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"No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga."

No one? What about Madonna?

From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.

As a 60s person, I'm highly amused by this presentation of the 80s as the standard what was once real in popular culture. Madonna was fake as a means to an end, but Lady Gaga is really fake, and fake is what's real now. To my 60s ears, that sounds like something Andy Warhol would say.

Lady Gaga has become successful by adhering to the belief that there?s no inner truth to be advertised, or salvaged: all one can do is invent anew.

It wasn?t that long ago when artifice appeared to be on its last leg. In the mid-to-late-1990s female performers especially were in a confessional place, a movement captured and branded by Lilith Fair, the summer tour package founded in part by Sarah McLachlan that ran from 1997 to 1999.

Wait. People took Lilith Fair seriously? 11-year-old girls, maybe. Seems to me it was mostly abhorred.

The last couple of years have seen the first wave of 1990s nostalgia, which might explain in part why Lilith was resurrected this year. But Lilith aesthetics haven?t aged well....

Do we say hasn't aged well about something that was never pretty?

Full post as published by Althouse on July 25, 2010 (boomark / email).