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Camille Paglia Trashes Lady Gaga and Praises Madonna


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And that's just the way it is! Gaga is ugly AND STILL getting her coins! :queenbitch:

Wrong. Gaga IS NOT UGLY. I REPEAT. Do NOT call her UGLY. :) Secondly, what coins? She ain't getting dem coins, girl. She's spending them on her performances. Meat aint cheap, ya know. Between her meat and Cocaine she spends about 95% of her coins right there. The other 5 percent? It goes on designer hand bags (shopping at Chanel) and the instant noodles she lives off. QUEEN OF LIVING ON A BUDGET.

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Wrong. Gaga IS NOT UGLY. I REPEAT. Do NOT call her UGLY. :) Secondly, what coins? She ain't getting dem coins, girl. She's spending them on her performances. Meat aint cheap, ya know. Between her meat and Cocaine she spends about 95% of her coins right there. The other 5 percent? It goes on designer hand bags (shopping at Chanel) and the instant noodles she lives off. QUEEN OF LIVING ON A BUDGET.

r1zf9s.jpg

RA-RA RA-RA-RAMEN!

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Wrong. Gaga IS NOT UGLY. I REPEAT. Do NOT call her UGLY. :) Secondly, what coins? She ain't getting dem coins, girl. She's spending them on her performances. Meat aint cheap, ya know. Between her meat and Cocaine she spends about 95% of her coins right there. The other 5 percent? It goes on designer hand bags (shopping at Chanel) and the instant noodles she lives off. QUEEN OF LIVING ON A BUDGET.

That's what TRUE ARTISTS DO :wow:

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Guest Madonna Bowie Prince

Gaga isn't trying to be sexy at all. She incoporates a lot of dark themes and adrogony into her imagery but she doesn't try to be sexy. Look at the Alejandro video.

When you examine a lot of Madonna's early 90s videos and the Sex Book, they're not really sexy at all. I find them to be saddistic and dark. I feel Gaga is challeing the same kind of vibe with her videos and images. The whole point is that Gaga was never called beautiful or sexy, so she uses her art to poke fun at the fact, and to poke fun at what people consider to be sexy.

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whatever gaga is trying to be, Im beyond sick of her shtick already. Its nothing but over the top contrived, silly and played out now. shes foul.

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Great response from the Gurardian:

Camille Paglia's attack on Lady Gaga is way off the mark

The professor who once heralded the future of feminism now seems marooned in the past

Lady Gaga In Concert Camille Paglia describes Lady Gaga as 'calculated and artificial' and is baffled by her popularity. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic.com

Almost 20 years ago, Camille Paglia made her name with an essay in which, prompted by the video to Justify My Love, she declared Madonna the future of feminism. Yesterday Professor Paglia returned to the fray to give us her take on Lady Gaga (via the Sunday Times, so sadly the whole piece isn't online but there's an extended extract here), or as the coverline put it "Camille Paglia demolishes an icon".

The woman who back in the day managed to win a flame war with Julie Burchill landed the odd decent punch below the belt (Poker Face, she said, perfectly describes Gaga's "frosty mug"), but Gaga remained undemolished as Paglia's critique missed the point by a mile.

Paglia's main criticism seemed to be that Gaga simply isn't sexy enough. "How would a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?" she asked. But Lady Gaga has never presented herself as a sex object. She sells weirdness and eye-popping spectacle, not sex. She isn't posing in a meat bikini to woo Nuts' one-handed readers, and why should she? Though Paglia's tome Sexual Personae posits sex as the prime mover behind all culture, you'd still think that as a feminist she'd applaud the fact that there's a massive female pop star whose appeal doesn't depend on how many men she manages to arouse. Before Gaga, we had Britney – and look how that turned out.

Part of Gaga's brilliance is the way she plays with the darker currents in popular culture, which are hardly hidden away. She's as much Marilyn Manson as Madonna. Yet Paglia gets a fit of the vapours about the "disturbing trend towards mutilation and death" in Gaga's work, somehow missing the feminist statement in the final scene of the Bad Romance video, which shows that Gaga the kidnapped sex worker in a Russian bathhouse has barbecued her punter with her flamethrower bra. Paglia also takes literally Gaga's recent line – that she doesn't have sex very often because she fears losing creativity through her vagina – which surely was just a witty way of saying that men can be a distraction when you're totally focused on your work.

Paglia gives Gaga no credit for her prodigious work ethic, bizarrely suggesting that her constant touring is a way of avoiding "serious scrutiny". She seems to think that the job of a performer is to be dissected by beady feminist critics rather than to, well, perform – and how is strutting your stuff to 10,000 paying punters a night "avoiding scrutiny"? Paglia even disapproves of Gaga's habit of dressing up for the paparazzi, though the Lady's insistence on being fabulous at all times strikes me as pretty commendable – entertaining for us, an effort for her. Even her piano playing gets it in the neck (or lid), but which other pop stars have managed to play an instrument, (co-)write their own songs, sing brilliantly live, dance (though Paglia criticises her "inert torso") and make major fashion statements all at the same time? Certainly not Madonna, Paglia's long-term crush, who has been playing the guitar onstage for the past 10 years but still looks cross-eyed with concentration every time she picks up a plectrum.

Paglia accuses Gaga of stealing from Madonna, but Madge pilfered sounds and imagery from everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Daft Punk. She loftily says that Gaga "does not belong in Bowie's company", which seems unfair – did Gaga ever say that she did? (No, Ellen DeGeneres did.) Bowie – who wasn't sexy either by the way – was of course, genuinely transgressive. Homosexuality had only been legal for five years when he told the Melody Maker he was gay. Madonna also challenged taboos that have by now largely been broken down. So what? There's something ultimately boring about criticism that insists that the glories of the past were so great that nothing modern can ever match them. Worse, it inevitably makes the critic sound ancient. Paglia's Gaga essay contains some insights (is texting, emailing and Twitter making body language incomprehensible to us? Maybe it is), but the professor who once heralded the future of feminism now seems marooned in the past.

------

And she's not the only one marooned in the past, is she?

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Guest Pud Whacker

It's not a difference of opinion when your argument is SHES UGLY (and you're a 40 year old man to boot). it's just an embarrassment. OH WELL

whats an alarming embarrassment is that EVERYTHING you do is aimed at me. youre an internet obsessed fright monster freak. :scared:

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Gaga isn't trying to be sexy at all. She incoporates a lot of dark themes and adrogony into her imagery but she doesn't try to be sexy. Look at the Alejandro video.

When you examine a lot of Madonna's early 90s videos and the Sex Book, they're not really sexy at all. I find them to be saddistic and dark. I feel Gaga is challeing the same kind of vibe with her videos and images. The whole point is that Gaga was never called beautiful or sexy, so she uses her art to poke fun at the fact, and to poke fun at what people consider to be sexy.

I agree, they were more 'sexual' than sexy..but I disagree that Gaga channels the same vibe, she offers more of a (intentional?) visual pastiche..as a performer she's a concept & she has 2 b, she created it cuz her priviliged background would never allow her 2 sell 5 records..We all know where Madonna came from, her hunger, her instinct & her surroundings as a budding artist in New York allowed her 2 gradually become a more sophisticated & informed product.

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It's not a difference of opinion when your argument is SHES UGLY (and you're a 40 year old man to boot). it's just an embarrassment. OH WELL

Everybody see's it, like that M.I.A. singer who said pops stars are supposed to be pretty and said Gaga is Ugly, are we in denial?

Edited by Lick
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