Published in The Weekend Australian magazine of September 25-26, was a very interesting and relevant article written by feminist critic, Camille Paglia. In “The World’s Gone Gaga”, Paglia undertakes a critical, if not, scathing analysis of the pop icon, Lady Gaga. (A subject of discussion for all of you at some point, I am sure). Paglia claims that Lady Gaga is “the first megastar of the digital age” and that “her success only shows how culturally impoverished we have become … living in an era of miniaturisation, image saturation and manipulation … and in a disconnection from nature”. While there is no questioning Paglia’s observation that we are in fact living within a digital age, does she gone too far to claim Gaga as a highly superficial, “manufactured personality” and as a “plasticised android”?
Paglia claims that Gaga is a mere replica: whose persona is founded on the copying, duplicating and apparent blatant forgery of past pop identities such as David Bowie, Madonna, Cher, Isabella Blow, Marlene Dietrich, Andy Warhol, Theda Baras, Clara Bow, Marylin Monroe, Jane Fonda, Gwen Stefani, Jane Russell … the list goes on. Paglia states that Gaga, through imitating such personalities (all of whom are understood by Paglia to be ‘authentic’), is essentially a living cliché. An agglomerative pastiche of artificial personas and superficial characters, who lack depth, originality and substance.
However what marks Gaga differently to her predecessors, and valorises her concept to a certain extent, is her usage of the internet (the very environment from which Gaga has manifested). However Paglia goes deeper then this to argue Gaga’s popularity and success through the consequences, effects and bi-products of the internet and the digital age. Paglia identifies the blurring borderlines that the internet has created between the real and the fake; the true and the false; the primary from the secondary; the virtual from the real; the public and the private, claiming “… in the sprawling anarchy of the web, the boarderline between fact and fiction melt away” Furthermore, Gagas fans, aged predominantly in their teens to tweens are “marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media … processing reality as cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits”. It seems that Paglia has adopted a very post-modern critique of Lady Gaga and the internet generation. However is Paglia correct in making such assumptions?
The lack of engagement with the real world by the Gaga generation has been the responsibility, or at least aided by their current obsession with the digital age, whose iPods, mobile phones and keyboards have become “sticky extensions of their bodies”, who “have abandoned body language in daily interactions … are not attuned to facial expressions and communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages…” This observation by Paglia, is an apt one. The current generational obsession with technology, gadgets and mew media is limiting people’s capacities to engage within the real world. It seems to me that in a world in which people are constantly surrounded by noise, gizmos and gadgets (I am not talking here of street or the sound of people socialising in a bar or a café, but rather the noise of glitching mobile phones, the clicking of iPod wheels, the beeping of pagers, the constant drumming of music, advertising and television) are infact becoming increasingly uncomfortable within the real or natural world and their capabilities to interact with it, is diminishing. Perhaps the current obsession with Lady Gaga, who seems to be a highly constructed, refracted and digitalised character, devoid of humanistic qualities or artistic talent, is an apt reflection of a media-obsessed generation whose diminishing social capabilities and lack of real world engagement is a direct result of a life lived on the net.
Cheers,
Blake Chitty.
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