Mask on, Mask off…
Mask on, mask off…Twitter is LIVID with Lady Gaga. At the Upfront Summit she spoke at for Haus Labs, her controversially sufficient makeup brand, she spoke on the nature of art and capitalism saying that the two could be “friends” with one another under the right circumstances.
As you might imagine, this set Twitter OFF, not so much debating the validity of the statement, but more or less mourning the sobering reminder from the once Queen of the Freaks that she, in fact, thought about business as a businessperson, i.e. that she had seemingly been subsumed into “the system” for which she was once the renegade outsider.
But Lady Gaga has always been a capitalist. Her debut album is a love letter to its culture and probably the most incredible example of wish fulfillment in the 21st century so far. Like so many in that tiny sliver of time of Bush-era disillusionment and Obama-era hope, Gaga wanted fame and fortune at any cost. She hungered for it. She wanted it to fuel her, ravage her, burn her from the inside out like drinking jet fuel or butt-chugging Mountain Dew—just to feel something
And she got all of that and more. She became tabloid fodder as a pants less, dick-having, song stealing hedonist corrupting our world like an alien weapon of war. She became an indisputable icon of the American music industry and global ambassador of American pop culture at-large in a way very very few artists have achieved all on the back of an image of hyper materialism and a romanticization of consumerism (she revived the iconography of the Birkin by literally putting her signature on it). But we know all of this…because it is so indisputable lol.
But to only say “she’s always been a capitalist” is being glib. As Kamala Harris has said, “you didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree! You exist within the context of everything that came before…”
Gaga has always been trying to make grabs for people’s money. There’s been deluxe editions, remix albums, merch, product endorsements, etc. But she sold them differently then. Back in 2009, Gaga’s bids for young fans’ parents’ money was wrapped in the Gaga experience. Literally. If you bought a limited edition of The Fame Monster, for instance, it would come with a lock of hair from one of Gaga’s wigs. Those t-shirts she sold at concerts? They didn’t come from Gildan, they came from the Haus of Gaga.
To fully engage in and be close to Gaga, one needed to consume, to be actively a part of the marketplace. It was actually the only way. Her message was that the material was an access point to the infinite potential of the self. She basically marketed capitalism as an all encompassing pill to self-liberation. The difference then to now is how back then, everything Gaga was tightly streamlined around the new, cool, and infinite. So it made buying into her brand not a nice to have, but a necessity. Everything was lore in the Book of Gaga.
Now, things are not so clear. In her bid for greater career security, Gaga has shifted her priorities to becoming a multi-generational mainstay. Her audience is no longer just disenfranchised queer teens, a famously unprofitable group. It is now the Rich Gay Ryans, the Suburbia Steves, the Supermarket Marlas. And to achieve that, she’s mostly done away with the lore of Gaga to make herself more accessible. Put simply, she’s not cool anymore and I don’t think she’s trying to be either. She’s immensely talented and hard-working. She’s a triple threat. She’s consistent. That’s the new positioning.
That said, I’m not sure who her most recent ventures are exactly positioned towards since none of those groups are particularly inspired by her turn in A Star is Born to harass Walgreens employees for pink Oreos, though I’ve been wrong before!
Which is kind of the big, glaring issue at the heart of the discourse: the capitalism isn’t fun anymore. There’s no pretense or fantasy being bundled in buying limited edition Oreos, a jockstrap that looks like a knock-off Livestrong bracelet purchased in party bulk on eBay, or a big Pharma migraine pill. If, before, Gaga came off as the progenitor of literally anything cool, the queen of the in-the-know, now she sounds like a QVC Sally. Buy this. Buy that. And that’s it. It lacks the fulfillment of identity for two generations so in pursuit of it, which is the cornerstone of an effectively insidious brand.
But as I said, it isn’t so much that she lost the thread on how to market seemingly random items to the public, it’s that she’s in such a position of wealth and status that she doesn’t care to pick it up. She’s insulated. She’s not the same girl who was hustling people down to get their asses on FarmVille. Back then, it was moderately comical that fans could hear Born This Way tracks early via a Facebook game/tool of inter-familial harassment. And she, you could tell, was at least somewhat in on the joke.
Now, if she did a Solitaire-adjacent app commercial like Sarah Jessica Parker, you’d be forgiven for thinking she didn’t even care to know that there was a joke to be had. The check hit. To Sushi Park, we go!
It’s a reminder to us all that there’s a certain kind of futility in capitalism—something that we hope marketing can make us forget about. At the end of the day, when the market forces play themselves out enough, they dominate and suffocate. I actually disagree with Gaga that art and capitalism can be friends. I think that when they work well, they work better as foils, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object (yes, I viscerally cringed writing that but sadly, it is apt). To associate them on terms of friends is something that only the capitalist would say because it has won out. It’s bigger than the person fronting it, but the humanity behind the mask is still screaming, however silently.
I don’t have an eye on Gaga’s finances and don’t care to, but I would hedge a strong bet that she’s making more money now than she ever has been. And it’s all because the market won out. And to know that, and to feel no benefit from it, I imagine is quite depressing as a little monster still small.