What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Like Rob, I also contributed an essay to the new book, Acculturated: 23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chic Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture.
I just finished reading the book, and agree with Rob: it is an excellent and hip collection of essays on something that touches and affects all of us, pop-culture. I think that Ricochet readers will especially appreciate the book: it's quirky, lively, and smart.
If you're interested, my essay, which is about the faux creativity of Lady Gaga, appears below. (Thank you to my wonderful co-editors, Naomi Riley and Christine Rosen, for allowing me to reprint the essay here).
In 2008 Lady Gaga’s debut album The Fame topped the pop charts worldwide, and its first two singles—the disco-inspired “Just Dance” and sexually provocative “Poker Face”—were international number one hits. In 2009 hungry fans made her the most-Googled female celebrity of the year. In 2010 the sadomasochistic music video for her booming hit “Bad Romance” became the most-watched item in YouTube’s history, receiving nearly 180 million views. That same year in March, Yahoo Music reported that Lady Gaga became the only act in the digital era to top the 5 million sales mark with her first two hits, while the tech website Mashable noted that Lady Gaga was the first artist to have her videos reach 1 billion viewer hits. She is the only pop artist in history to earn six consecutive number one hits on the Billboard charts.
How did Lady Gaga become such a standout? To begin with, she’s got a knack for sending sadomasochistic rape-like fantasies—in songs and videos that double as catchy club hits—to the top of the charts. The song “Poker Face,” which is about being with a man while pretending to be with a woman, alludes to rough sex (“baby when it’s love if it’s not rough it isn’t fun”). The music video for “Bad Romance” is about being a sex slave. The climax of the video occurs when she’s thrown at the feet of a group of shirtless, tattooed men who look like Russian mobsters. “I want your revenge,” she howls in the song. In the same song, she craves a “leather-studded kiss in the sand.” Then there’s her song, “I Like It Rough,” which needs no explanation.
Lady Gaga is no simple pop star, she is a pop phenomenon—in the overheated rhetoric of the Atlantic Monthly, she is “something like the incarnation of Pop stardom itself.” Gaga’s wild popularity—from the cultlike adoration of her fans, whom she calls “little monsters” (a hat tip to her second album, The Fame Monster) to her record-breaking hits—can be chalked up to her creativity, or so say her little monsters. She is “creative and fresh,” one young fan tells me, she’s “something that I haven’t seen before in pop culture.” Lady Gaga and her fashion sense are “one and only” in the world, says another, whose fi rst language isn’t English. One fan idolizes Gaga’s creativity because “she has broken ground and put a new face on this decade of music”—“this decade” being the only one the fan knows culturally.
That new face, in case you’ve never seen a picture of Lady Gaga, looks like that of a woman posing as a cross-dressing man—a woman who celebrates rough sex, rape-like fantasies, and murder—a woman whose message is, as she told the Los Angeles Times, “I want women—and men—to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.” She is all at once vaudevillian and carnal. At all times, she is in full Gaga attire, which means she either looks like a cartoon alien or a “transvestite ballerina,” as a writer for the U.K.’s Times Online puts it. “Look at her fashion statements,” one fan says, when I ask why Gaga is creative.
“I don’t look like the other perfect little pop singers,” she told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I think I look new. I think I’m changing what people think is sexy.”
To her young audience, Lady Gaga is the epitome of creativity, which is why she is so successful. But a cursory glance reveals that Lady Gaga is recycling old ideas—and how creative can that be? She takes her cues from Andy Warhol, Queen, Grace Jones, Prince, and David Bowie. To those with a longer memory than her fans, her disco hits and androgynous flare descend from the glam rock of the 1970s. She is a sexual provocateur, like Madonna was in the ’80s and ’90s.
Yet her fans swear that she is something new, and different, and rebellious—which is the paradox of creativity in pop culture. In pop culture, the market replenishes itself with new young faces every decade or so. Most of Gaga’s fans weren’t even alive thirty or even twenty years ago. Here Gaga is cutting edge. “I am fascinated by and respect her uniqueness and unabashed embrace of her own outlandish ideas,” one fan swoons. That definition of creativity has come to dominate the popular culture in modern times—being creative means being novel, outlandish, a one-off . But it was not always thus.
Throughout Western history, the definition of creativity has remained fluid. The concept of creativity was initially limited in the West by strict canons and divine order. Eventually, though, that notion of creativity gave way to a tide of romantic individualism in the nineteenth century and even rebellion in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, being a rebellious individual is the apotheosis of creativity.
In the classical Greek world and during medieval times, the concept of creativity was attached to the concept of divinity. Mortimer Adler, the American philosopher who wrote extensively about the West, explains Plato’s take: “There are two kinds of creativity—divine and human.” Divine creativity “brought the world into being” while human creativity concerns itself, to quote Adler, with the “fashioning of works of art out of natural materials.” In making art, humans were not creators, but craftsmen. Art, to Plato, was imitation. He writes that painting “is just the imitation of all the living things of nature with their colors and designs just as they are in nature.”
The craftsmen of ancient Greece fashioned their art by following strict canons ordained, they believed, by divine powers. Though the artists were making something new, there was little to no room for imagination, or for creativity as we use the word today. Adler writes, “In the Greek tradition, artistic creativity is associated with discipline, conscious purpose and acquired skill. It is a rational and deliberate process.”
For instance, the glowing sculptures of the high classical period in Greek art did not seek to imitate the body of an athlete or a young girl, but they sought to replicate the essence of the platonic form of the body. Keith Sawyer, who has spent his academic career studying creativity at Washington University in St. Louis, notes that the Greek craftsman was “someone who was particularly skilled at representing the pure essences underlying certain forms” using natural materials. And with music, the composers, too, were following a canon: one that replicated the harmony of the orbs in heaven.
The great exception to this rule was poetry. For the Greeks, the poet could be endowed with creativity, but only through communion with the divine—for instance, with the Muses. In this sense, poetic creativity was a form of divine, not human, creativity. Interestingly, in The Republic, Plato banished poets from his ideal city, saying that their demonic powers were dangerous.
In the Roman world, the human being became the central focus of art. Rather than depicting the gods or stories from myth in art, as the Greeks did, the Romans focused their attention on emperors and historic events, aristocrats and senators, soldiers and slaves. Art was brought down to earth: humans, not gods, were the subjects of art and the curators of creativity.
But with the onset of Christianity, creation again was delegated to God alone. He created the world from nothing, creatio ex nihilo. During the medieval period, artists were viewed as craftspeople—like shoemakers or smiths—hired to serve a function. Patrons would pay artists and specify what they wanted in a work, which was usually religious art for worship. The artist in turn was less an “artist” as we think of the word today—a lone creator—but more of a studio manager. The master and apprentices all worked together to create a work of art. It was not an individual effort.
During the Renaissance, the philosophical ground for individualism was laid. But it took some time for it to be applied in the popular culture. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, with the dawn of romanticism, that creativity became the province of the individual. In that period, the poetic creator, says Sawyer, was a “lone, solitary artist expressing an inner vision.”
Think of Samuel Coleridge. He longed to create a public image of himself as a solitary genius. There’s a story that he wrote his famous poem “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced haze—with no revisions. It turns out that Coleridge fabricated this tale. In fact, he labored over multiple drafts of the poem. But he sought a certain image that was admired during that period and still is today (like rock-and-roll singers getting high on drugs and then composing their music—another common fabrication). A few decades later, Sigmund Freud affirmed this notion of creativity. As Adler writes, Freud saw “artistic creativity as originating in the unconscious depths of the mind and as expressive of emotional impulses.”
This is the concept of creativity that took hold of Western culture until the mid-twentieth century. Artists like Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock even made spectacles of their lone creativity by inviting audiences into their studios to watch them, in their manic crazes, paint. But the 1960s changed all that. Andy Warhol, the most famous spokesperson of the pop-art movement, rejected the idea of the lone, creative artist. Warhol famously said, “I want to be a machine,” “I like boring things,” “I like things to be exactly the same over and over again,” and “the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” Art was a commodity to be mass-produced for a mass-public, not a carefully planned and executed work that was emotionally inspired—thus Warhol’s famous painting of repeating Campbell’s soup cans. Authenticity in creativity was out; the market was in.
At the same time creativity was becoming increasingly defined by rebelling against authority and convention. The more provocative one was, the more attention one received and the more successful one could become. Nowhere was deviance more palpable than in the rock-and-roll scene that began in the mid-1950s America and took off in the 1960s. Th e currency of pop music and pop art was the utter irreverence to authority. With pop music, the best way to inflame social mores was through sex. Th ink Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations. As Camille Paglia, the social critic who wrote Sexual Personae, notes, “If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust.”
A major point of departure between pop art and pop music, however, was authenticity: bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones assumed the image of singer/songwriters, artists who created music themselves. Warhol, by contrast, reveled in inauthenticity. For the next four to five decades in pop music, stars who fashioned themselves as authentic singer/songwriters—like Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, and numerous rap stars who allege to be “legit” and from the street—coexisted on the pop-music scene with those who were shamelessly inauthentic—the disco movement, Madonna, and Britney Spears.
In interview after interview, Lady Gaga cites Warhol as a chief inspiration. Like Warhol, Gaga revels in artifice—her songs, videos, and live performances are heavily produced—but she also claims to be authentic, to write her own songs. Like Warhol, she has a manufactured image, which by this point has become an iconic brand, but she’s also starkly individualistic. Lady Gaga’s secret may be that she’s carefully walked the line between authentic and inauthentic. She has managed to take the market appeal of pop art and the rebellious spirit of rock and roll and combine it with her outlandish individualism. The common thread running through all of these elements of her persona is, of course, sexual deviance and mass-produced hedonism.
A good many pop-culture critics compare Lady Gaga to Madonna, saying that like Madonna Gaga is a savvy exploiter of her sexuality. Madonna, in her 1990 music video, “Justify My Love,” was unlike anything seen at the time. The video was banned from MTV for sexual content. She released an entire CD in 1992 called Erotica, devoted to sadomasochism. A feature of her worldwide tours was masturbating on stage. By provoking the culture, she ensured that she was a constantly relevant, constantly famous figure in it.
While pushing boundaries is nothing new in the world of pop music, every generation of pop stars must push the boundaries further to make their mark and stay relevant. Lady Gaga knows that to sell more records, especially as a woman, she needs to incorporate sex into her image. And, because she’s a savvy businesswoman, she knows that the only way to stay relevant in the market is not just to be sexy, but to do something new with her sexuality that reflects current sexual kinks. In today’s culture, homosexual and transgender sexualities are highly fashionable. And to quote a recent Salon.com column by Paglia, “Entertainment, media and the arts are nonstop advertisements for homosexuality these days.” Playing into this, Gaga has adopted an androgynous, homo-sexy look.
Like most people who claim the transgender mantle, Gaga does not look sexy, but grotesque. Instead of pleasure, she celebrates pain. As a Los Angeles Times culture columnist writes, “Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.”
In the age of the Internet, when people have easy and quick access to an ever-larger, ever-replenishing pool of pop music, stars have to do more and more to make themselves stand out against their competition. According to Gary West, a pop-culture expert who has worked in radio, “Her audience likes to see how far she will go. I think that’s how they define her creativity.”
With Icarian hubris, Gaga thinks she will leave no boundaries behind—and many observers seem to agree: thus, the Atlantic’s brash conclusion that “She’s the last pop-star: Apres Gaga, the void.” The real challenge will be creating something from that nothing. Who is up for that?
You can buy Acculturated here and you can read Rob's excellent essay in the book here.
At an event for Acculturated in New York City a couple of weeks ago, the book's co-editors, Naomi and Christine, posed a fun question that I will put to the Ricochet community. The question is this: what is your pop-culture vice?
Do you, for instance, love reading trashy magazines and tabloids? Are you a fan of reality TV shows like The Biggest Loser and 16 and Pregnant? Do you leaf your way through romance novels? I'm curious to read everyone's responses!
My pop-culture vices, like pop-culture itself, tend to change with the day. For now, they include: the Harry Potter series (especially the movies), television's Modern Family (so good, so funny!), and--of course--Lady Gaga (a bizarre yet captivating phenom). A few years ago, I was obsessed with Madonna. But that phase has, fortunately, passed.
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Aug '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
TV vices: 16 and Pregnant, Maury, Real Housewives (OC and NJ only), The Voice, Justified, Modern Family, Happy Endings, Mickey Mouse Club House, Jungle Junction, Super Hero Squad, Iron Man: Adventures, Fairly Legal, Burn Notice, CSI: Miami (only), Chuck, many more.
Video Game vices: LA Noire (sic), Fable II+III, Mass Effect, Call of Duty, Dragon Age, StarCraft, Warcraft, Dawn of War, Jack and Daxter, many more.
Music: Maroon 5, Cee Lo Green, Rise Against, Foo Fighters, stuff they play on KROQ or that a 13 year old girl might listen to.
News: KPCC
Games: D&D, Dragon Age, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, Catan, Carcassonne, Dominion, Ticket to Ride, Squad Leader (the original and not the advanced), anything by Victory Point Games, Mutants & Masterminds hundreds of others
Comics: D&D, Justice League, Superman, Green Lantern, Walking Dead, Invincible, Avengers, others.
Short answer. I have no Pop Culture vices. I have a deep love of popular culture. We live in a wonderful era filled with so much worth experiencing that I feel truly blessed.
Aug '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Books: Micheal Connolly, JK Rowling, Curious George, James Enge, George R.R. Martin, John Crowley, Tim Powers, anything edited by Lou Anders, John Scalzi, Iain Banks, Garth Nix
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
I'm with you on Cee Lo Green.
Here's another pop-culture vice: The Daily Mail.
Jun '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
For some reason, I like the award shows on TV. I don't know who half of the people are, but it's live, and there's always the chance that some "star" will emotionally, or intellectually, self-destruct. My fascination probably stems from my own fear of public speaking. When I see famous people embarrass themselves in front of millions, I always feel better. At least it wasn't me. And it's not like wishing for a NASCAR crash. On the award shows, nobody dies, physically.
Jul '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
"Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration."
"What is the point of restraint and circumspection, if such stream-of-consciousness vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social acceptance?"
Dec '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
I became a fan of The Sing Off last year, and hopefully am about to become a HUGE fan of that show (purely selfish reasons). Outside of that, the TV set is for sports. ESPN's 30 for 30 series has been excellent, however.
I have a 17 year old daughter who has an enormous impact on my life from a pop culture perspective. Between her & Ricochet's own Lance, my music tastes have expanded significantly over the past couple of years to include One Republic, Coldplay, Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, Black Eyed Peas, Freelance Whales, Mumford & Son and many others.
The aforementioned 17 year old has fashionista tendencies. Thus you will often see her "padre" sporting a pair of Toms on his feet and designer jeans on his rear.
By far the most significant devotion to popular culture, however, is Ricochet.com!
May '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Wow. The philosophical questions you raise are fascinating, but it's so depressing to think that the performer you just described is among the most popular in modern America. What have we become? I'm reminded of Claire's interview with Rammstein. Everyone's trying to stuff the hole where God used to reside.
Emily Esfahani Smith:
Lady Gaga’s secret may be that she’s carefully walked the line between authentic and inauthentic.
An astute observation. Like Madonna, she definitely has an ear for melody. It's the nature of evil to assume a semblance of good. Lady Gaga has talent. She just abuses it.
To some extent, I sympathize. There's a general culture among artists that encourages expression of every idea without moderation. Self-censorship is anathema to most artists. Evil is the easier way. It's easier to pretend that creativity is good without qualification; an end in itself, rather than an instrument.
Appreciation of beauty and expression are the artist's gifts. Like any of God's gifts, they can be corrupted.
It's natural to be attached to one's works. Rejecting one's own unworthy ideas requires humility, courage and love.
Jul '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Lady GaGa's act was old when Madonna did it, and the Story of O before that, and Venus in Furs before that, and the Marquis de Sade before that, and on and on. John Derbyshire has the definitive quote on this: "Pop culture is filth."
But yeah, I've wasted years of my life playing the Grand Theft Auto games.
Feb '11
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Squad. Leader.
Awesome.
My brother and I spent so many happy hours with Squad Leader - even through the time I upended the board and the pieces went flying because he utterly defeated me.
Thanks for reminding me, Nathaniel.
May '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Metal and a fascination with dark things.
As I argued once at First Things, metal isn't inherently corrupt or ugly. But it often is. When I was a kid sharing a room with an older brother, we actually used to sleep to bands like Pantera. Much of the music we listened to was very artful, but angry and bitter. Also, many metal bands pretended to admire evil to appeal to the same "rebel without a cause" crowd as Lady Gaga now serves (and because they probably didn't believe spiritual evil is real). Ozzy is a clear example.
As I grow older, I'm less willing to indulge in stuff like that. I stopped listening to Danzig when the lyrics finally registered. I generally avoid games and films that revel in darkness.
But I think there's a place for dark music ("Moonlight Sonata") and dark stories (Flannery O'Connor). Not all dark art is bad.
Goth girls can be pretty hot. They generally don't light up when you start talking apologetics, though. Such a shame.
Oh, and I love Saints Row games.
May '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
I have zero interest in award ceremonies, but by happy accident passed by a TV during Cee Lo's performance at the Grammys (or whatever it was). Great music. I watched the video for that song just now, for the first time. Hilarious!
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Emily,
Speaking of Lady GaGa's inauthenticity, isn't the music to "Born this way" exactly the music to Madonna's "Express yourself?"
My Pop Culture vice is Disney World. I admit to falling for the whole thing. When we go we start with "It's a small world" to get us in the Disney mood, and we immerse ourselves in the whole experience, no matter how touristy.
Rain is just liquid sunshine? Admit it - it really is the happiest place on earth.
Aug '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Aaron Miller
Goth girls can be pretty hot. They generally don't light up when you start talking apologetics, though. Such a shame.
Oh, I dunno. What about Lady Kurobara? She sounds pretty Goth in some ways (and definitely very Catholic).
(Where did Lady K go, btw? I miss her. Did her passionate nature get the better of her?)
Jan '11
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
My personal vice is video games. My favorite is Command and Conquer, and fighting skirmishes over the web. It's like being a football coach. You design plays, and then go into a game trying to execute a strategy. I also like Splinter Cell - why hasn't there been a Sam Fisher movie?
May '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
(Where did Lady K go, btw? I miss her. Did her passionate nature get the better of her?);
Yes, I think Ricochet is a bit restrained for her tastes. She's a frequent stalker of a particular married Canadian refugee. Keep an eye on the mailbox.
KC, I strongly recommend LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2, if you're into RTS games.
Edited on Jun 10, 2011 at 4:15pmAug '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
My favorite pop culture vice of all time is the website Go Fug Yourself, devoted to celebrity fashion disasters.
It is astonishing how beautiful people with seemingly bottomless wardrobe budgets, personal stylists and personal trainers, and fashion designers simply begging to dress them can nonetheless manage to wear so much unflattering clothing. (The term of art for fashionably ugly is "fugly", hence the name of the website.)
The world of high fashion fascinates me. It is so bizarre... It's not just about looking pretty, that's for sure.
May '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
Music like this:
Fu Manchu: Mongoose (Godzilla's Eating Dust)
Sweatmaster: Maggots (Tom Tom Bullet)
Asteroids Galaxy Tour: Around the Bend (Around the Bend)
Spoon: Got Nuffin (Transference)
Steriogram: Walkie Talkie Man (Schmack)
Paris, Texas: Bombs Away (Like You Like an Arsonist)
My five year old and I can bond on this stuff, which doesn't necessarily speak well of my tastes Can't fathom the saccharine, overtly Auto-Tuned dreck that passes for electropop these days. Have been predicting the demise of hip-hop for 15 years, and I think it finally hit a wall about 2 years ago.
Nov '10
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
About the closest I ever get to pop culture these days is reading Robert Stacy McCain (whom I quite like as a writer, as well as Smitty). And of course Ricochet. But neither seems very poppish...But other than that, except the odd bit that drifts in with a model or two, I've managed to live without it since my youngest struck out on his own 3 years ago. I quite enjoy the peace.
Apr '11
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
It's anime and manga for me. I adore Fullmetal Alchemist. Yeah, I know I'm old enough to be the mother of the target audience. But then again, I've always been a weirdo. And I'm working out some of my 8th grade issues. ;)
Edited on Jun 10, 2011 at 7:14pmMar '11
Re: What's Your Pop-Culture Vice?
I really don't have any current pop vices. I don't like GaGa, I don't like rap, and I don't like reality TV. Most of the time I DVR old movies from TCM now. I have become that guy yelling "get off my lawn, you damn kids!". And I'm only 42.
I just don't like what passes for pop culture now all that much. The last current "pop" album I bought was Them Crooked Vultures.