I'm loving it. (Part three--Regions, Successful Compositions)

The second season of Jersey Shore will premiere any minute now (next week?). It's passage, from odd, low-budget, themed, Real World-modeled house&party show to straight-up phenomenology, has been a pleasure and a surprise. And that "phenomenology" is both the same and different. Like, it was a "meme" and Twitter accounts and paid party appearances and makeovers in magazines, but also, really REAL and HAPPY. That's the cast. The cast is full of friendship. (Also, they are dancers.)
Critically, I'm not coming from a place of mistrust-of or disrespect-for reality programming. It is the lion's share of what I watch, and as I don't believe there is such a thing as "guilty pleasure," I take its actors and creators v. seriously. I'm used to fame-for-fame's sake. I've written here before about Paris Hilton's genius, por ejemplo. There is something so wholesome and enlightening about her (and Kim Kardashian's) work ethic (pushing those perfume portfolios on at least three Continents). It's nuts to me (to me) that folks still portion out "real celebrities" and "fake celebrities," like movie actors and the movies aren't a big WHATEVER right now (except for Zac Efron, Twilight and cartoons). Anyway, Snookie, Pauly, JWoWW, Mike, Ronnie, Sammy, and Vinny are, among those who make a living appearing as themselves, sort of special. Just especially candid, nervy, but nice.

I have previously (privately, publicly) decried the rise of shamelessness in American (Youth) culture. There is something dangerous in the group-mind habituation of "bad boy and girl behavior," or the obsessive uptake and reuptake of avatars. But perhaps, there are two forms of such: "shamelessness" and "unashamedness." Like, "shamelessness" is hubristic and unstable, over-delusional and sort of line-stepping (disruptive). But "unashamedness" is simply a way of not being burdened by self-doubt, of being brave and transparent and CELEBRATORY. I don't know. Advocating shame doesn't sound quite right to me. Personally, I'm mortified by (the prospect of my own) self-promotion (though I don't lack in self-absorption). And I am beginning to think of it as a personal failure, a kind of parochially educated cross to bear (that drives me offside). Self-promotion and Unashamedness are (here we go) essentially American manners, processes. Americans know how to think themselves blessed, how to be certain about their own rectitude or beauty or anything without much angst, like the 'dumb' and 'ease' mentioned in the last part. The Jersey Shore cast derives their glamour and likability from straightforward, unashamed realness, from confidence in their estilo, their avatars (which are like surface souls? wishes and dreams for the self made semi-material?), their paths to success (their belief in the very fact of success...).
Then the clever duality of/in Jersey Shore is like this: the broadcast of the self, like a product, a brand, an idea is a piece of our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands), while the regionalism, the extreme, charming specificity of this group of Eastern Seaboarders is a piece of our Old New World.

As a Southerner, I have witnessed the slippage of Regional styles (no one talks quite like people's grandmothers anymore, unfortunately), and felt the need to keep whatever of the old, local stuff I could (if only by remembering how some forebears looked and sounded). To 'keep' The Region feels imperative for us now. We must 'keep' a balance between the Universalized and mega- (which, as I've outlined in the first part, are important and embraceable) and the local, regional, personal, small. America must have everything she wants, both ways---down-home and Global (even, Space-y).
Petrova started the conversation (at home, not en blogsite) some months ago about Jersey Shore's success as a regional program, and about her desire for endless, continual regional programming. Shows about everybody, everywhere, ourselves included--as in, "I wonder what's going on in ____ right now..."--And then I was like, "OH WAIT, that's what Youtube was supposed to be about! Right?"

So, I'm loving this exchange of local and super-Global objects and ideas, like the Coors commercials of the first part: from The stylized Rockies to your market, proud, shining, fast, loving, self-loving, lucky (blessed), happy, just a little careless but somehow steady, unashamed. The ads thrive on a benign tension; they are general and specific at once, contradicting themselves so contradicting themselves.

********************

I hate to indulge her attention-trix-ery, but Lady Gaga persists (demands post and repost).
There's this Japanese television interview I found from last summer.....

The way she looks.
But also, the oblique straining toward an Asian audience (as interpreted by an American private schoolgirl)-------all the talk of piano lessons!!!
There's also this embarrassing 106 & Park appearance from the same season, where all reference points are for black audiences-----I worked with Kanye, Jay-Z, "You all must love Beyonce!"

She is reshuffling her product line for this demographic, then that demographic. And she has been successful, has achieved cross-demographic appeal. But how kinda ugly when you stop and pay attention, set one appearance beside another. It's sheisty, condescending, very suit...not (keeping it) REAL.
Gaga is, like any of us 80s babies, a student of The Brand, The Market, The Branding and Marketing. But I feel like the great branding work is in the universal, the image, the sound (the humanity!) that crosses borders without losing its home-country, its regional identity...not this thin maneuvering and shapeshifting...? Right? Gaga comes by her false and uncomfortable regionalism honestly...Manhattan [as opposed to the other 4 boroughs], her homestead, hasn't been a region for some time---what with the turning out of the lower and middle classes, the strict, to-the-letter Capitalism that has no sympathy for history, no sentiment, that tolerates fakes and users, anybody with cabbage...maybe I just hate the theater, butI thought it was worth mentioning that working on this essay has helped me to understand my ultimate resistance to/with Gaga, whose voice and hooks I like so much (because of their glitzy emotionality), who I find endearing as a worker in the way of aforementioned Paris and Kim. She is an overnight icon of "our New World, our Web and stuff (the patriotic eating of television commercials, celebration of Better Brands)," but she pointedly eschews the other half, the realness, our Old New World. There is all kinds of consternating bluster about growing up in "The Upper West Side Arts and Culture District" (pardon?) and being a "dirty L.E.S. Artiste" (barf and bull-----a Dad-subsidized apt. [not that I have a problem with that] above Max Fish is not the look she meant to look for, or meant for us to see) and how "New York" the middle finger is (lol whatever) and how she has been in straight-up Madonna costume all summer. Her regional identity, and, in turn, her whole identity, is stuffed to the gills with affect, because she came from post-'86 Manhattan, the island of affect, of neighborhoods and ways of life dictated by real estate agents and club promoters, defectors from home (the Middle and South), people who often hate (out loud) their native regional identities. Though of course, until two minutes ago, Gaga--née Stefanie Germanotta--was doing something brilliantly regional. She was a guidette (a total compatriot of the Jersey Shore cast). But self-conscious about it. Because Manhattan, unlike Staten Island or Jersey (where most of that cast is from), is full of that affect that must needs degrade the outer-boroughs and regional identities, The Bridge and Tunnel (with callous inattention to the class repercussions of such narrowness and dismissiveness). The second Miss Germanotta saw the way to shed her (perceived unsophisticated) regional self, to become a costumed non-citizen (a "true" Manhattanite), she did, and HOW. So, I see her and I say, "Where's Stephanie?" And The Brand is incomplete, unfinished. It's not a good commercial.

"It mortifies the soul."

...That's a phrase Abigail Adams used (so say the HBO mini-series about her hombre). A nice, funny Yankee phrase, deeply felt. And I'm not sure what part of me these pictures of Lady Gaga in Sweden mortify, but OH how they do! I get that she's in the midst of her protracted "Monster phase," but...

After not writing about Lady Gaga, or rather, giving her a fullish treatment* for so long, I thought I might just avoid avoid for always (a talent). And the information ('the fame,' the hype) mounted, the task became fatter and fatter, further delayable, -whelming.

But this article in--I know it's stupid--Advertising Age, "Gaga, Oooh La La: Why Lady Gaga is the Ultimate Social Climber,"

has got me really bothered, in a semi-clarifying** way.

The piece frames discussion of Lady Gaga (to frame it at all is a help) outside, or aside from art (thank G-d); it's a lot of shop talk about a sudden media mogul and a character of our youth and times, a shameless self-promoter.

After a first skim, I got real sour over how there's no such color as "cherry pink," and how this sort of dissonance that isn't proper dissonance so much as error is exactly Gaga, her bad poetry and air-puffed stylings. Which brings me round to how "air-puffed stylings" are a thing I love. And bad poetry is a thing I hate. And LOVE HATE LOVE HATE; this always seems to be the way with Gaga. She does so much at once, and some of it well, and you get to digging the half and getting a little enraged at the rest and thinking and talking about it all through. So her missteps have little/zero bearing on big, lots-of success.

Being careful and quiet and curatorial about your output, your clothes and tongue and artworks is a game with some shame. And Gaga is principally (I'm restating this) shameless. In a personal way, her shamelessness, her costumed theater-kidness, prevents me from getting too invested, despite her clear abilities as a pop author and professional celebrity. Obviously, it's not performance full stop that makes me ill at ease. It's frenetic, thready performance (passed off as fully-cooked, impeccable), and masturbatory performance for performance's sake. Or she's just not that smart? I guess. I'm not so keen on actors, on inauthentic roles made "real," or presented as such. I wonder how I might have felt about early and mid- Bowie in real time....this is immeasurable. I'm sure I'd have been thrilled by him, and his character strangeness. For starters, his music, his poetical skill, is unassailable. Bowie is so smart, smart in ways young Gaga never will be, Madonna never was, etc. And, plainly, those were different times. Bowie's flashy difference was politically significant in ways that I'm not yet convinced Gaga is or could be...

I'm no surly adolescent; I feel pretty wretched about pop cultural non-embrace. I like to like the general, present likes. And I do. I do like "Summerboy" and "Paparazzi" and the newer "Alejandro" and "Monster." I like the way they sound, all Euro and emotionally punchy, and, even if I don't like the total lyric, I am moved by certain passages: the line in "Monster," "He ate my heart and then he ate my brain;" the repeated protest in "Bad Romance, "I don't want to be friends/I don't want to be friends." Comic-tragic disco. This is a rather great thing Gaga is doing: crafting, as her idol Bowie urges, "dance song[s] that can make you break down and cry." But the high speed of her rise and release of singles and images paired with singles (the artifice) has made for some holes, gaps, confusions, sort of degraded the quality of the recordings, the foundational work.

Gaga has invented Gaga on the road, in process, in the midst of some endless press tour. Witness the shift in avatars between the videos for first single, "Just Dance," and last (discounting "Telephone") single, "Bad Romance." 2008-2009...We're led to believe this shift was a matter of forethought, that Gaga has been working with a tight, over-arching narrative, from FAME to FAME MONSTER. I don't buy it, really. It seems to me she's gotten bigger budgets and a bigger circle and a bigger experience, like she's a good mimic whose happened to learn a little bit about looking art-y or art director-y. Even if it's so, this plan laid in 2008, it's flimsy; it's not all that scrutable. I don't hear or see a story, or gather that there's much connective tissue between Gaga efforts, aside from a certain look, an attitude, an any sort of non-thing that only people who work in fashion seem to think is solid or meaningful or even, um, cerebral....And like I said, "air-puffed stylings" are excellent, as long as they're not being passed off as grounded and circumspect. I've gathered a good bit of pseudo-intellect from Gaga's corner, and oooof it's the worst.

The AdAge article talks some about Gaga and Madonna. The author finds, incorrectly, that one can make a parallel between Madonna's Downtown life of the eighties and Gaga's Papa-funded L.E.S. rental of the late Aughts, when Downtown was unarguably dead, rotting even, alive only in the imaginations of provincial schoolgirls and a couple of promoter dopes (ahem, promotion). That said, Gaga&Madonna is a conversation worth having. I don't really want to have that whole conversation but...

Madonna, in her hyper I-am-being-aware-of-myself-now-ness, is sort of quaintly, naively (believe it or not) unaware. You know? Like there's some stuff that she invented, but also a lot just sort of happened to/for her and she's sparky and ambitious/ruthless. And maybe this has less to do with her and more to do with the sweetness of an old, slower media, of Pepsi commercials and Dick Tracy and "Come on girls, do you believe in Love," and an album called Music and on and on and children's books. One of your principal differences between Gaga and Madonna is how Gaga's self-awareness and self-promotion and self-modeling is standard, a piece of the greater celebrity, taken for granted, while Madonna's [action to self-form] was taken as the point, the center, the thing to discuss. It's more meet to pair Paris&Gaga, partners in seamless, shrugging fame-play.

Also, speed again and some singularity. Madonna worked and still works at the old pace (not lazily, mind you). Her ranged personas and reinventions happen/ed one at a time and with lulls in between—one kind of agenda and then a vacation and then another and a vacation, and so on. Gaga is in-a-flash and ceaseless and jumbled, a dizzy circle.

The real trouble—a notion AdAge*** and everybody else offers up clumsily—Gaga&Art.

The Polaroid consultancy has had me boiling for a minute. I mean, I'm jealous. And also confused and feeling slighted for (I'm really empathetic) all of the photographers who might have had brilliant residencies with Polaroid, a long, no-brainer of a list. The Polaroid has been central to contemporary art-imaging, a quick but powerful tool that makes sculptures and talismans of pictures. How will Lady Gaga, dame of the new social media, of the various, mixed-up and amaterial, improve the existing (if bankrupt [for no reason but bad boardroom dealings]) brand? Maybe if she were part of a group of media figures from all strata—photographers, painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, writers—brought in to do mini-projects or pop-up stores and shows....but the sole creative director? And Gaga's manager's statement:

"You won't see her face plastered on any packaging or anything. We're comparing it to when Tom Ford went to Gucci or Steve Jobs went into Apple and brought a different thought process and taste level in. We're looking for her to do the same exact thing at Polaroid," he said. "It's not about her putting her name on something -- it's reinvigorating a brand."
Woah dawg.

I am, in theory, a supporter of multi-genre employment. Success in one creative field ought'nt to prevent legit' success in any other (though it so often does). But this is just too greedy. And I guess I'm being small, because this directorship is a job I'd love to have. But it's just more of Lady Gaga being rewarded as an artist, not a recording artist, but a performance and visual artist. I'm not saying one must have formal training or anything; all people make works in one way or another. But American commerce (in general) needs to open up more to visual artists, and an overnight dance-music sensation, however sensational, doesn't count, not in this context, not in the matter of a plum job consulting makers film and cameras. And I think her work, what we've seen of it, even at its best, lacks integrity. She is a communicator. She emotes, is both tough and vulnerable. She writes fantastic melodies and sings very well. But her communications are never clear, or even clear about their own non-clarity. Gaga spouts and spouts without a point of origin (like Dada's socialism and post-Victorian.ism) or a destination or a nod to the fact that she gets nonsensical with it. She just needs to clean up her act, get smarter.

In December, I couldn't sleep. I listened to every Gaga track; I watched every Gaga video. I saw this, the—judging from hair-bow—early video for non-single, "Eh Eh." It's not crazy remarkable, and it apes Gwen a bit with the spaghetti and rolling in sunny sheets (which is cool, if obv). It's pretty and fun and cheese; it seems fluid and authentic. It's Stefani Germanotta, Italo-American-pop.ster. I think I'd like this draggy Fame Monster Gaga much more if I'd been able to see a year's worth of the other (pretty!) bubbly version, if she hadn't come on so fast and strong and shedding skins daily, if she hadn't, herself, behaved like the fleet, brutal Internet.

*There was a smallish post about liking the choruses and hating the verses of most singles off The Fame, the mess of the performative elements, a remarked no-longer-favored favorite...

**Clarity, like actual clarity, will be impossible here. Gaga is, as ZBS noted in our comments last week, 'entropy,' a lot of noisy mezcla.

***Obviously this article's assertion that,

[Gaga was] hired specifically to create new products and inject life into a brand that hasn't been hip for years -- save for maybe a popular reference in Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

is deaf, nuts and deplorable.