An atrocious, disastrous mistake on Gaga’s part. It’s so bad it’s mind-reeling. It could very well mark the beginning of the end her career. After all that gigantic build-up and anticipation about her first new material in over a year she’s gone and laid a… giant egg. Never mind ‘the gayest song ever’ it’s just Too Gay To Play. I suspect it’s too gay even for The Gays. Too patronising and crass and feeble. They’ll pretend to love it for a few weeks and then quietly forget all about it. It will be the shortest-lived ‘anthem’ ever.
It’s a catchy single, of course, and will make a lot of money, but everything about this song is backwards. The music, the lyrics, the mentality, the politics. For all the self-righteous posturing it’s completely free of any content. But brimming over with bullshit. Not only are we ‘born this way’, and ‘God makes no mistakes’, and being gay is apparently an ethnic trait, but sexuality is also now some kind of smug fucking railway – ‘I’m on the right track baby’.
Well, stop the choo-choo, I wanna get off.
It’s as if someone decided to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a GLAAD public service announcement, with Harvey Fierstein or Dan Savage in the role of Frank-N-Furter. And cut all the songs.
Gaga should never write head-on about sexuality again. Ever. That’s her only hope of recovering the post-sexual charge that made her seem so interesting and relevant just a few months ago. She embodies post-sexuality, and the notion that you might want to choose who you love or shag – or who you are – better than anyone. But she clearly can’t articulate it self-consciously in a lyric. It might be impossible for anyone to do that – but almost anyone could make a better fist of it than Gaga in “Born That Way”.
Musically, the homages to Madge were much better done on The Fame Monster (though it was the Boney M salutes such as ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Poker Face’ that were her best tracks). In 2011, especially after being dubbed ‘the Diva of Déjà Vu’ by Camille Paglia (you were so right, Ms P!) she really, really needed to escape the gravitational attraction of Planet Madge.
But she wanted this song to be GAY!!! so she returned yet again to the nipple of the original gay Borg queen at her gayest. And as I say, she may have poisoned herself fatally with this tragic pastiche, that is a HiNRG cover of “Express Yourself” in a Vogue stylee, but with less 21st Century lyrics than either of those 20th Century songs.
Maybe I’m completely and utterly wrong. Maybe this is a genius masterstroke. Maybe Gaga’s deliberately parodying old-skool American gayness here with her rainbow vomit lyrics, God-bothering, gagging mixture of self-pity and pride, apologia and anger – and slavish Maddy/Diva idolatry – to show it up in its worst possible light. To inoculate The Gays against… themselves.
I mean, after the global-scale, towering cackness of “Born this Way” can there ever be a ‘gay anthem’ again?
Erm, yes you are being ‘rude’ popups.cockups. More to the point you’re also abusive, guilt-tripping and as in your private email to me today threatening to boot. Clearly you don’t even know you’re doing it, and when it’s pointed out you claim this is ‘classism’ etc. etc. So there’s not much point continuing this conversation, as it never was a conversation in the first place. Cheerio.
Sorry, the moralising high ground you’re occupying is so lofty us poor mortals can’t hear you.
Glad to hear you had one.
Thanks for that. But unfortunately it’s still shit.
P.s. around 4:35
Here is a relevant comedy sketch from the new Ben Elton show he’s doing in Australia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0n01MT2F9c
Since no one can sincerely consider gaga’s music to be profoundly different from, let alone profoundly superior to, Madonna’s
and since the myth of Gaga the original, lone artist compared to the corporate creation of madge is just too absurd to dote on,
I think I can figure why a U2-rolling stones comparison is a plausible analogy to madge/gaga, and just as offensive, for gays.
Camille Paglia, as a lesbian (and a narcissistic woman, as all women are), found early madonna’s brazen insistence on being (and on her girl fans becoming) “hot sex objects”, pleasing. (successfully or not, btw).
But it was madge’s drag that appealed to gay men.
Gaga does indeed do the plastic, attention whore, drag act better than madonna. Without any pesky “hotness” to confuse the gay mind. She’s waxy and corpse-like. So gaga is the gay favorite, all drag, no babe, no problem.
The hysterical revulsion that Republicans/Christian fundies hold for gays has nothing on the gay blinders that guard against a woman’s potential nubility/sex appeal/sensuality.
With exceptions, oc.
Is it because the gay mind is utterly disconnected from female lust or is it just about competition?
We’re all fascists for our own side in the end. Yet I still don’t look forward to the next, gay-approved, diva:
Maxine Headroom. Or The Tin Lady, ready to help all the little Dorothys (and more importantly, the Darcys) find their way to Oz.
I’m coming late to this but can’t help agreeing with Baudrillard that it’s ALL simulation kids – and as I once read in a column Mr Simpson wrote about a night in a Parisian sex club with Rick Castro “it all ends in madness and death honey”.
Me, I’ll take the fruity freshness of James Maker and Peaches over that pair of eggy old blonde hams any day of the week and no mistake.
Jolly good work everyone – do keep it up!
PS Concern Porn – LOVEZ it!
My feelings about genetic determinism and ‘gay genes’ (now thankfully in disrepute) notwithstanding, not to mention my belief that if God exists at all he makes plenty of mistakes, Ms. Germanotta is all of twenty-four. She’s still entitled to lay an egg. Mark, cut her some slack!
I still see in Camille Paglia’s attacks on Gaga vis a vis that no-talent showboat from Detroit something akin to what I feel whenever some rock critic has the temerity to compare U2 to the Rolling Stones. Only I think I have more cause for anger.
AAAck!
Linder STerling is nee Linda Mulvey!
three insignificant letters away from the spark that started an industry of respectable witch hunting on voyeurs!
This. is getting. Weird.
I feel so Cheap and Used !
That damn Gaga! Damn music industry!
What an impenetrable veil culture remains.
Camille Paglia completely missed it and I think Mr. Simpson was unwittingly complicit…
but in celebrating the flip side of sex, as post sex,
the world has embraced radical feminist anti sex and called it hip.
Andrea Dworkin with blonde hair and legs, indeed. This type of provocateur, instead of saying how evil sex is with her words, shows how with her skin.
Like all bad writers like to advise with an absurdity that’s over their head, don’t “say”, “show”.
I really don’t see how this can have been kept under wraps so long! It’s sitting there on wiki.
Lainey, HOW did you come across it?!
I think we should all make pamphlet-posters of that and staple them to telephone poles where ever we are in the world.
Make it a movement.
If Born This Way is a title stolen from James Maker, music from a Madonna song? Since Madonna doesn’t write either the music or lyrics, just changes the odd word and is credited, then it’s belongs to some music insider. Gaga also stole the idea of the meat dress from Linder Sterling. Now this is an intelligent explanation of why she wore it.
Linder performed in a dress made of discarded chicken meat sewn into layers of black net, while The Crones handed out packages of leftover raw meat wrapped up in pornography. During “Too Hot To Handle”, Linder whipped the dress aside to reveal a large black dildo. “Bucks Fizz had just won the Eurovision Song contest. At the end of their song the men pulled up girls’ skirts, and that ticked off an outrage in me. Oh no, I thought, it’s still going on. At the same time at The Haçienda they were showing lots of soft porn and they thought it was really cool. I took my revenge. I was a vegetarian, I got meat from the Chinese restaurant, all the discarded entrails. I went to a sex shop and bought a large dildo. I didn’t tell anybody about it.” Meat and tampons were supposed to represent “the reality of womanhood” and the dildo “Here’s manhood, the invisible male of pornography. That it can be reduced to this, a thing that sticks out like a toy.”I remember the audience going back about three foot. There was hardly any applause at the end. And that was a crowd who thought: nothing can shock us, we see porn all the time, we’re cool. When that happened, when they stepped back, I thought, that’s it. Where do you go from here?”
You get some overhyped Warhol clone to copy you and gave you no credit.
Well that’s why I restrict myself to “The Evening News”, to keep up on British events.
Strange Fruit’s lyrics (and title) are actually excitingly beautiful for their universal, hazy image of horror.
Not for any bleeding heart sympathy they inspire to people who weren’t there and would never care to do anything about it.
And yet it’s the “concern” for the subject matter that makes it seem poetic, an abstraction of a hideous, restrained little problem locked-in-its-time.
Maybe I’ll have a chance with that lady gaga show after all. Concern porn’s strength is that it touches your heart, not your hand, as you say.
Definitely a merchandisable concept title for a popular essay in the “public intellectual” genre. We may never be concerned again.
So, you think that for an image of historical context to Holiday’s lynching dirge about the horrors of the south, a picture of a lynching of blacks should be balanced somewhere with a picture of lynching whites?
Wouldn’t the likelihood of even having such a picture be a rebuttal against the raison d’etre of Holiday’s song? I mean, if lynching of whites had been common enough during a barbaric period after the invention of photography, there wouldn’t have been much of a “race problem” in the US. Rather just a “psychopathic pogrom” problem in the west. oh, wait…
man, those are some good lyrics, though.
oh for the days of Holliday…
just kill me now.
Which is the market power of someone like gaga being a tattered mess of sexual provocation and repulsion. You don’t want to do it because it’s not doing anything. Just keep watching.
You’re perfect as you are, you attractive”slashdashslash”monster. wtf?
It’s easier to accept sensationally brutal imagery when there’s a conciliatory moral context. “Lynching is evil” is an easy context to assume the public is familiar with.
It has nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with moral indignation/refusal to participate.
The “problem” with extreme porn is that it may seem like fun to some people (because it instinctively seems like fun to EVERYONE, even the concerned censors) and that would risk incentivizing it.
But we all assume lynching is of no attraction to almost anyone but pure degenerates, so the image acts as a redundant, insulting deterrent.
Imagery is supposed to make us watch and not participate. Or else there’d be no market for it but the first: we’d all go out and do it. What the monkey sees…and all that.
I don’t want your admiration…I want your pity–er, concern–er, “baby”.
Works for me!
Whole newspapers specialise in Concern Porn….
etymology: cricket > vaudeville.
George Burns told Anthony Hopkins that he had survived the death of Vaudeville, decades ago. And Gaga is American.
So it’s impossible for her to lay one.
Madonna probably plays cricket by now. Or did.
There’s a kind quiet, loud beauty to real commercial success as an American. You’re untouchable. The only Americans who want to be Unamerican are failures. And if they can’t earn, they don’t want to suffer the price of being considered a winner. Everyone expects a winner to grease their palms.
I’m going to go and force myself to jerk off to that grammy outburst, just to be hip.
If she’s dead then either you’ve held a seance for her or I’m still too hip.
likely both.
Wondered what the etymology of the phrase “lay an egg” is, the laziest lookup on the net will provide:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lay
lay (v.) Look up lay at Dictionary.com
O.E. lecgan “to place on the ground (or other surface),” also “put down (often by striking),”
[…]
Meaning “have sex with” first recorded 1934, in U.S. slang, from sense of “deposit” (which was in O.E., as in lay an egg, lay a bet, etc.), perhaps reinforced by to lie with, a frequent phrase in the Bible. The noun meaning “woman available for sexual intercourse” is attested from 1930, but there are suggestions of it in stage puns from as far back as 1767.
Now I wonder if Mark Simpson meant lady gaga “fails” = “lay an egg”
or if she’s finally become sexually active. And it’s with an egg.
It works either way, Lainey! Nice to see you here.
I could pretend that ‘processed’ was a witty play on words but I’m dyslexic. It should read ‘possess’
Gaga is a cliche of what the music industry feel they can smother on the young. What did you really expect from someone who was created?They, in my opinon dreamt this up in a boardroom. Hopefully, no one will buy this and ‘Euthanasia’ will be her final song.
I liked her better when I thought she was a man. Now that may well have been the only bit of originality she processed and she removed it.
I think I love you, Mark.
oh and just you wait! MADONNA will lose her cool and say that Gaga looks “old” and “tired” and can’t keep up with the real thing.
May her anthem last a thousand years and be as fresh as a 1000 year old newborn babe to the eyes that know how to see!
As gaga said, we’re all monsters and stars and we’re all lovable. At any age. Or sex. or gender. or race. or disability.
Which is more recycling of wrinkles (in a good way) than madonna’s plastique-knife denialism ever did!
Ms Gaga is a little too stylised to claim she was born that way.
When you put nothing in, you get nothing out. Which makes for great reruns.
Gaga showed madonna up by exposing the bare bones of express yourself. She isn’t better than madonna but madonna is definitely worse than her.
Sometimes imitation is just embarrassing for the flattered: oh my gaaad! I did what thing you liked?!
Madonna was always about the CINEMATOGRAPHY. Her shows sucked. Her singing sucked. Her DANCING sucked. And I doubt she sucked much of anything, given how incompetent is her “demonstration”, which she obviously thought impressive enough to make a motion picture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IRZxKPTfJc
oh yeah, baby, suck that tip. And take the rest in – real. slow. not too much, sweetie. comfy?
I think, when I was 10, I could suck a popsicle that way on a cold day.
No one ever asked madge to “try”, she was always provoking an insipid, barely-non-victorian anglophone world.
So at least we’ve evolved beyond THAT.
Express. herself. Gaga can’t, for she has no experience or inspiration impressed upon her.
Her composition process is doubtless equally incubatory and stillborn as any grammy night cosmic energy she marketed to the gossip rags: probably just another, earlier, 72 hours in a room and all she could visualize was her childhood mtv reruning nostalgia episodes of Express yourself. Of course a rip off will hatch.
Given that Gags’s 18th century salon powdered skin blanching and nudity are generally a perfect match for madonna’s express yourself video, I think this now musical match is like a final farewell to a teacher.
Now. NOW. Comes the real magic of Gagalicious composition. She’s FREE.
Having TRAPPED the gays in their own self deluded PC indulgence (and the rest of american youth too), she’s freed herself not only of madonna but of madonna’s twinky dancer gangs. Let them eat cake. With sugarfree frosting and “it gets better” written on the cream.
There’s no more room for post sexuality. The tide will turn.
How many months (weeks?) now before Madonna releases a single that rips off gaga. THAT will be fun!
I can’t wait to see that withered old bat fumble at impersonating her impersonator. And since there are no more cinematographers of the caliber she used to hire, it’ll be as gay (venerable old sense of the word – not this new shit the kids love) as watching an evil cripple fighting a rat.
That scene of two social security recipients struggling to be the more petty on the streets of new york in taxi driver comes to mind.
I hope The Lady sues Madonna for infringement. It will come to pass.
She did use “Orient” in a way you would not expect . . . I don’t know — she’s built a successful career on the shoulders of her predecessors (i.e. Madonna who I never cared for either), and some clever costuming — she’s a light weight — the Empress has no clothes.
But I won’t toss lame allusions around, I’ll leave that to her.
Writing a ‘gay anthem’ (literally) is a bad idea, but she’s young. . . and her fans are young.
I think we all have been let down by our musical heroes — it’s inevitable, a rite of passage.
The chorus sounds like an affectionate parody of gay anthems.
It’s kind of scary to contemplate her incubating her next move inside that eggshell contraption.
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