Lady Gaga: Poseur or Ground-breaking performer?

From Iskomunidad

ABSTRACT

This study aims to understand how the postmodern aesthetic production called pastiche is used in the image production of Lady Gaga's music videos. The study concentrates on Gaga’s most prominent music videos, namely, Bad Romance, Telephone and Alejandro.

Textual analysis using deconstruction reveals that Lady Gaga borrows excessively from the pop culture image bank. Her visual imagery is a collage of various pop cultural references ranging from Madonna, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, etc. Gaga effectively synthesizes the works of her references to create her own “art”. As a form of artistic innovation, Lady Gaga engages in pastiche overdrive by pushing the works of her references to the limits or merely inverting them. With such display of excessive styles, images and themes, Lady Gaga’s music videos acquire their own meaning and undermine the “essence” of the song.


Manantan, M. F. (2011). Lady Gaga: Poseur or Ground-breaking performer? A textual analysis of selected music videos of Lady Gaga. Undergraduate thesis, submitted to the UP College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman.


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Subject Index : Lady Gaga , Singers--United States of America