The Actual and The Performed

Clearly my specialty (and that of any humanities Ph.D. student, let's be honest) is reading too much into things. Still, I was a bit surprised to read this about Lady Gaga this morning in the New York Times:

"Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (aka Lady Gaga) sings, writes, dresses, and apparently exists to toy with celebrity as performance art, seeing how freaky (in a fascinating way) she can be as she reaches a mass audience.

"While show people like David Bowie and Madonna established this career path, Lady Gaga is strutting along it with larger-than-life style and, behind it, actual musical gifts."

While the relativist in me is wondering exactly what "actual musical gifts" are, the pop music fan in me (as opposed to the scholar of popular music) is wondering if Jon Pareles is really elevating Lady Gaga's musical gifts above those of Madonna and David Bowie? I mean, he can't be doing that, right? That would just be crazy.

I don't really get Lady Gaga, I'll admit. I think "Poker Face" is just a funny song, with it's stuttering post-chorus "Pa-Pa-Pa poker face" reminding me of the screechy little riff from "Toxic" by Britney Spears: they're both sort of amusing little bits that I laughed at the first dozen or so times I heard them, but I can't imagine anyone taking them that seriously. Britney seems to have basically disappeared from the public sphere. I'm just waiting for her to return with an album of jazz standards.

Who knows what's going to happen with Lady Gaga in a few years, but as for now, she certainly seems to have some cultural cachet, at least in some quarters. She can sell out four shows at Radio City, which, you'll remember, is "Hannah Montana's place," according to Gregg Allman. But whereas Montana/Cyrus could probably sell out shows at Radio City and at similar theatres across the country, I'm not so sure about Gaga. Her co-headlining tour with Kanye West was cancelled this fall, basically because it was going to look bad if stars as famous as West and Gaga didn't sell out every show. But that goes into the differences between contemporary pop music and the ideology, based on rock music from the 1960s and 1970s, about the place of live performance. Which is to say basically that record sales, iTunes downloads, ringtone sales, youtube hits, unauthorized downloads do not necessarily correlate with concert ticket sales. This is a simple point, but one that I don't think too many people have picked up on. Who sells tickets does not necessarily equal who sells records, who gets listened to, who is "popular." This is for a lot of reasons, including the increasingly high cost of concert tickets, which put them only in easy purchasing reach of the oldest and most affluent music fans--who in turn usually patronize concerts by older artists such as Eric Clapton, Billy Joel and Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, etc. But also, live performance is just a lot less important for most contemporary pop musicians than it was 30 years ago.

Interestingly enough, I think Gaga is in some sense trying to go against these trends by making her shows such a huge spectacle, a spectacle which matches, incidentally enough, her own lavish (and, um, weird) music videos. Time will tell if she is going to be successful.