"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle

Showing posts with label social commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social commentary. Show all posts

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Gaga for Death 3


The photo above is of Lady Gaga during The Fame Monster photo sessions. One of the main things you notice from this photo is the fake bird on her head. I'm not sure if this bird is suppose to be a crow or a raven but either way it's inclusion is significant.

In Occult circles the crow represents the positive aspects of death and the transition into the afterlife. On the contrary, ravens represent the negative/physical aspects of death. I guess the identity of the bird on Lady Gaga's head is up to your own perception.


This bird was represented in the first of the many costumes worn by Lady Gaga at the MTV Video Music Awards. Death, of course, was a huge theme of hers that night as she staged her own death during her performance.
Since then I have been thinking about death and how it is perceived in various scenarios. In 2009 MTV Video Music Awards I compared the deaths of celebrities to religious iconography. This theme was heightened by the Catholic setting of her performance combined with lyrics that deal with themes of fame. It is interesting that after she dies in the performance she rises and we see a halo behind her. The next night she appears as a blood soaked version of Mary at Marc Jacobs party.

In the original Gaga for Death post I went as far as to find connections between the themes of death and resurrection found in religion and in the "Monster" themes found in Gaga's work and suggested that maybe we've been Gaga all along and the presence of Lady Gaga is simply a mirror to what is already present in our culture.

In Going Green I examined Lady Gaga and Madonna as pop culture representations of various Gods of death and Mother Goddesses which would also mean they represent life and death. What was interesting about this post was that Isis gave birth to Anubis which means that while Isis represents life she also represents death. Life and death are apart of the same continuous cycle as Madonna and Gaga are apart of the same music continuum.


A good example of this is Madonna representing the embodiment of death and life in her music video "Frozen".
In this scene we see Madonna dematerialize into a flock of crows representing the death of an aspect of herself.At various points throughout the video Madonna does the Hindu Mudra invoking infinity/perfection.As her power gets stronger she is able to alter the weather/nature.
She is then shown taking in energy.
The Hindu Om symbol is on her hand representing the absolute, omnipresence, or as Madonna would say "the sound of the universe".She is then reborn as the Triple Goddess.

To be continued?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Gaga for Death

Lady Gaga on the red carpet at a recent event


Lady Gaga is the latest in a long list of artist to achieve what right now feels like omnipresence. Her image has saturated all forms of mass media and she has become a pop culture staple. Although I do not think she has eclipsed the level of fame Britney Spears reached, she has accomplished something Britney Spears never has and never will -- respect from the art and high fashion worlds. It has been reported that Lady Gaga has been invited to perform at the Museum of Contemporary Art and legendary designer Marc Jacobs has honored her as a fashion pioneer at the 13th annual Accessories Council Excellence Awards. Not bad for a chick who's album tackles such potent topics as partying, getting drunk, fame-whoring, and boys.

The photo of Lady Gaga above embodies the main reason I started putting my time into this blog. On the surface, it is simply a picture of a popular pop star walking the red carpet in another crazy outfit she has become known for, but once you examine both the photo and other recent work by Lady Gaga you discover that she and her team are preparing to unleash an album, tour, and various music videos that focus on the theme of death starting with her concept album The Fame Monster. Now I'm aware that hardcore Lady Gaga fans will cry foul saying "But no!!! Lady Gaga said the fame Monster will be about her EMOTIONAL MONSTERS!!!! You don't understand her ART! YOU'RE TOTALLY HATING, YOU PSYCHO!!!".

To make it perfectly clear, I'm not concerned with the message Lady Gaga believes she is spreading, I'm more concerned with the repetitive themes presented in her work so that I can examine how those messages translate to the general public. Pop artists come up with off the wall explanations for their work all the time, but as history has shown, pop music is not exactly the best medium to convey any messages other than the mundane. Madonna is another artist who tried to convince the public that a performance that featured her fingering herself on stage was art and took the audience on an emotional journey. I'm seriously not even kidding, check this shit out...

When Madonna was Lady Gaga.


In her documentary titled Truth or Dare, Madonna explains that she knows she's not the best singer or the best dancer but she insists that she is not interested in that, she says she's interested in being provocative and political. Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I'm going to guess that most people do not see Madonna as a politician and are not leaving her shows pondering her deep social commentary on the state of the world. Because of this, it is important to explore what they are leaving Madonna, Lady Gaga, and other pop stars shows with.

In the Lady Gaga picture above she is wearing all black including a veil that is traditionally worn at funerals.On her lace gloves we see an inverted cross. My initial thought after spotting the inverted cross was that clearly if she put her hand down the cross would no longer be inverted and that this was probably just a random moment captured. Still curious, I went on ahead and searched some more and found out that most of the photos of her on the red carpet at this event featured the inverted cross - so this was not just some random moment and it could have possibly been intentional.But it's only about her personal monsters...


Now don't go and get your disco-sticks in a bunch Gaga-stans, I am in no way saying your Herme-Highness is a Satanist, I'm just pointing out the symbolism presented in her outfit. In fact, like most symbols, the inverted cross does not just have one meaning. Originally known as the Cross of St. Peter, the inverted cross was initially a Christian symbol. The story goes that St. Peter was crucified upside down due to his strong belief that he was not worthy of being crucified in the same manner as Christ. However, due to many Satanist and popular culture, the inverted cross is now seen as an anti Christian symbol.

When I originally began noticing the reoccuring theme of death in Gaga's work I was prepared to write her off as yet another artist presenting negative themes to the general public; but as I explored her work further I began to question my own thought process. Should the public really be shocked at Lady Gaga's constant antics or should we simply take a step back and examine existing socially accepted themes in religion and popular culture and see that Lady Gaga is simply a mirror to a distorted world we already accepted as normal before we knew what bluffin with a muffin was?

The Monster
Lady Gaga in "Paparazzi"

While Lady Gaga's original image was of a retro-loving blonde fame-whore who loves to party, the release of her music video for "Paparazzi" seemed to deconstruct that image in order to re-invent it into another image that centered around the theme of death.


Lady Gaga performing "Paparazzi" at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards

Gaga's visual representations of death continued with her now infamous performance of "Paparazzi" at the MTV Video Music Awards.

In my blog entry 2009 MTV Video Music Awards I pointed out the bride references in Lady Gaga's performance that night and I compared them to Madonna's famous performance of "Like A Virgin" at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984.

What I didn't think of at the time was Lady Gaga's connections to another bride - the Bride of Frankenstein. Take a look at the similarities between what the actress in the Bride of Frankenstein is knitting and Lady Gaga's Alex Noble designed head piece from the MTV Video Music Awards after party.


"The publishers do not see that my purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God." - Mary Shelley; a character from the film Bride of Frankenstein

It turns out Lady Gaga recently did a Bride of Frankenstein inspired photo shoot for Out magazine. Lady Gaga using the Bride of Frankenstein for this new era is not surprising considering the theme of her new era is monsters.The current obsession with Monsters in popular culture makes one suspicious; is this all happening naturally or is there an agenda being pushed by people behind the scenes controlling the entertainment industry? Blogger Tommy over at Kozmikon addressed this issue by connecting the over abundance of Monster related pop culture references to the Samhain; the beginning of the dark half of the Celtic year.

The Sacred Heart
"Pop ate my heart; he downed the whole thing in one efficient gulp like a beautiful monster."

The above screen cap is taken from the intro video of Lady Gaga's The Fame Ball Tour. The Andy Warhol inspired piece is meant to coincide with her other short film The Brain which I posted about here. The fact that she chose to open her show with a short film titled The Heart is interesting considering the surprising amount of references to hearts in her work and in her life in general.
Lady Gaga wearing a heart necklace in "Paparazzi"



"I need more to feed my pop heart"

The video above made be recall a recent blog entry by Pseudo-Occult Media (click here to read it) in which Ben went into detail about the repetitive use of the words "Papa" and "Pop" in Lady Gaga's work. That along with the obvious mind control elements made me suspicious of the video. In both The Brain and The Heart videos Gaga appears to be under mind control (her character, not her literally, although it could be both). Often a victim of trauma based mind control will be given commands that are stored deep within their mind only to be triggered at a later time.

During the aforementioned trauma they are often told imaginary stories by their programmers such as the popular story that they are going "over the rainbow" while they are disassociating. I only mention this because in both The Brain and The Heart videos Lady Gaga is going on and on about her "Pop" eating her heart and swallowing her brain. This could represent a story told to keep Gaga's "Candy" alter at ease and under control and it becomes a useful explanation to that alter as to why she is behaving in such a heartless and empty headed fashion (ate my heart, swallowed my brain). The man behind her appears to be having her repeat the story to him in order to make sure she is still fully convinced that the story is real and therefore still under control. This may sound strange to someone who has never researched mind control but off the wall stories like this are fed to mind controlled multiples. Some victims even believe they are animals such as cats while under their trauma induced altered state.

Later on in the video she says she feels free now that Pop has ate her heart. This is yet another reminder of mind control as victims believe they are "free" while in their altered state. Many are "thrown from the freedom train" (killed) at the age of 30. I'm not saying Lady Gaga will be killed at the age of 30; I'm just using the freedom train reference to show that trauma induced disassociation is seen as freedom to programmers and therefore to those programmed as well.

Lady Gaga also attened the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all girls private school on the Upper East Side of New York. Other famous alumnae include Paris and Nicky Hilton. This is a far cry from the story that the media is trying to feed that Lady Gaga was this struggling musician with no money that rose to stardom out of pure luck.

The Convent of the Sacred Heart reminds me of a documentary I posted a while back (click here to check it out) about Catholic sacred heart iconography and it's ties to ancient worship in which the heart was sacrificed to various Gods. This documentary may become useful when I return to discussing religious iconography later on in this post.

The references to hearts in Lady Gaga's work continues to come up as recently she teamed up with Dr. Dre to promote a new line of headphones called Heartbeats. Also, in a strange connection, there was recently a story about a photog dying of a heart attack while shooting Lady Gaga at a recent event. Like the Hermaphrodite stories, I believe the story was a hoax considering it was not reported by any legitimate news sources, only celebrity gossip blogs. I am convinced that Gaga and her people are propagating many of these stories. Remember her idol is David Bowie who was notorious for leaking many off the wall stories to the press in order to heighten his mystique and build a myth around his legacy.

If she only had a heart...

David Bowie with his band Tin Machine in 1989

Our Lady also hooked up with the Tin Man himself, Kanye West, to form the now canceled Fame Kills tour. During his 808 & Heartbreaks album, a symbol of a broken heart was a huge part of his albums art work and videos. The album itself featured West's computerized vocals as well as electronic beats heightening the tin man connections.

The Sex Slave

Recently the music video for Lady Gaga's current single "Bad Romance" premiered and all hell broke loose. Websites such as Livejournal and Twitter crashed due to the large number of people interested in viewing and commenting on the video. Recently the time and effort put into music videos such as the recent Rihanna video that I posted on has decreased due to the lack of airplay videos recieve and so people's expectations are low. Because of this people freaked out at the sight of a new pop music video that actually featured a story line.

Before the music video premiered Lady Gaga revealed information regarding the storyline to the press. In an article posted by MTV.com Gaga revealed "There's this one shot in the video where I get kidnapped by supermodels. I'm washing away my sins and they shove vodka down my throat to drug me up before they sell me off to the Russian mafia."

The quote above sparked my interest in this video considering the previous mind control and Monarch sex kitten themes in Lady Gaga's work. The fact that her next video would blatantly present her as a sex slave added more weight to my stance on the mind control themes present in her work.The video starts by showing coffins. Don't feel bad if you did not originally connect this scene to coffins. Apparently this style of coffin was used in the popular television show True Blood. I've never seen the show so I had no idea.True Blood

It makes sense that they would be coffins because, as I've mentioned, the theme for this era in Gaga's career is monsters and monsters such as the Bride of Frankenstein are made from dead bodies.The monsters crawl out of their coffins and begin dancing.
Gaga's dark alter stares hypnotically in the mirror. I'm sure I don't need to explain the mirror symbolism to most of you but I will refer you to a MK Culture throwback post If U Seek Esseker just in case.
The models force Lady Gaga to drink vodka. There is clear evidence of mind control and sexual slavery in the fashion industry; followers of Pseudo-Occult Media are well aware of this. If you don't know much about it please do head over to Pseudo-Occult Media and get informed. This music video will make a whole lot more sense once you know how a large part of it stems from reality. The models forcing Vodka down Gaga's throat are already programmed and have been sold into slavery.
When they are done intoxicating her they perform with her in front of the Russian mafia.
Gaga and the models then crawl like cats towards the men. This type of crawling is very similar to music videos by Madonna, Ciara, and Beyonce.
A cat is shown heightening the sex kitten theme.
Lady Gaga is sold to the highest bidder.
She is then shown with a bunch of diamonds. Presidential sex models are often associated with diamonds (Marilyn Monroe; diamonds are a girls best friend; research this on your own).
Goat heads are shown as she goes to have sex with the man who bought her. These goat heads have been in most of her videos including "Just Dance" and "Paparazzi". Of course this automatically makes someone like me think of the Baphomet.

The Robot
Metropolis; 1927

A lot has been written about the pop culture references to the 1927 silent film Metropolis. The Industry series has been very good at pointing out just how repetitive this theme has been in popular culture. The film is linked to Lady Gaga due to her name. Her name comes from the Queen song "Radio Gaga" which features clips of Metropolis (Click here to view the video).


The irony of prisoners dancing to Radio Gaga; art imitating life? Who cares, just dance!

The media current fixation with monsters seems to be an extension of their previous fixation with robots. It is essentially the same story; an artificial person made out of the likeness of a human being. The robots and monsters are both man made creations.


The Hickey Underworld - Blonde Fire

The music video above features the monster theme as people are made out of the remains of the dead. Certain scenes also feature a striking similarity to the trailer released to promote Lady Gaga and Kanye West's canceled Fame Kills Tour.

Unless you're a die-hard Lady Gaga fan, most people seem to be either shocked or disgusted by her yet they can't seem to take their eyes off of her. She has become an increasingly popular topic of conversation; each publicity stunt eclipsing the previous. While people around the globe are voicing their knee-jerk reactions to her latest video I'm just now figuring out why she never really moved me in the first place. Is she really all that interesting or have the themes of sexual slavery, violence, death, and resurrection already been present in our culture and religions? Maybe we've been Gaga all along.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...