A Skinny Take: The imagination of Lady Gaga

If there’s one thing Lady Gaga is good at, it’s generating headlines. The singer, who has become a household name over the course of the last twelve months due to her flamboyant on and off stage performances, again fanned the flames of her own fame last week when she released the video for her latest single “Telephone” – an epically bizarre nine-minute foray into the strange post-modern mind of the woman some are already calling the “new queen of pop”. 

 As is always the case with Gaga, the frenzy of commentary surrounding the video is focused not on her music – which is more often than not derivative and over-produced – but on the eccentricities and the theatrics that seem to come part-in-parcel with every move that she makes.   

“Telephone” is certainly eccentric. An odd tale that begins with Gaga being escorted into a ‘Prison for Bitches’, it is a mish-mash of crude violence, absurdist humor, irony and parody. The Huffington Post described it as “Lezploitation”, The Telegraph called it a “lesbian-prison-sex and mass-murder promo” but to Gaga it is a social commentary “about making fun of American hallmarks like soda cans and cigarettes and mayonnaise and bread” although she also noted “It doesn't really matter if it makes sense or if it doesn't make sense.” 

Taken scene by scene it is certainly difficult to make sense of it, or to find an all encompassing narrative or ‘moral to the story’, but there is, somewhere among the maelstrom, a message.  It lies not in the pre-requisite narcissistic theatrics of Gaga – who of course takes every opportunity to flash her flesh – but rather in the chaos of the video’s thematic: the violence, the murder, the lust, the confusion; pinned together with horrifically in-your-face product placements and glossed over with make-up and humour – ‘Telephone’ is a nine-minute metaphor, an unintentionally satirical piece of theatre that exposes the cold heart of modern America. 

The myriad of cultural references from Thelma and Louise to Michael Jackson, from Coca-Cola to Prisoner Cell Block H, allude to a society over-saturated with icons, imagery and advertising; a society where innovation and substance has been long lost in a mist of style and parody. It is a paradox then, that it’s in the meaningless of it all that there is actually meaning; as once you’ve recovered from the nine minute barrage of pure shock and awe – bewildered, exhausted, disorientated – it’s hard to disagree with Lady Gaga: “it kind of makes sense by the end” she says. 

 

See more of Ryan's work at http://www.rjgallagher.co.uk/