Postmodernism and Beyond Continued – Should We Ask For Directions?

The time has come to follow up Thursday’s foray into post-postmodernism, this time with actual reference to Lady Gaga’s central place within my own thought on the matter. She is central to it because she is the biggest figure in global mainstream culture at the moment, and not just in music. Her impact reaches far beyond the charts, out into the mass consumer culture that epitomises the age.

Young women now go on themed “Lady Gaga” fancy dress nights, her style is that iconic, and tabloid gossip pages can’t get enough snaps of her stumbling around parties in outlandish garb. But despite all this, I still can’t decide if she represents the industry’s control of ordinary people (ie she is an iconic puppet), or whether she has become too big for the industry to control (ie she is a ‘fame monster’ that has broken loose).

If she is the former, then she represents the pinnacle of postmodernism, in a line of descent that reaches back through Madonna to Marilyn Monroe, but with a twist. Monroe will inevitably be seen as a victim of fame, whether or not this is true. Madonna, for her part, has always been in bed with the labels, etc. even when she was being ‘edgy’ or ‘controversial’.

I’m reminded at this point of Michael Ignatieff’s quote on Madonna:

“I don’t mind that I see her face on every magazine cover; I certainly don’t mind that she is obscene; I don’t even mind that she can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act and is nonetheless the most famous person on the planet. What I can’t stand about Madonna is that she thinks she’s an artist.”

Now, has Madonna’s career proven Ignatieff wrong? Some would say so, I’m sure. For myself, I don’t know, and I don’t care – the important distinction I would like to make is that I don’t believe Gaga herself has any such delusions about being an ‘artist’ in the classic sense. She is undoubtedly very creative, and her personality is frighteningly powerful, but even she acknowledges that the music she makes is not pushing boundaries or forging a new paradigm within pop. Indeed, good pop is not supposed to do any of these things. It is supposed to sound good on the radio. She’s called it “soulless electronic pop” herself. Gaga echoes Madonna with her use of imagery and the way she courts controversial topics, but has to some extent desexualised affairs – Madonna had to maintain her sex appeal, but Gaga’s main selling points are her personality, style and shock factor.

I’ve read this post this morning and it seems to echo some of the things I’ve been looking at – its discussion of Altermodernism in particular – and while I haven’t reached exactly the same conclusions as the author of that blog, it makes plenty of sense. I don’t even agree that Gaga can claim to represent an ‘Altermodern messiah’, but I do agree that she has taken mainstream norms, which want their popstars “sexy” (cf. Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, etc) and smashed them apart. Madonna was an edgy popstar, while Gaga exists outside pop’s bosom, but nevertheless feeds on the industry.

Even if Gaga herself represents the death of postmodernism, society’s reaction to her has not caught up. She is not a reaction against standardisation or commercialisation, because people’s reaction to her has been to copy her style, and to shove fistfuls of money into the pockets of record labels. She cannot kill the industry from the inside, because her actions keep it in business. I would definitely not go so far as to compare her lyrics to Hemingway. She has subverted the media machine, and used it to her advantage, but she has not revolutionised anything.

But the reaction does fit in with Kirby’s pseudo-modernism. The interaction becomes participatory – girls going out “dressed as Gaga” sums it up, really. They feel the need to be part of the phenomenon, as it’s not enough simply to keep tabs on what Gaga herself is wearing. This cultural trend certainly seems distinct from post-modernism, and Gaga may represent a bridge between the two. On the one hand, she uses the same old tactics to gain publicity, but the reaction from fans is subtly different. She has managed to carve out an individual niche within pop, which is almost unprecedented, and that deserves credit if nothing else does.

So where does that leave me on this meander of mine? Back where I started, I suppose. It’s very difficult to draw long-term conclusions from what are currently short-term phenomena, but these posts may provide a platform for me to expand this sort of thinking in the future.

Postmodernism and Beyond – Let’s Take a Walk

NOTE: For the purposes of the following two articles, I feel postmodernism roughly translates as ‘the experience of oneself as art’.

I am, perhaps, a little late to the party on this, but this morning I’ve been hoovering up mashups from one of the Internet’s greatest little corners, and the sheer number of Lady Gaga mashups I’ve been exposed to has forced me to consider her wider cultural significance, if indeed she has any. You can find tons of stuff all over the Internet about an artist that, at first glance, is merely a new Madonna. A google search for ["lady gaga" culture] returns over 6 million results, and ["lady gaga" postmodern] pings back almost 60,000. Over the next 2 or 3 days, I’ll explore wider ideas (and Gaga herself) in my own uneducated, but hopefully readable, manner.

There is a fair amount of discussion amongst the appropriate circles of whether postmodernity is ‘over’, and if so, what comes next. Personally, I think culturally we’re still in the tail end of the postmodern era, rather than the dawn of whatever comes after (post-postmodernism?). Alan Kirby has called whatever new era is emerging/has emerged “pseudo-modernism”, and his article makes a number of excellent points. Whether he’s technically ‘right’ or not is another matter, and probably isn’t even important.

Kirby notes that postmodernism fetishises the author, while today we fetishise the recipient of the text, and this has some mileage. Whether it’s TV shows like Family Guy (did you get that pop culture reference? You did? Well done! Who’s a clever boy, then? You are! Yes, you are!), the self-aggrandising exercise that is twitter (listen to me, world!), or shows like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent (you can be famous too! Or at least help decide who becomes famous!), the consumer/recipient is made “partial or whole author”, as Kirby says. TV that makes you say the punchline in your head, a social website that lets you blather on about shit-all (and I should know), or TV shows-come-talent contests, decided by viewers’ votes. And yes, these things can lead to “excruciating banality and vacuity”.

For a prime example of such vacuity, tune in to any talk radio show, and listen to the absolute cock some people feel they need to share with the nation, or scroll through comments on any Youtube video you like. People might be stupid, and have stupid things to say, but still feel the need to be heard. The recently-launched Sunday Morning Live is another attempt to harness this spirit.

One point I wish to pick up on is Kirby’s allusion to computer games, and to how they (along with CGI) have reduced the impact of cinema. However, two recent games I have played have blurred the line between movie plotline and computer game in a way I had never seen before. Between them, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Red Dead Redemption have altered the landscape of computer games by making them feel like a motion picture. Games with epic storylines are nothing new – I’m part of the generation that grew up with Final Fantasy VII, but my sense of personal involvement within the two games I’ve mentioned above was greater than I’ve ever experienced before. By using Lord of the Rings as his example of “making the possible look artificial”, Kirby chooses the wrong target. Lord of the Rings, as a work of fantasy-fiction, is supposed to feel other-worldly and unreal, while echoing real life. Likewise Gladiator, which has the essence of saga and myth about it – it is one man’s quest for revenge, set in Rome, which despite its presence in common historical knowledge, is still to some extent an alien environment.

One thing I contest strongly is Kirby’s dismissal of modern cinema as symptomatic of this pseudo-modernism. Mainstream cinema is always the last cultural sector to pick up on changes in society because of the expense and timeframes involved in creating a big-budget blockbuster. To label all modern cinema “puerile primitivism”, with a focus solely on “the acts which beget and which end life” is to overgeneralise, and more importantly to ignore the countless excellent films still being made, for the most part firmly within the postmodern context. Kirby’s categorisation of dance music as “ephemeral…vacuous on the level of signification” also misses huge diamonds nestled amongst the shit. Having said that, the fact that Mike Skinner is best known for a track about seeing a fit girl on holiday, rather than his more poetic work, vindicates his criticism to some extent. Vapid people enjoy vapid music. Figures. My point is that this is not a symptom of pseudo-modernism, at least not on the creative side of the bargain. The mass consumption side of the relationship favours shallowness and lowest-common-denominator shitmongering, but real music and cinema fans refuse to settle for this sort of awfulness, just as fans of real literature don’t read those terrible paperbacks you see advertised at train stations and airports.

More on postmodernism, pseudo-modernism, and maybe even some actual discussion of Lady Gaga’s role in it all, tomorrow.