Nick Bogardus

I’m telling you, Stephen Marche is brilliant. In this article over at Esquire, he just summed up the end results of people pleasing, the fear of man, actual creativity vs. mimicking, and what that reveals about a generation in a few devastating key strokes.

Why did we all laugh at Björk when she wore a swan but cheered Gaga when she wore Kermits?

Was it because Björk’s radical openness is terrifying in its boldness and uniqueness whereas Lady Gaga’s subservience — her obvious posiness — is reassuringly slavish?

Don’t we all enjoy, in a sick way, how obviously she would do anything for our attention?

Why do we want that?

What is wrong with us?

Is it that Lady Gaga is representative, outside of whatever private crisis has led to her deep need to please, of a generational shift?

Isn’t it telling of the millennials that even their most radical pop star, their rock ‘n’ roll monster, is fundamentally a pleaser?

So doesn’t Lady Gaga represent, in the end, a profound closing of the collective soul rather than an energetic bursting-forth?

A maze with no exit rather than a path to new worlds?

Or in 2011 has everything worth saying been said and everything worth doing been done and ripping off the recent past will have to do?

That there is no escape from the maze and so all we can do is expand it?

While you’re at it, check out my other posts on Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga has won two Grammies, two Guinness World Records, and has sold 15 million records and 51 million singles world-wide. More interestingly, she was named by Forbes as the #7 Most Powerful Woman in the world.

She recently offered some life and career advice in Cosmopolitan Magazine:

“Lady Gaga’s been enjoying herself since becoming famous. “I wanted to sleep with as many rock ‘n’ roll guys as I could, and I’ve certainly had my fun,” the singer says in the latest issue of Cosmo. Still, she’s career-oriented: “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.” 

It’s All About You

One of the most successful, powerful women in the world is essentially telling her millions of teenage fans in Cosmo two things:

1. Use people to fulfill yourself: have loveless sex with people you care nothing for because they will more than likely care nothing for you.
2. Everything is about you: your dreams and your career are supreme over everything and anyone else. Commit and give yourself to nothing or no one outside of yourself or who doesn’t ultimately serve you.

Advice And Reality

Lady Gaga has a legion of fans she calls her “Little Monsters”. She makes videos for them proclaiming love for them and pledging to never forget them. Based on the statements above, that can’t be true. If her highest love is herself and her career, then she only loves those who support or advance her career, because that is what they do. They are loved because they serve her.

The sad truth is that Lady Gaga will wake up one day to find that her career, her fans, have told her that they don’t love her anymore. Every artist that creates disposable, imitative, inconsequential art will wake up to find that - the early episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music have numerous testimonies to that reality. If Lady Gaga doesn’t learn that lesson from history, she will face that cold morning alone.

Tragically, millions of people live in a way that reflects that advice. Our default mode as humans is to live for ourselves instead of others, to use people for our ends, to selfishly love people because they serve us, to be naively independent instead of maturely dependent, and to live as though the decisions we make today don’t effect tomorrow. While you might not have the spotlight that Lady Gaga commands for the moment - or the inevitable public crash - you can do what she hasn’t done and choose real, actual love.

“What is real, actual love”, you might ask.

I took this in an Urban Outfitters.

While many people might mouth the cliche that “Love is a verb”, they make make one fatal mistake: they make themselves the recipient of the action rather than being the one who is acting.  We love ourselves more than others.

Love is supposed to be entirely “other” in focus. I love my wife by caring for her, giving to her, sacrificing for her.  When I don’t demonstrate my love for her, I am loving other things, namely myself.  When I am loving myself, I am entirely selfish and self-centered. That is not love.  The kind of love that Lady Gaga proposes isn’t love at all. It is self-serving self-absorption.

The greatest example of love can be found in the Bible.  In nearly every instance when God’s love is mentioned, it is a demonstrative love.

 “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deut. 7:7-8)

God’s love is shown in His choosing of a people who didn’t earn or deserve it, His promise keeping towards a people who didn’t keep theirs, and His redemption out of slavery of a people who couldn’t free themselves.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

God’s love is shown in His giving, sacrificing, of His Son for the benefit of those who believe in Jesus; they will be saved from perishing to eternal life. God’s love gives, sacrifices, and saves freely.

 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8)

Again, God shows His love most potently by giving His Son for the benefit of people who don’t deserve it and who can’t earn it, who are “still sinners”. 

This is a love that entirely opposite of, and foreign to, the kind of love espoused by Lady Gaga and lived out by many people. It is a love that looks outward rather than inward, and exists for the benefit of another rather than the self.  More direct to Gaga’s concern - and maybe yours as well - is that this kind of love doesn’t wake up one day to change its mind. It is love evidenced in keeping its promises and selflessness to the point of costly sacrifice.  It is permanent, unchanging, and relentless. That is real, actual love.

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.