Ra ra ah ah ah

There are so many reasons why I love Lady Gaga. Let's review: She's from New York and she's relentlessly bold as all people ought to be. When I went to see her concert in Boston a while back, I really felt like I was watching some sort of twisted visionary do her thang. She got to me because she's always been so insistent on being out of the box. It's kitschy and trashy and campy but it's never just because she's a stereotypical rebel. All of her craziness actually serves a purpose: to point things out to us about our culture. This is a young woman who wears costumes made entirely of Kermit the Frog puppets and who often wears masks that cover her entire face. For a woman in the entertainment industry to obstruct her face and to present this crazy image and to STILL be successful is a huge feat. She pulls all of these crazy stunts and we don't tire of them (or at least not yet) because, oddly enough, they offer us a bit of information about ourselves.

During the concert, for example, she had one screen that showed all these crazed images of her in bizarre, "high fashion" outfits. Then, out of nowhere, there was one clip of this girl blatantly shoving her finger down her throat to make herself vomit. There's no turning away from something like that. As an audience, we all had to confront this large image of what some people do "to be beautiful." In the midst of all the fun of the concert, she compelled us to see that the entertainment world is not all glitz and glamor. There's more to the story than what we think of when we look at certain popularized images of women.

That's also why her "Bad Romance" video is so damn amazing. She plays with all kinds of images, freaks us the hell out and still exposes us to things we never want to think of. In the video, there are these bug-like images of her and her back up dancers. She frowns and grits her teeth. At some points she even has these creepy, huge doll eyes that left me weirded out for the duration of the video. In some ways, it seems like she does everything in her power to violate the rule book of what a sexy, commercialized artist should do. She then twists that, though, and strips down to a dark bikini. She is still compelled to be a sex object for the men bidding on her.

It's interesting because the set up of the video implies that in the future rather than doing away with the way the objectification of women's bodies (like some of us might hope), women will still be used as playthings for men in the year 2500. She messes with us so much and we never know if we should be repulsed, worried or turned on by this. That's the magic of Lady Gaga: she knows there's no black and white to anything and so instead she messes around in that gray area. She's not going to entirely accept the role of a rebel who's attacking portrayals of the female body but she's not saying they're great either. We know she doesn't think these images are perfect, though, because at the end what happens? The male bidder gets what coming to him! He feels the burn.

Now all of this might seem like an over-the-top analysis and it might be. But I do think Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video was crafted with much more detail and innovation than the average music video out there today for a reason. It's no accident that it turned out to have all these odd little details (e.g. a frozen, raining diamond scheme, excessively large eyes, a corpse, intentionally tacky red masks for her backup dancers) that are so meticulous. It seems like everything is designed to paint a picture for us. It makes me upset when people can't see any of this because a) it makes me wonder if I'm crazy and just seeing what I want to in a 5 minute music video and b) it makes me wonder if people only want to watch what they can understand at a quick first glance. Why do people overlook your amazingness, Gaga? I mean really. What's up with that?

Tiger Tiger Woods Y'all

On November 27th when I opened up my MSN account I found a bold headline screaming "Tiger Woods Injured in a Car Crash." When I first saw it, I panicked because I expected the worst. Here's this young beacon of hope for a lot of people who's worked himself to the bone to get where he is in his professional career and now he's been hurt. Though I saw the headlines from two days before on some magazine claiming that he had a mistress, when I looked at the woman I simply thought that Woods had unfortunate taste and that worse things have happened than a professional athlete loving on some woman with too much spray tan. I didn't make the connection that the story about his crash would lead to revelations about his extra-marital affairs. Or that there'd be claims that his Swedish wife (and yes, apparently it's important for us to remember that she's Swedish since no article ever lets us forget it) Elin came after him with one of his golf clubs.

The thing that gets me about a story like this is the way people have reacted to it. The guy is 34 damn years old, worth millions and millions dollars, known worldwide and is incredibly successful. Is this really a surprise to Elin? We know she's blond and that's always a plus, right? And she's young and she's willing to have his children, right? And she wanted to stay married him forever and ever, right? Unfortunately for Elin, so do hundreds of other women! I do feel sorry for what has happened to her and I don't wanna claim absolutely that she couldn't have been shocked about this, but it seems that the REAL reason she has been so upset is that we all found out about it. He's revealed a crack in the picture perfect image of them as a young couple and now she's been humiliated. There are all kinds of sexual taboos that Americans pretend to be astonished by (for example, cheating) but we engage in them all the time. It's always Bad News Bears for the people who are reckless enough to get caught, though.

In our society, a person's sex life is often somehow related to his work life. What in the Sam Hell does his adultery have to do with his ability to swing a club or sell watches in an ad campaign? People keep claiming "he's let so many people down" and he himself said he was sorry about his "indiscretions." Why should Tiger Woods have to apologize to anyone but his wife? The danger in living in a celebrity-obsessed culture is that we tend conflate a person's talent and their private actions as if they're of equal importance. It's like we're looking to celebrities for some model not just of skill but also of moral conduct. I never would've thought about Tiger's sexcapades for a nano-second before but now I keep seeing headlines about his latest lady friend. It doesn't matter to me who Tiger sleeps with and it really shouldn't concern anyone but Elin Nordegren. Like my roommate always says, "Is he paying my bills? No? Then I don't care what he does." She's right.

Actually, I'll take it back. I do care about Tiger Woods' personal life and conduct outside of the golf course but here are the reasons why: 1) I've never liked that he's often tried to downplay his blackness (but those are his own issues to work through or not) 2) I wish he wouldn't have picked cocktail waitresses who looked like rejects from the third season of Rock of Love and 3) I wish he could've kept this all underwraps because if he had, he wouldn't have to keep blowing up my newsfeed saying he's sorry about some stuff that none of us should worry about. So for all of this mess and for American's paradoxical prudish and sex-obsessed nature I have to ask: what's up with that?

This is the Start of Something New

So it's the end of 2009 and a lot has gone on this past year! We're about to wrap it up and move on to 2010. In the spirit of new beginnings I decided to create a space to reflect (in a lighthearted way) on one of my favorite subjects: pop culture. I was always the kid who lived for the afternoons and weekends when all the best shows would come on Nickelodeon (Hey Arnold, All That, Kenan and Kel, etc.) and have been fascinated with the music videos and image creation of musical artists. I've also believed that "scandals" and representations of blacks and women (yeah, look to my profile picture and you'll understand why) in the media have so much to tell us about American culture. The fact of the matter is that we live in a society inundated by images and messages about what we do, how we should act or look and who we are. It's always seemed to me that various types of media (tv, movies, ad, the internet) have a huge potential to construct and influence us in our day-to-day lives. Rather than stopping to critique that influence, we often just soak it up like sponges. That's where this blog comes in: I don't claim to be the first person to take a step back and look at all this, but I do wanna throw in my two cents in hopes that I might clarify to myself and to others that what we're told is not all that we can be.