Lady Gaga–Born This Way
Posted By BillHeise on June 8, 2011
I like Lady Gaga, and apparently I am not alone. This week, the Economist has an article equating Mother Theresa and Lady Gaga as models of business leadership. I laughed before I got to the article where the headline writer asks the reader not to laugh. I couldn’t help it, though, and laughed again. This is because the celebrity/paparazzi culture makes role models out of everybody who is or ever was famous. Warren Buffett?
The article makes the case for Gaga’s business leadership here:
Lady Gaga has what Messrs Anderson, Kupp and Reckhenrich call “leadership projection” and a layman would call charisma. The authors think this is because she tells “three universal stories”. First, a personal story: who am I? (She stresses that she was the weird kid at school, but driven to be creative.) Second, a group narrative: who are we? (She calls her fans “my little monsters” and herself “Mama Monster”, and she communicates with them constantly via Facebook and Twitter.) And third, a collective mission: where are we going? (She promotes gay rights and celebrates self-expression; she tells her fans that together they can change the world.)
They note, however, her failings.
Likewise, sceptics may doubt that the secrets of Lady Gaga’s success, or Mother Teresa’s, can usefully be applied to, say, a company that makes ball-bearings. A manager who calls her minions “little monsters” will probably not win their hearts. A boss who declares that God wants the sales team to meet its targets will be laughed at. Sceptics might also point out that Lady Gaga is not much of a manager. Her recent world tour attracted legions of fans but still lost money, because she kept changing the sets.
The writer then goes on to not get the point of her latest single, ‘Born This Way.’
Her new album cover depicts her as half-woman and half-motorbike, and claims that she was “Born this Way”. This is obviously not true.
I think I can do a little better at explaining the joke to the obviously humor-deficient writer.
I have regularly defended Gaga is the most complete artist in our pop star times. Her talents include but are not limited to
- Her voice
- Her talent as a piano player
- Her songwriting skills
- Her sense of style
- Her deep sense of tradition
- Her intelligence
- Her sense that what she is doing is art
Of course, all of these have been listed as weaknesses by others. Nevertheless, such a mix of talents have rocketed her to the top of the cultural universe of America. This brings me to ask whether my sense of what she is saying matters if she has such a large following. But before I get to my particular critique of Lady Gaga, perhaps I must bring myself to consider her in her wider context. And this of course brings me to Derrida.
Derrida’s Critique of Pure (or Any Other Sort of) Reason
Since the middle of the 18th century, metaphysics has been the end point of Western aesthetics. From the beginning of the 17th century it was reason, but that system failed to adequately account for human experience and was dropped. The same thing had happened with medieval scholasticism’s attempt to map the mind’s road to God.
In any case, this metaphysical sense of art guided us through the period of Modernism. It began to be questioned in the 60s. The chief Postmodern critic of the 60s and 70s was Derrida, who drew on the failure of language to achieve what Modern literary critics had been telling us was the end point of our engagement with words: a stable meaning. There were no stable meanings in Derrida’s universe. Instead, words referred only to other words, and not to a deeper ‘logos,’ a stable and secure meaning which lay beneath our words. Thus was ushered in the Postmodern period.
The Postmodern period changed our relationship with our language, as well as to our culture. Language was supposed to provide the limit of our human consciousness in our ultimate quest to reach an impossible resting point in the philosophical universe. Everything we think of as stable in our universe is simply a matter of us not having learned to fully question our assumptions.
As a result of Derrida’s impossible to reach metaphysical endpoint, Postmodern art has substituted endlessly reproducible art for an art that has a stable unchanging meaning at its center. Warhol is the patron saint of this sort of art (see my discussion of the weakness of Warhol’s art here). This has placed a changeable culture at the center of our quest for metaphysical wholeness and not the individual him or herself. Individuals are thought to be too selfish and too greedy, looking out for themselves in a selfish desire for accumulation of material goods and not for the more general culture. Culture is thought to be more complete.
Lady Gaga is a nearly perfect American cultural icon. But is she ‘authentic?’ According to Camille Paglia, the answer is a resounding ‘No!’ Her latest song is merely a copy of Madonna’s authentic ‘Express Yourself.’
Her positions, which she constructs can be deconstructed just as readily by those in the know who realize that she is merely imitating Madonna in her unoriginal reproductions of greater works. Paglia agrees that Madonna is ‘original’ and so ‘authentic,’ while Gaga is, well, derivative ga-ga (as defined in the song from which she took her name):
The question this raises in my mind is whether all those other rare talents that I have listed above mean nothing if she is imitating her betters without bringing enough philosophical or linguistic originality to her work? This seems to be the case if we are to believe Paglia and Derrida. But is this the case? Let’s take a closer look at Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ for answers.
‘Born This Way’
The Introduction to Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’
What Lady Gaga seems to be doing in her ‘Born This Way’ is to be shoring up the selfish individuality of Madonna ‘Express Yourself’ with a feint toward the wider culture that is based in another world than ours. After a picture of a cute unicorn, Lady Gaga opens her eyes to the startling music of Hitchcock’s Vertigo—a perennially popular Postmodern favorite, see my post on Madmen—and then she starts to speak, saying:
On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place.
Okay, what? Is this real? Of course not. It’s a fantasy written by Lady Gaga. And once she has settled that with literalists like the headline writers at the Economist, she continues:
But the birth was not finite; it was infinite. As the wombs numbered, and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal; it is eternal.
This puts her in the wheelhouse of art, focusing on infinite things, rather than temporal things (see my consideration of the art of Man Ray). After this declaration, she engages in a bit of word repetition, known in literary circles as ‘tautophrase.’
And thus began the beginning of the new race: a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom.
I learned in graduate school that such things mean things, even when the denote nonsense; and in this case, Gaga means to derive her meaning from her origins in nature. Such a thing might seem ridiculous, given the fact that she has just introduced us to her completely fictional universe with a unicorn, but she probably believes that her words make sense; so we’ll have to wait and see.
Maybe Plato Can Help
What could she mean? Well, here a little Plato will come in handy, for Plato was the guy who gave us Atlantis in his cosmology of the Timeaus (see my bit on Atlantis). My point in that post was that Plato never really thought that Atlantis existed; but he also thought that such ‘necessary fictions’ could not be done away with, as Aristotle had thought. This is why he positions Socrates’ repetition of the Timaeus on the day following his repetition of the Republic. A careful reader—one who is engaged in reading texts as opposed to one who accepts texts in their complete form as final—will be able to recognize that Socrates’ story has changed (see Cornford’s Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato
Plato was trying to prove that Aristotle, with his universals derived from nature, was wrong to place them within nature. His Socrates goes around telling the same general story with a few minor differences. He (Plato) does this to cement the notion that the ideal state is not found in nature but in Socrates’ superior mind. And this is why Plato puts so much emphasis on the imaginative construction of the world (in the Myth of Er with which he concludes his Republic, for instance) as opposed to finding the ‘truth’ within ‘nature,’ as Aristotle had in his day and both Joni Mitchell and Rush Limbaugh have in ours.
This led in the classical world to a configuration of thought in which fiction (particularly the fiction of Homer) was used in place of science (see Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Penguin Classics)
, trans. Robin Campbell, The Penguin Classics (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), LXXXVIII, 152.). This meant that anybody could make up stuff, and there was no way to tell if what they were telling you was real or a complete fantasy.
The Greeks and Roman, though, had a long tradition of thinkers going back to Socrates on which they could rest their tradition, while recent upstarts like those pesky Christian doubters were focused on the lowly individual (of all things!) rather than the more collective good. In that way, philosophy could allow Greeks and Romans to peer beyond our lowly individual lives to the core of our being, which lay somewhere else; and it allowed them to compass both good and evil, maintaining them in ‘balance.’
Of course, the price of this ‘balance’ was that Socrates’ death became a model for the philosopher’s behavior and the good was aligned in the pagan mind with death, not life. The medieval Church would have something to say about that in their prohibition of suicide. In the Middle Ages, the Church stood for life against the destructive tendencies of death.
Back to Gaga
The same focus on death can be seen in Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ video, as she parades around in a death mask. As she does so, she shifts from ‘reality’ grounded in ‘nature’ to a reality grounded in her own mind and introduces ‘evil’ into her universe.
But on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.
She takes a place above good and evil, encompassing both. And there is more:
And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance.
Once again, she focuses on ‘imagination’ as the way forward, and not on ‘nature’:
It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”
So she is intent on protecting herself from the way of the world by traveling up out of the world into her own imagination, where she is in full control.
She then tells the audience, from her position as protector of the ‘perfect,’ that it doesn’t matter whether she focuses on HIM (presumably the One Creator of Plato’s Timaeus) or on ‘him’ (a human individual). Both contain aspects of the ‘One,’ so the interchange doesn’t matter.
The Critical Posture towards Lady Gaga
But Derrida would tell us that such a gesture suppresses the differance; it doesn’t eliminate it. My question is whether Lady Gaga’s fame more than makes up for her weakness as a leader of intellectuals like the academically-trained writer at the Economist.
Before you react to his criticism of her, you should be aware that I love Lady Gaga’s music. She seems to me to be quite young, of course; but she appears to me to be more intellectual than any of her predecessors. Britney Spears focuses on her body as she asks ‘Why won’t they just let me live?’ She wants to get boys; she is a performer, rather than a spectator; and the lowly moralists ask her to tone her ‘craziness’ down. But she is wise enough to continue to be crazy just like Charles Manson, who also shaved his head in protest of something or other (I can’t be the first to have noticed this; nope, I’m not).
Britney has found herself a place in the universe from which she can judge others without being judged herself. But the universe is not so forgiving as to give her what she wants (a secure and unassailable post). Her idealism covers from herself the fact that, as talented as she is, her personal life is certifiably crazy. Britney’s problem is that she has no mechanism in place if she is wrong about her place in the world. She simply thinks that it is the fault of others that they won’t let her be the way she wants to be.
That’s the problem with fame. Once you have it, you need to be careful that you don’t take yourself too seriously and that you listen to other opinions, including sometimes unflattering opinions. That is difficult but nevertheless necessary if you don’t want to get distracted from what got you your fame in the first place. But she has found her own unassailable position as a woman who can judge but not be judged. In her case, it is as the Demiurge who gives birth to evil, as well as good in perfect balance. Hooray!
Gaga’s Foray Into Metaphor
But the problem with this, as the humorless academically-trained Economist writer notes, is that it is all a lie. There is no unicorn in space. She was not born this way. Gaga’s point, however, is a metaphorical one. Her inner beauty is not contingent upon her outer beauty. Instead, her outer beauty is an expression of her inner state of mind. Moreover, her ‘little monsters’ are not, unlike the Economist writer, obsessed with ‘the truth.’ They can be carried away by the fantasy she is providing.
It’s up to her followers to be brave enough to follow her into her idealist fantasy (which humorless academically-trained writer might feel obligated to remind serious readers that the whole thing is a ‘fiction’; there in no G.O.A.T.). Her followers are empowered by believing in her ‘fiction.’ And as for folks like the Economist writer who have doubts, well folks like them have to be isolated from infecting the faithful with their doubts. Lady Gaga has placed herself above doubters like them by placing herself in the philosopher’s heaven where their philosophical program is beyond doubt.
Can she do so with impunity? Apparently the power of her celebrity and her legion of fans will allow her this, at least for awhile. Is this really okay? Well, when I was in graduate school, I, too, was trained to be skeptical of such claims, which eventually must necessarily fall apart. We were trained there to take a step back to the philosopher’s heaven and note, from our position far away from earth, the folly of taking any permanent position. The Economist writer shares the academic skepticism to which I was trained. He, too, is too literal to share in Gaga’s fantasy. He steps back from her success and comments on it from a safe ironic distance.
But there is irony in the academic position, as well. They, too, have left the world of ‘lived life’ to travel to a fictional space in which they can comment on the works of others without being judged themselves (precisely that which they criticize in others, including Gaga). Their translations of terms away from ‘lived life’ into a critical vocabulary, they tell us, are not fictions; they are only there to make things clearer to those who actually live their lives blind obedience to others. This becomes the mark of academic authenticity.
This puts the ‘little monsters’ who live their lives in a subordinate position to ‘Mother Monster’ in an inauthentic position of being followers of others. This is precisely what intellectuals hope to avoid. For them, the ‘little monsters’ are symptoms of a lost generation. This causes academics to dig into their own set of ‘non-fictions’ in the hope that they can persuade those involved in following an obvious ‘fiction’ that their way of looking at the world is not just different, but wrong. Only the ‘non-fiction’ position allows unassailability from assaults of the unwise and impure, even as they lecture others on the assailability of every position but their own.
The Assault on Reason
This gives rise to ‘with-us-or-against’ positions. Everyone in the world thinks that their position is unassailable because they have authentic and unassailable existence; reason does not enter into it. Reason would tell us that Lady Gaga’s work is nonsense. Likewise, reason would have us believe that no position (including that of my academic colleagues) will hold up forever. But reason has been dismissed from consideration in art and literary criticism. Art is attempting to peer beneath the surface to the ‘essence’ of the matter. Reason peers only at the surface of objects and hence its products are unfit for consumption by serious critics. No one ever asks whether the translation from surface to depth is possible. If it is possible, how? And what about the translation cost that Derrida would exact from the exaltation of one position over another? Who pays the freight charges?
Metaphor in Criticism and Gaga
Lady Gaga and my academic colleagues both seem to be proposing a ‘natural’ worldview by proposing a metaphor which we need to pass through before we get to ‘nature’ and ‘truth.’ In the case of Lady Gaga, it is that she was born ‘this way.’ As the Economist writer notes, this is nonsense. But in the critic’s translation of her experience, I am more concerned with what is lost in the translation out of ‘lived life’ into the critical sphere of the philosopher’s heaven. In the translation, the writer has stripped out all sense of irony, not completely, of course—Derrida tells us that this is impossible—by suppressing our natural impulses in favor of new impulses.
It turns out that (if Derrida is right) there is always an inexorable ironic distance between ‘lived life’ and ‘nature.’ Therefore, the academically trained writer feels the duty to appropriate the irony of Lady Gaga’s situation. He has the right to take an ironic stance on his experience, but Gaga and her followers are supposed to be living without any sense of ironic detachment. Of course, in Lady Gaga’s experience, the writer is an idiot who doesn’t get the joke in the first place. So in the end, both are appropriating the ironic stance, and both are denying it to others.
This is a way of keeping everyone is happy. Lady Gaga is happy, because she is a nice girl who is being deliberately misunderstood by critics who don’t even get what is an obvious play on words in the title of her song ‘Born This Way.’ Here followers are happy because they are in on the joke. The critic is happy, because he has appropriated the sense of irony that is necessary to be a good person in the postmodern world.
But my question is not about who is right in this debate, but why we think it is necessary to translate ourselves out of our ‘lived lives’ into a position of ironic distance from which we can take stock of our lives. The question is not one of ‘nature vs fantasy’; everyone in this debate deals with nature and truth through a veil of metaphor. It is a matter of supporting people vs tearing down their beliefs. By that measure, isn’t Lady Gaga a better person on account of her real support of her followers than the academically-trained critic who doesn’t have nearly as many followers and is merely content to snipe at others for not being as cynical as he is.
A Walk Through A Lady Gaga Concert
So let’s take a walk through Lady Gaga’s lyrics without translating them into another context. The song itself starts off with an introduction in which she declares the lack of difference between herself and
It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M
Just put your paws up
’cause you were Born This Way, Baby
Of course the Economist writer, who has ceme along for the ‘show,’ is correct that she was not born this way at all, but her followers would say that he is missing the joke and move on. She moves on:
My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
Of course, the persistent writer would say ‘Nuh-uh’ (probably in a whiny voice), but Gaga’s followers would ignore him as a humorless crank. Perhaps someone might explain the joke that he apparently still doesn’t get. The ‘little monsters’ would resume listening to Gaga’s performance, while the unlucky follower who was picked to speak to the critic would attempt to take him outside so that the rest of us can enjoy the show.
Gaga continues singing:
She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on
In the glass of her boudoir“There’s nothing wrong with loving who you are”
She said, “‘Cause he made you perfect, babe”
What could be more harmless than that. But at this point, our academic critic would turn around and protest: ‘No one is perfect, Lady Gaga. If everyone was the same, then we would have no individuality. We know this because Rousseau has told us that it is by our differences—which Jacques Derrida calls differance—that we are unique.’
‘How do you know that Rousseau is right?’ our unlucky ‘little monster’ would answer him, suspecting that the academically-trained writer is spouting authorities in order to make himself superior to the little monsters but without having as firm a grasp on the situation as he supposes.
‘Let’s go outside and we can talk,’ he says, but the academically-trained writer is screaming at Gaga again.
”
So hold your head up girl and you’ll go far,
Listen to me when I say”
‘Listen to you? Why should anyone listen to you if you’re promoting SELF RELIANCE?!’
Lady Gaga looks annoyed as she continues:
I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way
Christopher Hitchens, another humorless academically-trained writer, has called her “Hell’s Angel.”
In his book, “The Missionary Position”, he berated her for spreading an extreme form of Catholicism and for accepting money from dodgy people such as “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the late dictator of Haiti.
Our academically-trained writer agrees. ‘How can you bring God into it?’ he asks. ‘And what about your taking money from brutal dictators?!” he screams. Gaga continues unfazed:
Don’t hide yourself in regret
Just love yourself and you’re set
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way
‘WHAT?’ screams the ill-behaved academically-trained writer screams.
‘Please step outside with me, sir, so we can discuss your complaints in private,’ says the unluckiest of monsters, who is starting to realize that he has been handed an obstreperous psychopath to deal with who can’t just lighten up and enjoy the mood.
Gaga continues:
Oh there ain’t no other way
Baby I was born this way
Baby I was born this way
Oh there ain’t no other way
Baby I was born-
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way
At her repetition of the phrase ‘I was born this way,’ our unlucky ‘little monster’ starts to get angry with our academically-trained writer, who can’t let it go.
‘No. NO. NOOO,’ he says. But then, he hears something he likes.
Don’t be a drag -Just be a queen
Don’t be!
‘THAT’S what I’m talking about. There’s your differance!’ But before he can even get up on the stage to stop the performance so that he can start a dialog with Lady Gaga on this point, she reverts back to her inauthenticity once more, as she sings:
Give yourself prudence
And love your friends
Subway kid, rejoice your truthIn the religion of the insecure
I must be my self, respect my youth
‘PRUDENCE?! What are you talking about?’ Receiving no answer from his attempt at direct negotiation, he says to no one in particular, ‘What is she talking about? There’s no prudence in art. Art is all about differance.’
‘She was talking to her audience. Subway kids and young people,’ says the unluckiest of monsters. He was just about to leave he academically-trained writer to be devoured by the angry crowd, when Gaga saved him with her words.
A different lover is not a sin
Believe capital H-I-M (Hey hey hey)
I love my life I love this record and
Mi amore vole fe yah (Love needs faith)
He approved of her vaunting of differance in art, as well as life partners, although he could not believe in her expressing herself on the subject of H-I-M. The more hims she had the better, as this would spread the gospel of differance as far as men could scatter their seed; but everyone who was anyone knew that there was no such thing as H-I-M.
But the odd thing was that she didn’t seem to be interested in displaying her body, as Madonna had taught the best of us in the 80s. Instead, she seemed to have some sort of odd fascination with tying differance away from the individual body towards an impossible to conceive of God in heaven. And then he realized why, as Gaga sang:
Don’t be a drag, just be a queen
Whether you’re broke or evergreen
You’re black, white, beige, chola descent
You’re Lebanese, you’re orient
Whether life’s disabilities
Left you outcast, bullied, or teased
Rejoice and love yourself today
’cause baby you were born this wayNo matter gay, straight, or bi,
lesbian, transgendered life,
I’m on the right track baby,
I was born to survive.
No matter black, white or beige
Chola or orient made,
I’m on the right track baby,
I was born to be brave.
Of course he now understood her at last. She was talking about otherness of the disabled, as well as those who don’t fit in with the ‘norms’ of society. Such a position was appropriate to them, and he was finally persuaded to step outside.
‘I would like to talk to Lady Gaga about her position in her song,’ he said. She seems to be mistaken in her belief system.’
‘It’s just a song,’ said the unluckiest of monsters, who was now missing her ‘Poker Face.’
‘But she is misleading so many of her followers with her false beliefs. If I could just correct her, she would get on the right path and so be better able to lead her followers to ‘the truth,’ and not guide them down the path of unrighteousness.’
‘She’s doing okay as it is,’ said the little monster.
‘But don’t you see, my friend….’ The little monster thought to object that they weren’t friends, but refrained in the interest of getting back into the concert before he missed the whole thing. ‘…Don’t you see that she could be doing so much better if she would only listen to ME!’
‘Lady Gaga is very busy,’ said the little monster, who thought that this guy was taking Lady Gaga far too seriously and could actually pose a threat to her. ‘Wait here,’ he said. And with that, he went and warned the security guards about him as a possible threat before going back inside to enjoy her ‘Bad Romance.’
After an interview of over an hour with the terrorism police, our academically-trained writer was put on the ‘banned-for-life’ list and escorted to the door. And there he waited for her, but to hs dismay she came out another door.
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