"What happened to Lady Gaga?" Asks the
Sydney Morning Herald. "She of the meat-dress variety, whose only aim was to shock the public?"
"It’s simple science. What goes up, must come down, said Isaac
Newton. After a meteoric rise to fame on the back of solid talent, she
propelled her career forward with the power of image."
I'm not sure I would agree with the writer here that Lady Gaga's rise to fame was due solely to her talent, especially given the videos that we're seen of the artRAVE so far...
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| RIP Laurieann Gibson, who died of laughter after watching this |
...but I think she's on the right track with the "image" thing.
The writer goes on to describe Gaga's most memorable outfits: the bubble dress, the meat dress, the lobster hat, and so on (none of which are - despite the fact that they're her
most memorable - entirely original, on her part). She then says:
"But my personal favourites came towards the end, when
you could tell she was running out of ideas."
And on the meat dress:
"She explained at the time it was a statement for what one
believed in. But really, we all knew it was because the dress-up thing
was done for."
Okay can we just stop for a second and laugh, because the writer here says the dress-up thing was done for after the meat dress... and the meat dress was from the
VMAs in 2010! 2010!!! That was four years ago!
"How could she possibly
one-up herself? Then she arrived at the 2011 Grammys in a plastic egg
shell. We couldn’t even see her on the red carpet. Let’s call it the
moment she imploded."
Well, you can only shock people for so long. When everything you do is a spectacle, it starts to be expected out of you. The writer says:
"The outfits that used to make headlines were now ho-hum."
Again, she's referencing a time that was 3-4 years ago.
"Here lies the genius of her “normal” dress. Now when she’s
photographed, she’s wearing – gasp – clothes! Granted, they’re high-end,
designer outfits that sometimes border on the surreal but still actual
clothes. Not bubbles. And we are genuinely surprised."
Why, with Gaga, is every criticism of her also met with an admission of her "genius"? The writer basically spent the whole article telling us how she's been bored with Gaga and her outfits since 2010/2011, yet she's a somehow still a "genius".
Anyway, the writer suggests Gaga might be sending a message to us all that she's accepting of herself now, and that she may be demonstrating that she "doesn’t need to be a completely different character every time
she gets dressed".
But I don't think so. Even when she's dressed "normal", she's still acting out a character. She's doing the same thing she always has - she puts on a costume, runs downstairs to get photographed by the paparazzi, rinses, and repeats. It's no different now in 2014 just because she's got black hair instead of blonde.
The writer closes with:
"But knowing Gaga, this is just the next stage of her image
transformation and, like all true chameleons, she’ll have another
reinvention to shock us back into buying her music soon."
Wait - "soon"? Gaga just
released a new song last week, didn't you know? Ha!
Guess the "genius" reinvention isn't working after all.
Check out the source for the whole article:
Sydney Morning Herald
