RobKirkpatrick.com

Sorry, I know a lot of you out there like her, and I should probably be nicer to her if only because she was a Springsteen fan growing up. But I just couldn’t resist…

1. Millennial anxiety was new…well, at the end of last millennium.  Yeah yeah, we’re in the posthuman age, the end is nigh, we get it.  You can take her whole apocalyptic drag queen momento mori killing-herself-into-art shtick and mail it back to Marilyn Manson in 1996.

2. She’s a hypocrite.  She staged an intentionally provocative faked “suicide” number while performing “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV VMAs, which I guess was supposed to be some sort of damning statement against the paparazzi (a sentiment with which it’s hard to disagree). Yet she also panders to the paparazzi by attending mindless galas in her lingerie and posing on a balcony in her panties, legs spread apart for all below to see, so her crotch can get posted all over the internet.  The paparazzi aren’t killing her; they’re making her career.

3. There’s no there there.  Let’s be real: Take away her fashion handlers and trendy club connections, and you have someone whose tracks aren’t much different from the rest of the overblown electronica you’ve been hearing on the radio for years. I listened to one Gaga sycophant on TV praising her songwriting abilities because she’d even written music for the Pussycat Dolls.  That’s right.  The Pussycat Dolls.  That’s some major songwriting cred right there.

Okay, maybe I’m being too hard.  So let’s look at some lyrics from one of her best-known hits, “Bad Romance,” which she described as a song about falling in love with your best friend:

Walk walk fashion baby/Work it/Move that bitch crazy/Walk walk fashion baby/Work it/Move that bitch crazy/Walk walk fashion baby/Work it/Move that bitch crazy/Walk walk fashion baby/Work it/Imma Freak bitch baby

This isn’t exactly Exile From Guyville or “Dolls Parts” or even Alanis Morrissette on a rainy day. Gaga doesn’t even pass for bubble gum pop. She’s bubble gum pop chewed up and spit into the gutter. 

4. Why is it that any singer who “reinvents” herself though some form of female drag queen stylistics or otherwise ridiculous fashion makeovers (see: Cher, Madonna) is invariably praised within the gay community as a being a “genius”? Lady Gaga has openly credited “my gays” for making her famous—apparently she personally owns a troupe of them or something—and that’s fine and dandy.  But listen, Mozart was a genius. Gaga’s a pop culture hack.  Even her name is recycled—from some dorky producer who thought she was the embodiment of Queen’s song “Radio Gaga.”  So she’s the embodiment of one of Queen’s worst songs, then? 

5. Her whole act is affected.  In every photo I see of her, I don’t see an iconoclast; I see someone who’s trying really hard to look like an iconoclast. Behind that doofy, self-satisfied expression she always has on her face, she seems to be saying, “Look at me!  I’m so outrageous!”  I’m sorry, but it feels like a huge act.

6. The Myth of Gaga.  She spins the tale of being this outrageous Catholic school rebel.  (You know, unlike all those other girls who surely loved having to wear those uniforms and pray in school and getting slapped with rulers.)  Granted, she was no beauty queen, but I doubt she was a social outcast.  She was probably just some girl who would have passed for marginally attractive if you ran into her at the mall in Paramus.

7. She gives inspiration to every attention-starved drama queen.  I once had an assistant who claimed Gaga as one of her cultural heroes because she liked to make clear to everyone how she (just like Gaga) was “outspoken” and how she’d had to overcome all the people who’d tried to suppress her individuality. (Beware people who speak about how outspoken they are.)  Really, she was just a self-involved girl who regularly brought her personal life into the office and had a sense of entitlement regarding the work that everyone else at her level had to do.  Gaga is the freaking patron saint for girls like her.  She teaches the lesson: Be as self-involved and attention seeking as you can be, and then if you’re really self-involved and garner all that attention you were desperately hoping for, maybe one day you too can look back and bemoan how you were way too outrageous for people.

8.  Speaking of her outrageous “Paparazzi” suicide number: Given that the majority of Gaga’s fans seem to be teenage girls (who just might be going through some very challenging years) how smart was it for her to depict herself as a suicide victim whose lifeless body ascends triumphantly into the sky while everyone in the hall applauds?  I don’t support censorship…but that’s not the point. The point is: how smart is it for an artist to do that?  Did she think about any of this when she was planning that performance…or just about the YouTube hits she was going to get for being so outrageous?

9. She’s been positioned as this avant garde pop artist who speaks for those who don’t fit in, yet there she was at the Grammys wearing a Giorgio Armani dress.  Granted, it was a really weird (or…outrageous) Armani dress.  But still, it was an Armani dress, the perfect symbol of elitist fashion designed for the Beautiful People only, and the ultimate sign of being in high-society’s “in” crowd.  So basically, this outrageous iconoclast was just doing what every other starlet, flash in the pan, or flavor of the month does at any given award show du jour: Show up in a dress from some snooty designer so that Melissa Rivers can ask her “Who are you wearing?”

10. People keep calling her “brave” for wearing lingerie in public. Please. That’s how she gets most of her media attention.  Is someone really brave for doing something that she knows will have fans and media fawning all over her?  You know what would be brave?  If she put on clothes, cleaned all the shit off her face, and tried to make it on her musical talents alone.