The Queen's English

Lady Gaga’s language uses and abuses

I KNOW a person who refuses to see any merit in Lady Gaga; as an artist or a person. Normally this would be of little regard to me, but her disdain of the performer extends beyond a simple dislike for the music and, indeed, what we might loosely term ‘pop’ isn’t exactly her thing so I could excuse that. But the hostility towards all things Gaga, from her and other quarters, arouses my interest. Hence, I was inspired to delve further into the Haus of Gaga and decided to consider the lyrics – perhaps these could be one source of the vehement rage that abounds?

I should confess straight away that I like Gaga. Opera’s more my thing, but I like her, the music does more for me than anything else you might hear on a station playing contemporary music, i.e. I can stomach the whole song. But wait, that sounds disingenuous in itself, let’s just say I like Gaga. I even iPod Gaga. Perhaps, then, this piece is a more a validation of my own relationship with Lady Gaga.

People say her songs are all about sex. They are wrong. Some of them are. Many allude to it. She is undoubtedly sexual. But it is the sensationalist reaction to see ‘sex’ and then rubber stamp and dismiss everything else. (Both Madonna (surely now upwardly beatified to Saint of pop?) and Henry Miller fell prey to this kind of public backlash.) But Gaga’s songs seek to feed off the whole of the human experience.

Let us start with a rebuttal of those who sneer at the opening of Bad Romance (BR):

Rah, rah, ah, ah, ah
Roma, roma, ma
Gaga, ooh la la

Perhaps the ‘ooh la la’ is a little much, but since when has this sort of lyrical playfulness been a crime? Nonsense syllables have a history in jazz music going back to the twenties and even the Chairman of the Board himself, Sinatra, employed his famous ‘dooby-dooby-doo’ scat at end of Strangers in the Night. Sticking with BR we have a filthy melting pot of synecdoche that encapsulates the idea that Gaga wants the whole of you, down to your ‘ugly’, ‘disease’ and ‘revenge’. This establishes the idea of the ‘bad romance’ as one that accepts a person as a whole, for better or worse. An idealised relationship.

Alternatively, Poker Face is song where romance has no business, it is a high stakes world of love ‘em and leave ‘em – but love ‘em physically. The juxtaposition of Russian roulette and rough love is a reaffirmation of the much maligned idea that sex should be exciting. The entire song is a litany of gambling-themed double entendres and the poker face itself is a metaphor for the caprice and inscrutability that a woman can dominate a man with, without ever showing her hand, as it were.

Gender politics and feminism are obviously strong themes within Gaga’s milieu (and yes, Germaine, just how obvious is a debate for another time) but they are most clearly expressed through the interesting Dance in the Dark: Gaga intones ‘I’m a free bitch’ at the beginning of the song but the more subtle overtures are found in the preceding line:

Silicone, saline, poison, inject me, baby

Far from nonsense nouns, the inference here is that men use these chemicals, and other cosmetics, to suppress women; like the subject of the song who has to dance in the dark because her boyfriend thinks her a ‘mess’ and a ‘tramp’ but she finds freedom when dancing, i.e. can be herself (à la Just Dance, perhaps). Gaga believes, to the contrary, she is a vamp – a more powerful female guise. The listing of iconic women is a little trite and adds little to the song, and, furthermore, it sustains a cult of victimhood if women identify with people like Marilyn Monroe.

As an aside, Lady Gaga appears to be more preoccupied with feminism than her near contemporaries: Lily Allen merely compains about her boyfriend's sexual inadequacy whilst Katy Perry flaunts her inadequate sexuality in the most meretricious way possible, that is, spouting religious tripe between kissing girls (in the manner of attention seeking dancefloor whores) and video shoots where white liquid spurts from her cupcake bikini.

To some extent, female empowerment is also explored in Telephone – but only in the scant notion that she should be allowed to be with her friends and have a night out without interference from an unspecified significant other. This is extended throughout the song and the lyrics have little more to say – they also include the unforgivable R&B cliché of rhyming club with bubb’ (bubbles = champagne) – unforgivable because 50 Cent, at the very least, has used a similar tactic with Bud[weiser]. Bad Gaga.

Paparazzi picks up the standard of another favourite Gaga subject: fame. There is some ambiguity here, is the paparazzi itself the biggest fan or are the paparazzi and the obsessive fan symbolic of the media and celebrity as a whole? Either way, a single word, ‘plastic’, bears the tremendous weight of dispelling the façade of fame and is followed by what could be quite a bitter sentiment about the whole thing; ‘but/We’ll still have fun.’

We could go on, and we haven’t even touched on her support for the LGBT Community (including her activism for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), but I hope this will serve as an interesting, if brief, foray into the Haus of Gaga. Also, Love Games… ‘disco stick’… speaks for itself.