Camille Paglia does not overhear herself.
I disagree with
Anne Althouse, who sees nothing in
Paglia's takedown of Lady GaGa but an old fart telling the damn kids to get off her lawn. In point of fact, I see a lot of blunt truth:
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.
One doesn't need to spend a lot of time with adolescents to see this. Technology has empowered the self-absorption/self protection cycle of adolescence to the point of mindlessness. We will one day reach the point when people will wonder why dining tables and fireplaces even exist; when families will be nothing more than genetic flash mobs. The machine is in the ghost.
However, Paglia, like Marx, does not see the logic of her own argument. She does not see that every criticism directed at GaGa redounds to Madonna as well. The names themselves mirror each other; had they been switched, none could tell the difference. So when Paglia says:
For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…
I can only say, "did she miss the 1980's?" That sounds like every act my elementary-school psyche came to grips with on MTV: jaded, soulless hawkers of plastic decadence. I cannot understand why she believes that GaGa differs from Def Leppard differs from 2 Live Crew differs from Madonna. And when she says:
There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.
I have to say "Woman, please." As though Madonna was an indie act, bursting forth armed from the head of Avant-Garde, rather than a relentless self-promoter who cannily released her disco-pop from Sire Records, who by 1982 had, like everyone else in the music industry, ran not walked away from everything risky. Madonna's entire shtick has been an
epater les bourgeois riff punctuated by exploding dollar signs from the beginning. It's actually kind of sad watching Paglia continue to play defense for a woman who has become as big an institution as Elvis ever was:
However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir.
That laughing sound you hear is me trying to figure out whatever it was the young Madonna did that could ever be considered "fiery." Was it the Go-Gos Lite of "Lucky Star"? The syrupy tedium of "Papa Don't Preach"? The lipstick-smeared, second-rate Vivienne Westwood fashion sense? Whatever the hell was going on in "Express Yourself" (truly a sentiment America had never encountered before)? What?
I suppose if I grew up in the 1950's and came of age in the 1960's, I might have considered Mdme Ciccone's disco-cancan act vital and novel. As it stands, I find the
Ga of Ga's way less offensive than Madonna, who will not rest until she's acknowledged as
the Queen of All Culture. Both are, at root, making a mint being drag queens with girl parts. The newer one, at least, has no notion of being anything more.
23. The Good, The Bad & the Queeen -- The Good, The Bad & the Queen
