Gaga’s Mythos of the Metropolis

“Got no salvation...

Got no religion...

My religion is you.”

--Lady Gaga

“To be of no Church is dangerous.”

--Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton

“Pop melancholy,” Gaga says. “That’s my art.” Like the refractory light from a shattered disco ball, Gaga illuminates the exquisite two-dimensions of a dying city--a morbid metropolis wherein “little monsters” feed and are fed upon. Her point of departure is the prevailing sense of emptiness that has been our cultural inheritance, recostuming our mythic personalities into the death shrouds of Gen X. The prevailing cultural aesthetic knows nothing of Beauty--only Glamour, which replaces inner value with outer and turns appreciation into envy. In Gaga’s Metropolis, we boldly accessorize our feelings, our Aeschylean humanity stands posed in heelless stilettos, and love grinds in our teeth with the sensation of “chewing on pearls.”

But in insanity, Gaga whispers, we are redeemed. For a generation of Facebookers & Tweeters, personality inevitably precedes identity. Dissociative disorders are this year’s black, and we openly flout “notions of self” in ironic contempt for our undeveloped egos. Gaga wishes “to prove that [she] is art and that her art is not a mask. It is her life.” But with all due respect, the Lady gives unfair ontological priority to the reality of her life. The ancient Greek tragedians openly wore masks in an effort not to hide their humanity but to accentuate it. In truth, we are our most human behind the masks we wear. The face beneath is simply a crippling ego investment, a slave-master which threatens only to delimit our potential by binding us to an overly rigid sense of self.

Jung taught us that the painful--even dangerous--process of individuation was about embracing the Other within, and in so doing unlocking the full panoply of the human experience. Haute couture is Gaga’s metropolitan metaphor for inner dynamism. Those already bored with her “shocking” antics aren’t paying attention--or perhaps their own ego investments prevent them from fully understanding. Whatever the case, Gaga’s art has the potential to go on forever, given she never deigns to “express herself,” as Madonna so often did. For the sublime irony is that there is nothing to express--only render. There is no core self from which expression emanates--there is only the body, the lights, and those divine shoes.

Rather than trying to constrain the public imagination (and its subsequent gaze) by insisting upon good rationalist constructs such as “taste” and “merit,” the public imagination must be allowed to feed--and what it wishes to feed upon is Gaga. The need to gaze upon the famous is the need to gaze upon our own fully-realized human potential--a potential which isn’t limited to a resume, but instead reverberates with the fullness of even our inner subjective experiences. Gaga’s achievement as a musician is secondary to her achievements as a human being, and we are fascinated by her dynamic self-definition--her simultaneous capacity to be all things to all people and her consistent refusal to be anything to anyone. To couch it in the language of our inevitable postmodernity, we have entered the age of meta-celebrity, and Gaga is our reigning queen.