GAGA TAKES A TRIP

Nashville Scene, April 2011

 

There’s this photo. In it, Lady Gaga is framed tight, center of the picture, shot from far away by staked-out paparazzi, perhaps hiding out behind a row of chairs or a ficus. There are blurred objects around the edges, and there are frames within the frames—distant glass security cordons. The dark, lumpy figure of a TSA agent looms to the left, hands near the star, extended rigidly, officially. Lady Gaga does not acknowledge the camera: She is not looking at it, but there is no part of her presentation that does not anticipate the camera’s gaze, and subsequently, ours as well.

Lady Gaga is taking a trip and has arrived at Los Angeles International Airport in full pop regalia. She is not like the other blond pop singers—Madonna or Jessica Simpson—who deplane in comfort sweats, their makeup-free faces looking strangely unfamiliar, a ponytail sticking out from their ball cap. Gaga does not dress like she is headed home from a yoga workshop even when flying across the continent. Gaga teases out the fan fantasy of the pop star by never dropping the act—she’s like a superhero, never appearing out of uniform. She never snaps us back to reality; we stay with her in the weird, glamorous world she has made real.

In this, she is conceding the duality of pop stardom: this is all surface and finessed-to-please presentation, an impossible manufacture. She one-ups all those who decry her work and platinum pop as not “real” music—because it’s all “fake”—by making it the most fabulous fake that ever faking faked. To be sure, Gaga’s “fake” is at least as real as the “real” of any self-conscious Brooklyn beardo ‘bout to be discovered by Pitchfork.

Here, amid her TSA-administered security screening, Gaga is looking spectacular—as in, like a spectacle, which is how we want her to be—and she is not disappointing. She is wearing perilously-tall (10-inch) Alexander McQueen snakeskin platform heels, which the designer is said to have modeled after an armadillo. Their fronts arch from the ankle in a smooth half moon that is blunted by the floor, like a toucan’s bill if it pointed down instead of out. They are leathery and gleam in the light, and they look unlike shoes anyone’s ever seen. Their protrusion is strange, but there is something natural to the line—it’s easy to think them as hooves. Gaga’s legs are covered only by what appears to be industrial-strength fishnet pantyhose that go up under her shiny black belt. Looped through the right front of the belt is a pair of metal handcuffs. Her flowing white wig cascades down to her stomach, she wears round, Lennon-style sunglasses, there is a phone in her hand. Most of her outfit is accessories, the only clothing she has on is a pair of “nude” bikini underwear and a bra, and a golden jacket, of which she is wearing only one sleeve, with the other half seemingly tucked into her back waistband—a curious slip of modesty to cover one’s ass while appearing nearly naked in public.

In this picture, we see Gaga as White Swan to out-of-control Britney Spears’ Black Swan. This outfit is similar to the one worn by Spears in summer of 2008, in one of the bleaker paparazzi shots taken during her lost years. A pale, blemished Spears is shown clad in ripped black fishnets, black cowboy boots, a black jacket, mini skirt hiked up her waist, revealing her blood-stained underwear. She wears oversized black sunglasses, and her hair is dyed black—her weave a ratted mess—and there is a phone in her hand. She is heading in to L.A. boutique Kitson for a private shopping spree at 2 a.m.

Though Gaga’s work is as platinum-perfect (perhaps even more so) as Britney’s, Gaga’s work is rife with irony and self-possession—she satisfies with a cultivated, purposeful strangeness. She should by all means be the Black Swan of the two, and as she plays with the idea of pop’s manufacture, she winks at us from atop her skyscraper heels. Being nearly nude in LAX, she obliges our most debased wish: to see celebrities naked, to ogle them, completely. She acknowledges the ironies, the ruptures, the fantasies of pop, and she abides by them as she rips them apart. In doing so, Lady Gaga shows that she understands the only real rule of popular entertainment: Give the people what they want.