By: Alex Knepper
Lady Gaga has been described as “a voice for our generation.” She is a woman on the verge of releasing Born This Way,
a potentially world-changing record which one person has called “the
greatest album of this decade.” The lead single of the same name has
been dubbed the “anthem for our generation.” Her concerts have been
deemed “youth churches,” and, as someone once put it: “the bitch can
sing.”
The Truth About Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga’s favorite subject is Lady Gaga. She envisions herself as
an enigmatic riddle wrapped inside a mysterious paradox. For my
inability to understand this infinitely complex figure, I’m constantly
being bashed over the head by her Monster Cult: I simply “don’t ‘get’
her,” they say. Browse YouTube comments or Twitter flame wars: her
detractors are told that they fail to understand Gaga’s deeper points
about celebrity, fame, and art. If we understood what she was aiming at,
we’re told, we’d stop aiming our bayonets at her and proclaim ourselves
Little Monsters, too.
In this essay — which will be ever-growing — I intend to chronicle, in fairly comprehensive fashion, why I totally do “get” Lady Gaga — and why to understand her is not to embrace her.
2010 was a watershed year for her — but for all the wrong reasons.
Having achieved fame, she has shed the arty, self-knowing persona of her
early period and has come to embody all of the pop life’s worst
attributes: egomania, pretension, and self-importance, topped off with a
big, steaming pile of histrionics.
Let’s begin by examining what exactly a ‘Little Monster’ is.
This is a fascinating read. I posted this essay on the blog within the first couple of months of it's start and I didn't have many visitors then. I'm posting it again because Alex Knepper did a fantastic job and it deserves a lot of attention.
So share this, tweet this, email this. Enjoy this!