Gaga Studies

As an “icon” in mainstream popular culture, Lady Gaga has imbued a new standard of super stardom as a performance artist and transformative fashionista in today’s generation and thus challenged orthodoxy. Her interpretation and expression of Christianity, in particular, places the iconic goddess under the critical spotlight of the religious community. Born a Roman Catholic, Lady Gaga experienced a series of life-changing events that has brought her to integrate risky biblical references into her lyrics. Her music is only one perspective, however, upon which this can be analyzed: her fashion, often unpredictable yet impressive, is equally influenced by her religious roots and ideas. The art of Lady Gaga’s music and fashion brings together new meaning both insightful and controversial to the Christian body, which elicits a response to examine and criticize the superstar’s interpretive messages. As a result, subjective interpretations of those references lie at the heart of Christian argument as well as Lady Gaga’s.

The article discusses a specific reading of Lady Gaga's image as something new and provocative in pop and celebrity culture. Since the release of The Fame Monster (2009), arguments for the postmodern ‘subversiveness’ of Gaga have emerged both in music journalism and scholarly writing. Such claims surprise me for one basic reason: apparently no one has noted the extent to which Gaga's star persona is related, in many media texts, to specific discourses about the cultural and social value of music. For this reason, I will deliberately ignore the visual texts on which ‘postmodern’ readings usually rely (e.g. Gaga's music videos), and will look at the discourses that emerge in Gaga's interviews, analysing one particularly long piece from the online music site 'Noisevox'. This example shows the construction of a biographical narrative that relies on quite distinctive notions of cultural authenticity. [...] Overall, I argue that more extensive studies on Lady Gaga should not ignore this discursive rhetoric, as long as it frequently re-frames Gaga's visual and allegedly postmodern ethos.