adaptation of the Andrew
Lloyd Webber musical should feature Madonna in the starring role. Indeed, the
Queen of Pop regnant is said to have vigorously campaigned to play the role of a
South American woman who rose from poverty and obscurity into the limelight of
fame and power. Ironically, although Evita would come to be swathed in Cartier
and Dior, her destitute followers were known as descamisados, “shirtless ones.”
Like Evita, both Madonna and Gaga understand the power of high fashion to
sustain popular imaginaries, whether they be in the service of a pop star’s legacy or
the political agenda of populist reformers. As Mandoki noted, “Fashion opens up
the curtains of social imaginaries to a stage where each and everyone is invited,
like Cinderellas at the castle of Prince Charming, to the world of glamour and
masquerade. It is all a matter of adequate attire” (600). Since apparel and
appearance sustain the imaginaries tied to a star’s aura, it is perhaps no
coincidence that Evita, Madonna, and Gaga, like the inimitable icon Marilyn
Monroe, are all brunettes-cum-blondes.
When the image of someone like Gaga becomes so closely associated with
spectacle, the question of authenticity inevitably emerges. Vannini and Meyers
have explored this problem in the cases of pop stars Avril Lavigne and Britney
Spears, respectively. Vannini analyzes online consumer reviews and offers an
excellent account of how the authenticity of “pop-punk” star Avril Lavigne was
belied by her ability to play the guitar and the extent to which her entire artistic
persona was “carefully managed by Arista as those of any other popular persona”
(55). Along similar lines, Meyers examines the authenticity of “pop princess”
Britney Spears and the obsessive interest in her failed marriage and child-rearing
ability. Meyers noted, “The never-ending quest for the ‘real’ celebrity bestows upon
her persona heightened cultural significance that is disseminated through all
forms of celebrity media” (896). The question of authenticity is rendered almost
meaningless, however, given that the star’s day-to-day life is thoroughly consumed
by the mechanics of performing. Meyers concluded that “being Britney can never
really be an ordinary experience. She is constantly followed by paparazzi, spends
much of her life either preparing for or performing on stage, and rarely has a
moment to herself away from her fans or her entourage” (902). Gaga has avoided
the authenticity dilemma by affirming that she is the persona she inhabits on
stage. Unlike other successful female singers like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, her
stage presence does not use any version of her birth name. In early 2009 she
claimed, “The largest misconception is that Lady Gaga is a persona or a character.
I’m not—even my mother calls me Gaga. I am 150,000 percent Lady Gaga every
day” (Scaggs).

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The Monsters Within

Since her first album’s release in 2008, Lady Gaga has enthusiastically played with
the trope of monstrosity. Her re-release of The Fame with new tracks, The Fame
Monster, includes a song titled “Monster” that describes a male love interest with
“evil eyes” who, she sings, “ate my heart and then he ate my brain.” Her 2009-2010
tour is called “The Monster Ball,” a term that evokes the “monster’s ball” tradition
of English jailers in which they would celebrate on the night before a prisoner’s
execution. She consistently addresses her fans as “my little monsters,” a term
which they eagerly use among themselves. The word “monster” is thereby used to
indict past relationships and fame and to celebrate the products of that fame, her
fans. Monster becomes a metaphor for the maddening swirl of images, anxieties,
and fads in hypermodern life. As Gaga explained to Ann Powers of the Los Angeles
Times, “Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-
cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us
to judge ourselves. I guess what I am trying to do is take the monster and turn the
monster into a fairy tale.” Gaga offered additional explanation in an interview with
Rolling Stone:

“Each one of these songs on my album represents a different demon that I’ve
faced in myself, so the music is much more personal. I don’t write about fame
or money at all on this new record. So we talked about monsters and how, I
believe, that innately we’re all born with the monsters already inside of us—I
guess in Christianity they call it original sin—the prospect that we will, at some
point, sin in our lives, and we will, at some point, have to face our own
demons, and they’re already inside of us” (Hiatt, “Inside the Monster Ball”).

One of the best examples of this narrative in Gaga’s aesthetic is probably the video
for the first Fame Monster single, “Bad Romance.” The video was made by the film
director Francis Lawrence, whose movies include Constantine (2005) and I Am
Legend (2007), both of which feature ghoulish characters. The “Bad Romance”
video is built around a story of sex slavery in which Gaga is sold to the Russian
mafia but ultimately destroys the man who purchased her. Animals are used to
lend a bestial flavor to the video, which includes a furless cat, a furless bat. and a
taxidermied rat used as hairpieces, mounted antelopes on the mafioso’s bedroom
walls, and a coat whose train ends in the head of the classic polar bearskin rug.
The dance moves recall the clawed fingers of the dancing undead in Michael
Jackson’s “Thriller,” while one set of costumes appears to be inspired by Maurice
Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. The lyrics make reference to the films Psycho,
Vertigo, and Rear Window, directed by the master of cinematic macabre, Alfred
Hitchcock. The video concludes with Gaga lying beside the charred skeleton of her
buyer, her chest emitting the electric sparks that vanquished her captor.
In popular culture as a whole, the blending of the beautiful with the
monstrous is a well established motif. The contrast of beast and beauty is used to
provoke a reckoning with prevailing ideals of appearance, tolerance, justice, and

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sexuality. As Ingebretsen argued, “Monsters show us what happens—to them,
certainly, and possibly to us as well—when the always vulnerable line between
civility and incivility fails. In the language of Aristotle and the ancients, monsters
are monere, and monstrare, warnings and demonstrations—‘signs and Portents’”
(26). Rock stars like Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, and Marilyn
Manson also built their careers through a keen sense of the power of the morbid
spectacle to attract audiences and provoke media chatter about their albums. The
popularity of the Twilight films and television shows like The Vampire Diaries and
True Blood also highlights the renewed vigor of the monster motif in pop culture.
The image of the monster in memorable music videos has also been
successfully deployed in the past. One of the most popular songs of all time,
Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller,” had the star himself taking the forms of werewolf
and zombie. Mercer has astutely captured how the “Thriller” video’s depiction of
monstrosity was inextricable from the overall development and perception of
Michael Jackson’s sexual identity (werewolf as hyper-sexual; zombie as anti-
sexual). As Mercer noted, Jackson’s transformation into a werewolf (albeit one
with feline features) is triggered by his coy comment to the female love interest,
“I’m not like other guys” (308). Experimentation in music video imagery alone will
not garner commercial success, although it is certainly a powerful mode of
expression: “Videos are often filled with surrealism; they represent avant-garde
filmmaking that serves to associate the popular star with the style and romantic
connotations of the innovative artist” (Marshall 163).
Gaga, however, puts a distinct take on the trope of monstrous Otherness.
Weiner has described how “Gaga debuted already-defiled,” in stark contrast to the
purity ascribed to Britney Spears before the story of her virginity and its loss
became mainstream news. If, as Dyer argued, successful stars touch upon certain
“social resonances,” then Gaga’s lyrics and videos have successfully touched upon a
hypermodern disenchantment and appetite for the raw that continues to be fed by
entertainment formats like reality television. Gaga’s first hit, “Just Dance,” is
essentially about being drunk at a club but remaining confident in a happy
conclusion to a night of drunken stupor. Gaga’s Grammy-nominated hit, “Poker
Face,” deals with her bisexuality and desiring a woman while she was with a
boyfriend, while “Lovegame” raised eyebrows with her reference to a phallus as a
“disco stick.” The playfulness earthiness of earlier pop stars is passed over in favor
of a more realistic sense of youthful, urban revelry. The song “Beautiful, Dirty,
Rich” recalls her period of drug use as a struggling upstart in New York’s club
scene. Even her bubbliest video, for “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say),” is an
homage, via pastiche, to her Italian-American roots, complete with her sitting on a
Vespa in front of “Guido’s Meat Market” and serving spaghetti and meatballs to her
husband.
Gaga’s aesthetic vision is perhaps most vividly elaborated in her 2009-2010
“Monster Ball” tour, which she calls a “truly artistic experience that is going to take
the form of the greatest post-apocalyptic house party that you’ve ever been to”
(Hiatt, “Inside the Monster Ball”) and has been described by a Canadian theater
critic as “at least twice as entertaining and infinitely fresher than any stage musical

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written over the last decade” (Nestruck). Relating the sold-out “Monster Ball”
concerts to the success of the Twilight films, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom
of the Opera, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” a New York Times theater review
claims that Gaga’s show turns “the conventions of pop stardom into a fully realized
gothic musical that aims for the commercial sweet spot at the intersection of
horror and romance” (Zinoman).
A broader audience was exposed to Gaga’s “neon noir” imaginary during a
live performance of her song “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards,
where a Romanesque stage draped in pink and white was the site of a bloody
simulation of her demise. In the video for the single, she is thrown from a balcony
by a lover trying to ensure that paparazzi capture a photograph of their embrace.
She somehow survives, fatally poisons the lover, and is arrested at the conclusion
of the video. While the song itself deals with being a fan obsessed with a male rock
star, the video features images of dead women that recall Hollywood’s most
famous murdered ingénue, the Black Dahlia. The story was continued in the nine-
minute video for the 2010 “Telephone” single. In the video, Gaga is jailed in a
“Prison for Bitches” until she is bailed out by Beyoncé. Together they poison a
diner full of people and escape in the “Pussy Wagon” featured in Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill film. Throughout the video, Gaga and Beyoncé are adorned
with essential artifacts of Pop America: soda cans, leather jackets, American flags,
cowboy hats, and, of course, a telephone.
Rather than subsume these dark displays into another brooding, moody
celebrity demeanor, Gaga claimed that the live “Paparazzi” performance on MTV—
inspired by Frida Kahlo paintings—was actually an attempt to pre-empt the tale of
a tragic celebrity demise that has now become a fixture of pop lore, as in the
deaths of Princess Diana, Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe. Gaga
told Elle, “I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public, I can
somehow cure my own legend. I can show you so you’re not looking for it. I’m
dying for you on domestic television—here’s what it looks like, so no one has to
wonder” (Purves 147). Using a performance of the song “Paparazzi” to comment on
the insatiability of the public gaze is interesting given that photographers’ images
so often capture stars as they perform the most mundane of activities, like
shopping for groceries or walking their dogs. The images captured by paparazzi
therefore lie in a gray area that rubs out the Durkheimian separation of the sacred
(stars and their glamour) and the profane (the drab, everyday lives of the non-
famous). Casting aside this sacred/profane division, Gaga’s vision may prove that
the more important delineation in hypermodern pop culture is between the
monstrous and the merely mundane.
One benefit of this branding strategy is the ability to solidify the degree to
which Gaga can associate subcultural membership with her music and thereby
activate enduring allegiances. As Marshall describes:

“The star’s cultural power depended on a very close affinity with a specific
and loyal audience. The star, then, was actively engaged in the construction
and differentiation of audience groups, in terms of style and taste, and in

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 authenticating their elevated position. The popular music star, more than
other forms of celebrity, had to be a virtual member of his or her own
audience in order to sustain his or her influence and authenticity, and the
commitment of the fan” (161).

The power of the “monster” motif lies in being able to attract other self-identifying
outcasts to her music and aesthetic, an effort that Gaga hopes will ultimately
empower them to express the “monster” within them. The possibility of self-
empowerment via a celebration of one’s Otherness is a powerful function of public
and televised spectacles. For example, Smit praises the display of children afflicted
with muscular dystrophy during the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, claiming that the
“event actually offers power and agency” to the children themselves” (688). In a
comparable way, when interviewed by Barbara Walters as one of the “most
fascinating people” of 2009, Gaga claimed that she hopes to “liberate” her fans
from their fears so that they can “create their own space in the world” (air date, 9
December 2009).
Like other female pop stars, Lady Gaga marshals her femininity in her
performances. An open bisexual, she vigorously defends the gay community and,
despite explicitly gendering her stage name, has at times mischievously fed rumors
that she is a hermaphrodite. The careers of other female pop stars demonstrate the
challenge of negotiating this aspect of the celebrity identity. Judy Garland, for
example, embodied three distinct identities that struck a cultural chord: “the all-
American small town girl-next-door; the personification of showbiz good humour
and bezazz; the neurotic woman” (Dyer, A Star Is Born 132). Garland thereby
captured key elements of what Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and Courtney Love each
represent individually. An “alternative” rock star of the 1990’s, Alanis Morissette
colored her display of femininity with a seething rage aimed at former lovers and
authority figures before undergoing an artistic transformation that yielded songs
like “In Praise of the Vulnerable Man” and “Giggling Again for No Reason.” More
recently, Britney Spears cultivated a “girl-next-door” identity before a torrent of
news about premarital sex, drug use, and irresponsible parenting largely deflated
her rise. By contrast, Gaga’s teasing lyrics, shocking outfits, and outrageous
comments at concerts warp the kind of sexualized performance introduced by
Madonna, who famously attracted attention by writhing on the ground in a
wedding dress and celebrating sadomasochism in the music video for the song
“Erotica.”
Yet despite Gaga’s distinctive mark on pop music early in her career, she is
not storming the gates of American cultural mores. She had a rather conventional,
affluent upbringing in Manhattan in a two-parent household. Despite being an
open bisexual, she told Elle that within ten years she hopes to be married with
children (Purves 172). In contrast to celebrities who are estranged from parents,
Gaga repeatedly talks about being close to her family and states that she wrote the
song “Speechless” from The Fame Monster as a way to convince her father to
undergo heart surgery. Her own career narrative proudly proclaims that her
upward trajectory was respectful of the appropriate conventions en route to

11
stardom: “I did this the way you are supposed to. I played every club in New York
City and I bombed in every club and then killed it in every club and I found myself
as an artist. I learned how to survive as an artist, get real, and how to fail and then
figure out who I was as singer and performer. And, I worked hard” (ladygaga.com).

Conclusion

In September 2009, the author stood not far from the red carpet at the MTV Video
Music Awards in Manhattan and spotted someone wearing a glittering gold mask
and a wide-brimmed black hat. The figure slowly meandered past camera flashes
and ascended a small stage to be interviewed, just a sidewalk away from the
evening traffic flowing uptown on Sixth Avenue. Nearby, a young woman
muttered, “That has to be Lady Gaga—only she would wear something like that.”
The onlooker was correct. It then became evident that Gaga’s escort for the
evening was Kermit the Frog, whom she repeatedly kissed while being interviewed
on MTV. Presumably, Gaga would have been pleased to hear the onlooker’s
statement. She would have likely taken it as evidence that she had successfully
established an easily recognizable identity on a cultural landscape brimming with
performers desperately trying to stand out.
In order to begin unpacking the meanings behind the aesthetic actively
constructed by Gaga and her creative team, this article has argued that her unique
spectacle says much about the hypermodern pace of cultural consumption and the
heightened requirements for longevity on the public stage. As Engel Lang and
Lang wrote, “Survival in the collective memory is closely tied to the survival of
tangible objects that recall the deceased” (80), to which those living in the age of
Google, Twitter, and YouTube would add video, photos, and tweets diffused via
the BlackBerrys and iPhones always ready at the consumer’s side. It remains to be
seen, however, if Gaga can continue to surpass the quality of “intimate strangers”
(Schickel) that inevitably characterizes the celebrity-fan encounter, based as it is
on a “fundamental asymmetry of knowledge” (Ferris 28). Also, Gaga is not without
her vehement critics, who see only empty spectacle and pompous airs without any
substantive content. Wondering what the late Claude Levi-Strauss would have said
about Gaga, a Newsweek music critic wrote, “The problem with Gaga is that she
refuses to add any concrete value, while also wanting us to think she has
something to say” (Colter Walls 57). Although she has publicly acknowledged the
criticism that she is only a pretentious attention-grabber, Gaga projects confidence
that her “little monsters” are meaningfully connecting with her aesthetic and are
now, according to her, “spreading the book of Gaga around the world” (Barber).
As early as 1998, scholars began lamenting the rise of a “hyperculture” that
today Gaga exemplifies, whether or not she also criticizes elements of that culture.
Bertman, for example, bemoaned the idea that “each successive invitation to
superficiality and transience becomes a further distraction, keeping us from
pursuing the quest for deeper and more enduring truths” (47). Given that, for him,
hypercultural devices included pagers and microwaves, one can only imagine how
egregious he would find music-playing, email-enabled camera-phones and the

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connectivity they provide. Today, it appears that even the recession will not slow
the “culture of the fastest.” A sociocultural context inundated by information only
emphasizes the urgency with which stars seek to activate and sustain mass interest
and fan loyalty for reasons other than visits to drug clinics (Lindsay Lohan),
adoption litigation (Madonna), unseemly sex scandals (Tiger Woods), “wardrobe
malfunctions” (Janet Jackson), or a sudden, suspicious demise (Michael Jackson).
Bertman and other critics might instead find solace in the idea that the dizzying
pace of hypermodern culture may ultimately augment the effervescence enabled
by celebrities, the power to provide “some sense of community—common idols, if
not common ideals” (Schickel 275).
As the first hypermodern pop music star, Lady Gaga’s brand of celebrity
emerges during a period beleaguered by recession and war, a time that yearns for
the occasional glimpse of the sublime. The advent of hypermodernity has only
heightened the persistent longing for the spectacle of stardom as a ready escape
from the tedium of everyday life. With organized religion in decline throughout
much of the West, celebrity culture has become a means of social integration in a
context where “the public secretly longs for that rare charismatic figure whose
auratic values are not reduced but magnified. The desire for someone around
whom to make a cult gets greater and greater” (Herwitz 134). To sustain such
devotion, however, a captivating voice, an ingénue’s smile, and dizzying dance
moves may no longer be enough. A hypermodern cult seeks a grander pose, a more
thorough means of dazzling the spectator and holding her attention via an array of
images and media. It is this role that Lady Gaga seeks to fill. The “Manifesto of
Little Monsters,” professed like a prayer at her concerts, declares, “It is in the
theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say,
for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection.
Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become
rather, in the future.”

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1
The Jackson Five’s first four singles, also hits, were spread across multiple albums.

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