Lady Gaga seems to excel in fashioning accessible music. My Russian friend told me recently that nowadays in Russia, even gruff old men like to bob their heads to Lady Gaga's music. No matter what you might think of Gaga, she has made a name for herself on a global scale, so that even choirs made up of old Chinese people in Hunan Province have a blast singing her songs (just google “Old Chinese Choir Lady Gaga,” if you don't believe me). This world-going-Gaga phenomenon astounds and compels me to query her music for the secret of her fame.
I read an article wherein a music critic tries to assert that we should understand Gaga's song “Paparazzi” as a denunciation of the media. But as I listen to the song, I search in vain for that denunciation, for that level of depth. In fact, it seems to me that Lady Gaga's songs avoid depth entirely. Her songs seem to defy any attempt to find deeper meaning behind the words. Instead, they stay invariably surface-level, maybe in order to remain immediately accessible to the widest possible audience.
Perhaps it's this lack of depth, this rootedness in rootlessness, that makes Lady Gaga so marketable. With such a vacuous message, she can have us experience in her songs whatever cheap emotion we would wish, while the songs' repetitive catchiness drowns you in the numbing bliss of not having to plumb the depths of any deeper meaning.
Perhaps therein lies her genius: Mindless music crafted by one so mindful that the masses would prefer not to bear the burden of sober thinking but rather to pulse with indiscriminate, animalistic feeling. Perhaps she figures that the average Joe and Jane would rather engage in a passionate commotion about nothing than to negotiate the messiness of real personal connection. That relational detachment seems, at least, to be the thrust of her song, “Bad Romance,” a song in which the main character's desire to craft a dramatic story completely replaces a desire to engage in any real relationship with another person. It's as if she's saying to a man, “Let's just use one another to write a bad romance novel, full of melodrama, because what really matters is the story, not you and me.”
Consider the first lines, for instance. They consist of a string of drawn-out oh's followed by the line, “Caught in a bad romance.” From the get-go, she's already "caught" in something - something dramatic. One would think that if she feels “caught,” the “romance” has her in its custody, not allowing her to escape from some kind of unwanted prison. However, she quickly reveals in her next intelligible line that she actually wants such a “romance”: “Want your bad romance.”
Describing what makes such a “romance” bad, she reveals that she relishes those things that would actually bring tension and thicken the plot of her supposed relationship: “I want your ugly; I want your disease. I want your everything as long as it's free.” She gives a condition here: she will only enter into this “relationship” if everything remains “free.” In other words, it must cost her nothing, like a cheap romance novel in a trash bin. To her, this “relationship” must stay merely surface-level and run no deeper, lest one find obligations or expectations that would require any level of real sacrifice. Sacrifice isn't her thing; she's looking only to write a fictional, heart-wrenching story to tease the imagination, a story wherein she can feel free to act like a desperate woman screaming, “I want your love!” but only for the fun of saying it to advance her fantasy.
Then, her next line reinforces this idea that she's not looking for a real relationship but only a romance novel-like story: “I want your drama, the touch of your hand; I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand.” And she tops off her drama lust with a flurry of highly performed statements of melodramatic love: “I want your love... You know that I want you, and you know that I need you. I want it bad, your bad romance.” The vacuousness of these phrases tempts even the cursory listener to fill in the dots with whatever one wants to hear. Desire? Desperation? Actually, no; just a woman whispering sweet nothings to you to see if she can treat you as a character in her fantasy.
The chorus confirms this. She sings, “I want your love and I want your revenge. You and me could write a bad romance.” So the story to “write” is all that really matters to her. She could care less whether you two stay together. In fact, she will deliberately fracture the relationship by cheating on you so that she can experience your revenge and enhance the emotion of her story's plot line.
The plot certainly thickens with the second verse, taking the form of thriller cinema: “I want your horror, I want your design; 'cause you're a criminal as long as you're mine.” Craftiness steeped in lawbreaking: the stuff of an engrossing Hollywood film. And what else must be in a Hollywood film? Gratuitous sex: “I want your psycho, your vertigo stick. Want you in my rear window; baby, you're sick.” So she continues to add elements to her story to make it more and more like cinema; once again, what matters to her is not the other person but rather the crafting of a spectacle full of theatrics. In other words, the story's passionate commotion reigns in her heart, not any sense of personal connection.
Surface-level image is all that matters to her, which she accentuates in the bridge: “Walk, walk, fashion, baby; work it, move that b---h, crazy.” Nothing puts a passionate focus on externals more than a fashion show, and she draws that focus out by crassly depicting a runway full of strutting models. She simply refuses to go deeper or to tie herself to a real relationship, a refusal that she proclaims proudly at the end of the bridge: “I'm a free b---h, baby!”
To put an exclamation point on the dramatic tension that she wishes to create, she repeats, in both English and French, her desire for the story rather than the relationship, the commotion rather than the connection: “I want your love, and I want your revenge. I want your love; I don't wanna be friends.” So she purportedly wants love, but only the kind of love that is heightened beyond reality, the kind of love that won't allow her to be friends with her lover, the kind of love that makes a good movie but a horrible relationship.
Perhaps, in this way, Lady Gaga's attitude toward her “romance” mirrors the cinematic emptiness of relationships in our society today. Perhaps, in these days of movies and television and pervasive fiction, we have ceased to seek real personal connection and have busied ourselves with authoring our own vain, passionate commotions that now comprise our lives. It's as if we are writing our own romance novels. But perhaps our novels would read much better if we simply chucked all the passionate commotion and went back to valuing personal connection.
