Arthur Kaptainis On Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga performing at her last show in Roseland NYC

“Is Lady Gaga as radical as she seems?” This is not a question to preoccupy many readers of this column. But it caught my eye as the subject line of a recent Concordia University announcement related to a chapter in a scholarly book about this performer.

The volume is Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture. The chapter in question — Celebrity, Spectacle and Surveillance: Understanding Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” through Music, Image, and Movement — is the joint work of a Concordia sociologist, Marc La­France, and Lori Burns, the director of the school of music at the University of Ottawa.

If you are surprised by an expression of interest by two tenured professors in pop-music videos, you are even further out of touch than I am. Competency in counterpoint and knowledge of Beethoven string quartets are by no means necessary, or even helpful, if you are seeking work these days in a musicology department. At best, they will not be held against you.

Nor do the venerable scholarly virtues of balance and objectivity have anything like their traditional prestige. I leave it to Gaga fans to judge the validity of the observations Burns and LaFrance make about her videos. But it is clear that they approach the subject not with the dispassionate stance of mid-20th-century scholars but a full arsenal of turn-of-the-century politically correct expectations.

A few of which, alas, Lady Gaga has failed to satisfy.

She has done badly on race. Burns and LaFrance found that “whiteness is associated with bourgeois respectability” in her videos and “blackness with aggression and low social mobility.” This is to say that the butlers and chauffeurs in Paparazzi are black, as are the female prison inmates and brutish boyfriends of Telephone.

There is more. Disability — which ranks immediately behind sex and race in the contemporary hit parade of academic priorities — is not portrayed in a positive light by Lady Gaga but deployed as a metaphor for punishment meted out to celebrities who fly too close to the sun.

But the Gaga scorecard is not all bad. Give her a point for sex.

“She tends to celebrate strong female characters and non-normative sexual experiences by representing queer sexualities as linked to emancipation and self-determination,” LaFrance assures us. “That’s a positive message for the LGBTQ community, and one she upholds again and again.”

On the content of these comments, I have nothing to say. I am not a Lady Gaga authority. I wish only to point out that the aims of Burns and LaFrance are not confined to making perceptive comments about this performer and illuminating her work.

There is a higher objective, and this is to assess her success in upholding ideological priorities that are as thoroughly agreed on and impervious to criticism as any proclamation by the Union of Soviet Composers or dictate from the Soviet Ministry of Culture in the good old days of socialist realism.

“We want to get people to question whether Gaga herself is subverting or upholding that status quo she claims she is working against,” La­France says. This statement is rather different from: “We want people to understand Lady Gaga and her art.”

Lady Gaga is not the only pop star of suspect loyalties. Miley Cyrus has been called to the principal’s office for the “assertion of her sexual womanhood at the expense of black women.” This I discovered in a blog by Melanie Marshall, one of the editors of the Gaga volume, and a lecturer at University College Cork. (Marshall, I should note, does not confine her attentions to contemporary pop phenomena. She is now at work on “Italian Renaissance sexualities.”)