Is she popular among college students? I have no idea. My musical preference is grumblingly narrow, straight-ahead jazz recorded between 1945 and 1967 (after a childhood of Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner, though, then college days of Pink Floyd, Neil Young, and Led Zeppelin).
But look at the astounding number of page views for this Gaga video on YouTube: 344,936,880. It has garnered 832,654 comments, too. It’s the only piece of her corpus that I’ve seen or heard, but something immediately stands out, perhaps because of too much time reading Romantic philosophers, Russian formalists, and New Critics on form-content distinctions.
The words to the song are lurid and vulgar. They begin, “I want your ugly, I want your disease / I want your everything as long as it’s free.” Lots of “leather” and “I want . . . I want . . . I want” and entrapment and bad, bad, bad romance, punctuated by loud and soft “oh-oh-oh” and “ra-ra-ra” pleas.
The film, as you can see, has garish images of flames and lingerie and space-age interiors and, of course, the star’s big eyes and lithe body in soft-core flashes.
Here’s the thing. Turn off the camera, ignore the meaning of the words, and just listen to the music . . . and all the edginess and raciness and darkness disappears. It sounds like what we used to call back in 1981 “bubble-gum” stuff. We would compare such teeny-bopper fluff to “The End” (The Doors) and “Kashmir” (Led Zep) and The Wall (Pink Floyd). Here, it happens again. The visual and verbal content of the performance is (or at least tries to be) adult and worldly, fully cognizant of the dark sides of desire, but the form of the musical composition is entirely adolescent.
This isn’t uncommon. The tossing of grown-up matters into teen genres and conventions happens all the time. Modes of irony and weariness and sophistication and experience are fitted to the structures, images, patterns, plots, and stock characters customary to 21st-century adolescence (for instance, the music video). Obviously, it’s a formula that works, as the numbers on this video show. But one has to wonder what the gross disjunction of form and content does to the sensibilities of 18-year-olds.
