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Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline

Thu, 07/29/2010 - 10:42 — Dave Culver
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We have made monsters out of others in order to kill them without fear. Gaga makes herself a monster to try to show us ourselves.

Sarah Jaffe,  AlterNet

"If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment."

So wrote Tom Engelhardt, in an essay titled "America Detached from War," and he couldn't have picked a more perfect metaphor. Gaga is sexy, ubiquitous, and oh so of-the-moment. She exists on a line between monstrous and beautiful, making us ask questions about progress, about agency, about control, about men and women, about Americans and the world. She is both a perfect embodiment of American cultural dominance and subverting what that means at every turn.

Gaga-analysis could fill a library at this point. It is impossible to ignore her. She demands in a voice somewhere between a howl and a snarl at the Grammys "I wanna be a star!" and she makes philosophers (like Nancy Bauer, in a New York Times piece) as well as pop critics talk about her.

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