The 2010 Grammys opened with an emcee declaring on stage that he wanted “the real Gaga.” He dragged an “artificial” Gaga by her hair, demanding that he “bought a Lady Gaga, but you sold me a fake.” As he exclaimed that the “real” Gaga “has no soul,” Lady Gaga herself appeared on a platform above his head. The first sounds the audience heard from the massively commercially successful pop star were an acoustic rendition of her electronic dance hit “Poker Face,” transformed into a piano ballad. The performance quickly lulled, the familiar synthesized sounds began, and Lady Gaga jumped to the stage proper in order to perform the song as her audience expected. Her back-up dancers enacted a routine including a variety of familiar poses, evoking stances from pop iconography as diverse as “The Macarena,” “Thriller,” and traditional “vogue” movements of drag house cultures. The stakes of the performance were set. Lady Gaga as a phenomenon constituted something artificial, “poppy,” the absolute bane of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy.[1] Lady Gaga as a performer, however, involved something else. The “pop” version of “Poker Face” was short lived, as the emcee cut her off, shouting, “Everyone’s going goo-goo for Gaga! Her mind-controlling, pop music is ruining my business! Take her away. She’s a monster! She’s a monster! And she’s turning all of you into monsters.” The dancers subdued the singer, dragging her up a set of stairs to a meat-grinder sort of contraption adorned with the word “rejected.” As the dancers tossed her into the nightmarish funnel, the set-piece erupted in flames.
Fans of Lady Gaga undoubtedly recognized this spectacle as a fairly standard tactic of the singer. Lady Gaga has made a truly remarkable career out of enacting, while explicitly critiquing, pop music conventions. However, her performance at the 2010 Grammys illustrates what I believe to be a profoundly powerful expression of the ambivalent relationship between the arts and the hegemonic social structures that enable them to exist. As the emcee ranted about how monstrous Lady Gaga is, a wall of the set opened to reveal what was, presumably Gaga’s state after being tossed into the inferno. She sat at a piano, dark makeup smeared over her face to indicate residual soot from her incineration, while her sparkly costume remained mostly unsullied. Across from her, poised at an interlocking grand piano, sat Sir Elton John, his far more “sooty” face demonstrating that he had been tossed into the inferno long before. The two singers launched into a duet version of Gaga’s “Speechless.” The song morphed seamlessly into John’s iconic “Your Song,” the two songs existing together in a remarkable synchronicity enabled by a steady quarter-note articulation of their common harmonic progressions.
Rejected by the external “business” sensibility of the emcee, Lady Gaga descended into a fiery hell, only to be united with Elton John, an icon of pop music whose fame and success has insulated him from the potential mass cultural rejection invited by his sexuality. This concurrence of celebrity occurred a mere three months after Lady Gaga’s impassioned speech at the National Equality March for LGBT rights, which she described as “the single most important moment of [her] career,” and in which she declared that she “love[d] Judy Garland,” referencing the political potency of the Stonewall Rebellion.
The most potent aspect of this performance, for me, however, is the activation of culturally-inflammatory musical technology in the service of uniting identity politics with the injustices of the market economy. Robert Walser has examined the extent to which the piano functions as a “feminine,” or indeed gay, instrument in American culture, a role exacerbated in contemporary rock music when it is placed in contrast with that of the electric guitar.[2] Gaga’s forced descent into a hellish world, precipitated by her “pop” transgression, results in her communion with a figure whose is, at the same time, a true pop icon, an potent symbol for an aggrieved sexual minority, and a musician who, almost single-handedly, brought the “effeminate” piano back into vogue after its subsumation into the guitar-saturated acoustic world of 1970s and early 1980s heavy metal. While the “pop” world of Lady Gaga is explicitly critiqued in the course of her performance, the confluence of its artificiality and a realm of “authenticity,” represented by the commercially successful John, disrupts simplistic, binary conceptions of aesthetic value—an important philosophical move in the world of queer experience.
Another good example of a similar impulse:
[1] While notoriously suspicious of any kind of popular music, Adorno’s most clear rejection of the mode can be found in Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary and notes by Richard Leppert, with new translations by Susan H Gillespie, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
[2] Robert Walser, Running with the Devil, 130.
]]>
