I’m tired, so this may not come out well, but I’ve been wanting to do a post on Lady Gaga for some time. I remember the first song of hers I heard, “Poker Face”. That song has two parts: the grim, sadomasochistic part (“when it’s love if it’s not rough it isn’t fun”), and the sort of soaring, hopeful part, where she shows she really does have a very pretty, innocent sounding voice. It’s like there’s this compulsive darkness, punctuated by a dove flying to a cloud on a sunny day.
In my view, this is her split. She broke. She was an unsuccessul singer with a very normal name and appearance, and then apparently decided to play the game the way it is played in this society. She accepted that she had to sacrifice her innocence and–perhaps–protective barriers to make it. She sold and sells sex.
In our day to day relation, I think we often mirror this. I went for the first time to a local nightclub known as what we called a “meat market” in high school a few weeks ago. There was this compulsive energy to it. You could feel everyone looking for someone, then getting ready to dump them. Processing people. Processing relations, like so much pasteurized cheese in plastic wrappers. This corresponds to the dark part of that song, which is where the energy in most of her songs is.
Yet, for most people–and I think this applies particularly to women, who are in general more in tune with their emotions, and more imaginative than men–there is also this hope, that is non-compulsive, of falling in love, or a return–for at least some brief time–to innocence.
We balance these things. Pornography feeds compulsion. Religion, and an appreciation of beauty, and moral imagination feed the second.
I feel pity for Lady Gaga, since I think she feels a lot of conflict and pain. She deals with it, since women are tough. She is an open, creative spirit, with a lot of pressure on her to cultivate what amounts in my view to the pornographic side of our culture.
In general, I think we should use our celebrities less ruthlessly. Our greed for sharing their lives vicariously in some ways makes us vicious. We ask too much, from some.
In her particular case I am simply going to offer a prayer that God guide and protect her from losing her way.