Paglia gags on Gaga

Perhaps desperate to remind the world that she isn’t actually deceased, the writer who used to be Camille Paglia wandered onto the pages of the Times of London to attack… Lady Gaga. That’s right, the self-described “dissident feminist” who worshiped Madonna as a feminist icon has laid into the current inhabitor of the Madonna cultural-space for being, inter alia, derivative, unoriginal, unattractive, asexual, over her head, and – horror of horrors – hypocritical.

 Listen to this:

There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”.

 Good lord. Since when did being a dissident feminist mean wagging your finger like a schoolmarm? She might as well have just written "kids these days.... harumph" and left it at that. But no, she goes on:

Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the exact same attack that Lynn Hirschberg launched against MIA in her infamous profile in the NYT magazine a few months ago. As I wrote about that spat, Hirschberg was falling for the old authenticity hoax, the idea that what an artist is entitled to say or write or sing about is underwritten by their social, economic, or ethnic background. What made the Hirschberg/MIA spat so funny was that both of them appear to buy into the hoax; in contrast, Camille Paglia seems to be the only one not in on the joke.

It’s pretty clear that Gaga doesn’t intend for her act to be taken as anything other than "rebellion as performance” How could Paglia fail to see that Gaga is ironic? Could it be that she's daring to be ironic about all the stuff that Paglia made a career out of taking oh-so-seriously? Wouldn’t it be ironic if the only thing threatened by Lady Gaga’s playful boundary-transgressing is the body of work of a dissident feminist who made her name celebrating exactly what she now finds so offensive?