What Lady Gaga Reveals About Our Generation
Camille Paglia had a potent article in the UK’s Sunday Times last week not only critiquing Lady Gaga, arguably the largest pop star at the moment, but making the connections between the hollow icon and the generation she is reflecting and feeding her product to.
Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply just to Gaga and her “little monsters”. It far more prevalent than that.
It’s easy to read this and be cynical. The other way to see this kind of article is as helpful, palpable evidence that while an entire generation of people might be ever-connected but increasingly isolated and focused on the external; they are hungry, if not starving, for substance - for transcendent, ultimate, enduring, heart-changing truth.
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