421. Lady Gaga: She Makes Madonna Look Tame

BROWDERBOOKS

I have just finished approving the cover of my next book, a self-published work of nonfiction comprising posts from this blog.  It's the most original and unusual cover I have ever had, for which I thank 1106 Design.  Next, the back cover blurb.  I'll announce the title and show the cover, when work on the book is more advanced.  But the cover really excites me.

Lady Gaga: She Makes Madonna Look Tame

My friend Silas told me that as an undergraduate he liked Lady Gaga's Telephone video, so I decided to investigate.  I found it on YouTube, and here is what I saw.  First, a view of a prison wall topped with barbed wire.  Then, sexy young women in cells peer out behind bars, as Lady Gaga, her blond hair in coils, enters in a garish outfit and high heels, flanked by two other women.  They  proceed down the aisle between cells, watched by the inmates  Is she touring the prison?  Suddenly the two women push her into a cell, strip her, and lock her in.  Clearly, this is no tour.  So far, no music.

         Scene change: the prison yard.  She appears, her blond hair still coiled and elegant.  A man appears (how did he get in?), kisses her ravenously; she kisses him back.  Two women fight savagely, as others scream and cheer.  Announcement: a phone call for Lady Gaga.  She goes to a phone, picks up the receiver, bursts into song, dances.  Now she is dancing wildly with other women in the aisle between cells, some six of them in the skimpiest bra and panties, pulsing to savage music in a dance like no prison on earth has ever witnessed.

         Scene change: the prison interior again, minus dancing.  Her lucky day, a guard announces; she is being bailed out.  She walks out under a preposterous large black hat that would dwarf anyone but Gaga.  She gets in a yellow car where Beyoncé, beautiful but not garishly dressed, sits behind the wheel.  Beyoncé to Gaga, “You’ve been a very bad girl.  A very, very bad girl.”  Gaga looks unrepentant.  They drive off, the yellow car streaking across the landscape.

         Scene change: a roadside restaurant.  A young black man at a table, coughing.  Does he know Beyoncé?  Music, wild dancing.  A kitchen full of dancing cooks.  Is Gaga putting some drops in a coffee cup?  The coughing man sips, slumps down, passes out.  Beyoncé says something about Gaga stealing him from her (it’s pretty vague).  Wild, wild dancing.

         Scene change: a landscape.  A radio announcement of what seems to be a mass homicide, with two women fleeing the scene of the crime.  Gaga and Beyoncé in the yellow car again, speeding off.  Beyoncé makes Gaga promise they will never come back; Gaga promises.  Their hands clasp, as if making a pact, and the car speeds away. Words on the screen: TO  BE  CONTINUED.   (To see the video, go here.  but skip the ad at the start.)

         To be continued?  Not for me, I’m not tempted by a sequel.

Lady Gaga in 2016.  For her, this is tame.
Eric Garcetti

         What is one to make of this?  Assuming you’re not a dance-crazy teenager, that is.  First, it’s what her followers want and expect, so my comments are not too relevant.  It's a mishmash, a mix of things -- a story that's not even half told, with hints of shame and guilt and masochism, and even a touch of lesbianism.  She’s so wild, so outrageously weird, that the craziness of the setting, a women’s prison, hardly needs to be commented on.  The prison is no more real than Madonna’s cathedral in her Met Gala 2018 video, a mere pretext for Gaga’s wild singing and dancing.  And that singing and dancing is not bad.  In fact, if you like crazy wild dance music, it’s really very good.  I happen to like such music and in my time did a bit of crazy dancing, where you just let the rhythm pound through you and let go, totally willing to make a fool of yourself.  If that's what you want – and a lot of young people obviously do – Lady Gaga’s Telephone video can’t be beat.  It’s mindless, it’s fun.  (For my post on Madonna, go here.)

         Lady Gaga was born Joanne Angelina Germanotta in New York City in 1986. Her working-class parents sent her to Catholic schools, where she felt like a misfit, being too provocative or too eccentric.  Wanting her to become "a cultured young woman," her mother had her taking piano lessons from age four on, and in time she developed a love of music and later studied acting as well.  By 2008 her singing career was well under way and she was becoming hot stuff under the name Lady Gaga.  The world hasn't been the same ever since.

         As Lady Gaga she has been so flat-out weird, that she makes Madonna look tame.  As with Madonna but even more so, for one of my ripe years the weirdness risks upstaging the music, which in its noisy, roaring way isn't bad.  There’s room for both these gals, but if I had to choose, I’d go with Madonna.  Maybe not all of Madonna, but with what I know, the Met Gala 2018 video, where she appears, properly cowled (for a little while), in the semblance of a cathedral.  These woman are true performers, and to achieve their final product they and their huge casts must rehearse exhaustively and exhaustingly.  Both were raised Catholic, but it didn't stick.  And offstage – as if they ever were – they are clowns, and in the world we live in, a bit of clowning is appropriate.  Let’s not leave all the farce to the politicians.

         Frenzied craziness seems to be what’s wanted today.  Was it always like that?  Not really.  Neither the minuet of the eighteenth century nor the waltz of the nineteenth permitted it.  They were stately and elegant.  But things were changing.  Imported from Paris in the late 1860s with other frivolities, the cancan was fiercely wild and naughty for its time, and New Yorkers flocked.  It was a dance for performers onstage, not for the public, but Victorian morality took a near-fatal blow when, as Offenbach’s rousing music sounded, one hundred dancers, prancing on two hundred shapely legs, kicked high, and then turned around to hike their skirts and flaunt their frothy derrières.  Suddenly the whirling, giddy patterns of the waltz seemed prim and proper.

         In the so-called Gay Nineties lovely Lillian Russell radiated a magnetic stage presence as she sang pop songs and light opera, mesmerizing audiences.  And for something spicier, there was the song “Ta-ra-ra-boom–de-ay,” which began here but really took off with a naughty music hall version in London that made singer Lottie Collins famous.  

The English music hall singer Lottie Collins, 1892.
When she sang "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," audiences went wild.

And with early 1900s came the Dance of the Grizzly Bear, which the “in” set danced, and whose movements supposedly imitated the movements of a bear.  It was the latest thing first in San Francisco, a notoriously wild urban conglomeration in the Far West, but came to Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910.  Those Follies were extravaganzas with legions of scantly clad girlies, a feature that Hollywood would adapt, with a touch of propriety, in the musicals of the 1930s.  Other crazy dances of the early twentieth included the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, and the Boston Dip, causing New York City in 1912 to ban them as “huggly-wiggly dances” and degenerate, which probably made them even more popular. 

Ziegfeld Follies of 1916.

        The twentieth century brought us the Roaring Twenties.  Along with booze and mobsters and speakeasies, came jazz and the Charleston, a dance that was plenty wild and crazy.  (I know because, in the safety of my apartment and with only imagined 1920s jazz, I’ve done it.)  And by the 1940s, with the Depression followed by World War II, it was time to “cut a rug,” to jitterbug.  At my high school dances most of us did the fox trot, sometimes hugging close to slow, romantic music, and sometimes doing it faster to jazzier music.  But when really wild music like Two O’Clock Jump was played, a few couples took over and danced what was called the Lindy, as wild a dance as young people ever did.  Wikipedia likens the Lindy hop to the Jitterbug, but I and my friends in the Midwest in the early 1940s didn’t think of ourselves as jitterbugging, and we knew the word “jitterbug” as a verb only, not a noun.  Jitterbugging was what a select few did to wild music.  But we did a milder version of it, too: hold close, break, turn the girl, hold close, break, turn the girl, a version of which I saw a young couple do in a restaurant only last year.  These dance names are as flexible and fluid as the music they were danced to, and they varied regionally.

Jitterbugging, 1943.

The Lindy Hop in Sacramento, 2006.
It's still being done.

         With the 1950s came Rock n’ Roll.  Elvis the Pelvis took over, insidiously seductive, singing “Love me tender, love me true,” his gyrating hips kept carefully out of view on television.  It wasn’t wild, but it was sexy as hell, and audiences loved it.

Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1956.

         And now couples weren’t dancing close, the man’s arm around the girl, but apart, facing each other.  Then in the early Sixties the Beatles took New York and the country by storm.  Amazingly, they kept reinventing themselves and coming on fresh.  Also flourishing were a dozen other groups, the Rolling Stones prominent among them, and a whole counter culture with its own literature and, God knows, its own music.  All this was to the bafflement, and often the admiration and envy, of that rebellious generation’s elders, those tragically over the age of thirty.  (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” was the motto.  I, alas, was a bit over thirty.)

         And so on and so on.  Why labor the point?  Since at least the 1860s, we in America have had wild, crazy dancing and wild, crazy singers galore.  So let Madonna and Lady Gaga have their moment.  It’s only a moment in time, glorious while it lasts, but very short.  So let the good times roll, until …  Well, until they don’t.  You can watch from the sidelines, or you can join the dance.  Or you can ignore it all and get on with the serious things of life.  Your choice, and lots to choose from.  As for me in my sober senior years, is that some 1920s jazz I seem to hear and want to Charleston to, or just a cancan?  I’ll take either one.

©   2019   Clifford Browder