The hidden truth of the fame ball tour

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we really saying? Are we saying that we’d like to be remembered? Are we saying we’d like to change something, be a part of something? Maybe pop-fame, in everything it touches/creates/animates shows how interchangeable and utterly communal this disconnection is. I’m thinking here of P. Diddy: no one really cares about him and yet he and anyone he offers a label contract with chant about how untouchable he is. Behind him in stature are hundreds, if not thousands of rappers who all rap about the same thirty-five products, all claiming a throne that is only on loan to them at considerable interest.

When we say “I want to be famous,” what are we saying? Maybe we’re looking to change history. Maybe we’re looking to live the right way, the next big way.

Next time Lady GaGa “invites everyday people” to live the celebrity life, maybe she’s saying that we ought to riot against it.

Headaches

It’s no secret that popular music is really just a rouse for marketing products. Increasingly (I would guess over the last ten years, but it’s really difficult for me to say for sure because I grew up in that epoch) popular music and the larger marketing apparatus that it is a part of have veered away from promoting and controlling specific product-consumption, but lifestyle appropriation.

What do I mean when I say lifestyle appropriation? To me, l.a. means the instillation of a specific type of consumer that functions autonomously (i.e. without being prompted overtly to buy certain kinds of champagne, luggage, etc.) in the consumer market. The lifestyle fully overtakes the potential for a life outside of consumption (whether or not this was already done in a “negative” sense, I’m not too sure) is completely walled off.

Lifestyle appropriation is evident in so many cultural “figures” and latent in the genre of popular music, itself. Briefly (and I am working on my Lady Gaga!) as a figure, LG is the embodiment of lifestyle appropriation. Aside from her idiotic invitation for her fans to join her in the celebrity lifestyle, her persona is based on the super-sized goth-invert of fame as a monster. And it was from the beginning, even when she performed in half-empty bars in Manhattan. We can see that from the beginning, LG was only a symbol, an empty symbol that was made whole (or, at most, buyable) after a corporation found a quasi-warm body to legitimate the all-together obvious incarnation of fame as an apparatus.

(Things to work on in depth–)

Def Jam/Interscope as Lady Gaga: The thinnest shell of a performer. How does this relate to the interchangeable narrative of the Signed Rapper?

Lady Gaga as music: since LG began signing as this persona, her lyrics have always been rooted in the mis-reality of fame.

The Abyss of Irony: The content of Lady Gaga’s music videos “provide commentary” (as much as her lyrics do)…? How are we to receive LG as a persona, and is this done to refract the real content in the FAME display?

In a broader sense: Everything is a joke, everything is ironic. Of course they’re selling shit! It’s just an add!

[am thinking I should look into more Badiou on propaganda and its content-]

I think I should

Attempt a full-scale cultural analysis of Lady Gaga over winter break.