Lady Gaga and Popular Music: Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture (Routledge Studies in Popular Music) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.3 ‘Paparazzi’’s imagery tells its story through the song’s sections. (8.3a, verse 1; 8.3b, chorus 1; 8.3c, break; 8.3d, verse 2; 8.3e, chorus 2; 8.3f, bridge; 8.3g, chorus 3; 8.3h-i, out chorus).

In music video clips, supporting characters often function as odd, mute, inanimate, symbols, and they appear only in interstitial sections. They possess a blankness that’s almost deathly. Such depictions started early: the second clip screened on MTV’s first broadcast, Ph.D’s ‘Little Susie’s on the Up,’ contains a background figure lurking around like a silent executioner. Jonas Åkerlund extends the depictions of the background character much further than their initial and historical uses, suggesting something new and uncanny. The functions of ‘Paparazzi’’s and ‘Telephone’’s mannequin-like characters are impossible to determine. ‘Paparazzi’’s inability to suggest cessation or death is revealed by the music’s pause after the poisoning. Two uncanny doctors are needed, both with glasses, one with blue skulls and another with green, to keep the body down. Real, depicted death, tends to be rare in music videos. Sometimes in a hip-hop video a member of the posse might toss a handkerchief at a camera, whose lens peers skyward from the bottom of a grave. A body in a casket might appear, as in Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems,’ but the corpses tend to like to open their eyes. Even Guns N’ Roses’s ‘November Rain’ was unable to bury its corpse. The success of ‘Telephone’’s odd deaths can be explained as well. 6

So perhaps ‘Paparazzi’ is cheerier and more life affirming. The clip exploits the ambiguity between one real death and many supplementary ones, or one real death and many who are just ornamental symbols of something else, like the death drive of fandom. It’s unclear. The video is also chipper because, though some of the material in the verses might be bleak, the choruses are opulent. Gaga’s singing here is prettiest, when she hits the highest pitches on ‘until that boy is mine.’ Here, the voice is colored with a bit of sadomasochistic teasing. Gaga is able to suggest something vulnerable and lethal at the same time: perhaps she’s offering death through orgasm. And even if this video suggests death, attractive, beautiful materials of gold, fur, marble, diamonds, orchids, and glitter gild the video. Vibrant pinks, purples, greens, reds, blues, and oranges also brighten it. The model’s bodies are also strewn like Easter eggs. They seem more like clues or hieroglyphs, text to be read, than real dead bodies. The video hovers between the real and the unreal.

But the most surprising depiction of performers occurs in the third chorus. Here, as mentioned, the thick arrangement of the first two choruses fails to appear. Only a pulsing synthesizer fills its place. This encouraging synth along with a bevy of multitracked voices feels trustworthy, like home. Lady Gaga rides this wave and struts forward to commit murder. I, too, come forward, and am implicated in this gesture. When her glasses are removed, I see her face. She’s an Olympia, a puppet doll! She’s become like the mannequins, and perhaps even more so.

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