A few months ago one of the blogs I follow announced that Amazon was selling Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way for $.99. I can’t say that’s a good deal. It did occur to me though that this would allow me to purchase the album cheaply for a St. Anne’s Public House review.
Usually when one reviews an album one should spend a lot of time listening to that album over and over again. This author confesses that he has not listened to this album over and over again. Some of these songs I’ve heard only once. So with that admission, the review commences.
On a visit to LA last year, while I was staying with a friend who sings opera, I asked him what he thought of Lady Gaga. He said “Brilliant.” I asked whether he meant Gaga as a musician or her music. He said, “It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is managing her is brilliant.”
Stefani Germanotta, the young lady who calls herself Lady Gaga, is worthy of at least some attention. For the purpose of this review I will assume that she actually is the one coming up with the stuff that she’s doing, and that she’s not a puppet for a bunch of other people who tell her what to do and say. Stefani understands story, and this is what separates her from many of the other pop stars who tried to imitate Madonna. Madonna’s genius was found in her ability to size up the cultural moment in which she found herself in her youth and to mold who she needed to be to transform one corner of her culture. She understood exactly what she wanted to destroy, and what she wanted to strengthen. Madonna was a postmodern whore, and now, with her tight gums and sagging skin, she’s sort of like a grandmother who was a postmodern whore. Many have tried to copy her, but those who do don’t understand what she was actually doing. Madonna was able to redefine female sexuality in terms, not of femininity, but masculinity.
Stefani is taking this one step further, by defining female sexuality in terms of bisexuality. Forget that being feminine stuff,. What’s really cool is being bisexual. In doing so, just like Madonna, she is passing off a bribe to both young men and young women who listen and identify with her music. The target of high school and college bi-curiosity is young men. Girls get the guys’ attention. And the young men don’t protest. Why should they when their girlfriend is kissing another chick. Maybe they’ll get to join. By making this move Stefani gets to play with reversing gender roles. And this is something the gay community likes. Since presently homosexuals are powerful in media she is able to become a pop-culture champion for them, thus eliciting their support. This again is something similar to what Madonna did.
In Stefani’s latest album, Born This Way, the enemy becomes more obvious. It is difficult to know whether she fully intends to, but this album takes aim at God, especially the Christian God revealed through Jesus Christ who claims to define morality, and sexual morality specifically. God may be involved in our moral decisions so long as God does not restrict us from pursuing our sexual appetites. Now this theme is as old as bread mold. But Stefani’s primary audience just hit puberty, and this is all new to them. She’s also a skilled musician and songwriter (or at least whoever is her handler, see above) and she has a knack for saying this in a postmodern Madonna meets Liza Mennelli meets Boy-George sort of way. Kinda cool. Her fashion team adorns her with gaudy metaphors, and properly armored she walks through narrative upon narrative, redefining the good in our culture. Brilliant. Brilliant because she knows what she is destroying.
It’s a shame that Christians are not as savvy, especially when Christ did a much better job of using metaphors and narrative to make cultural war on his enemies. The reason why Christians fail at subverting this sort of subversion of Christian morality is that we have truncated the biblical hermeneutic necessary to even understand what Scripture teaches about how to do this stuff.
I know I haven’t passed judgment on the album, but if you read carefully I have both the album and the American Church.
Last night Planned Parenthood called me. Actually, they called for my wife. They wanted her to call Washington State’s government, because my state is looking to cut significant funding to “Women’s Health” (Planned Parenthood). This got my attention. Planned Parenthood is scared that my state is about to cut much of their funding.
