E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

If you want to understand the problem with the world at the present late stage of capitalism, watch The Bling Ring , then listen to the new Lady Gaga album.  Both are obsessed with the surface of material glamour ("bling") as it becomes a fetish object, standing in for what really might drive us - sex, love, safety, faith, freedom - and, in both cases, these American products of excess and  privilege  gesture brilliantly, if rather sadly, at another way. This may be satire or an epiphenomenon.  Gaga's album is not the  master-work  she no doubt hoped it would be, critics say, but several songs are funny collages and cut-ups of sounds and styles and personae that suggest the Lady is as much Shanghai as she is Wilde.  This is certainly the year of the pop diva - with Cher, Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Charli XCX among others coming out with massive tracks and albums of technical delights and quirky gems.  But like a morning after a cocaine bi...

James Christopher Sheppard reviews Born This Way by Lady Gaga; and recants his earlier opinion... At last, after months of ultra-hype, Born This Way , the brand new Lady Gaga album, has arrived. Let’s see if it lives up to the expectations. ‘Marry The Night’ Straight into a haunting melodic club track, Gaga sets the pace for the album in style. This is a great song to bridge the gap between The Fame Monster to Born This Way , showing evolution in sound, but playing to Gaga’s strengths. ‘Marry the Night’ eases you into the new album with a soft start, but that quickly turns into those hammering beats Gaga has been promising for months. ‘Born This Way’ The title track and first single, which went on to become Gaga’s biggest hit in the USA, was met with controversial comparisons to Madonna ’s ‘Express Yourself’. While it is less edgy to her previous headline grabbing singles, ‘Born This Way’ seems to have established itself as THE guilty pleasure. You shouldn’t love it, but eventu...

The beginning of the end for GaGa? By James Christopher Sheppard For almost three years now, Lady GaGa has reigned supreme as the multi-million selling iconic pop star of the age. She has launched four of her first six singles to the top of the UK charts, sold over 12 million copies worldwide of her first album The Fame/The Fame Monster and is still on the epically successful and hugely long Monster Ball Tour. Love her or hate her, the success and buzz around everything GaGa does is something quite spectacular. Having produced credible, edgy dance tracks such as ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Paparazzi’ and establishing herself as a vocally gifted musician, as well as writer, the mind boggles when hearing the first two singles released from her new album, the hugely hyped, Born This Way. In February you’d have been hard pushed not to have heard ‘Born This Way’- the first brand new single from GaGa since ‘Bad Romance’, which hit #1 in December 2009. The difference between these two tracks cou...

As has been noted elsewhere on the net, there's a link between Lady Gaga and Lady Godiva - though the earlier lady sought to pass unseen though naked, covered herself with her long tresses, and was only spotted by Peeping Tom - and acted for the good of her people.  It is likely that Gaga partly based her name on that of the famous woman of nakedness, though. And now Gaga has shown up at the blank other end of that spectrum, the red carpet of the MTV awards - as far from Coventry's middle ages and over-taxation as seems imaginable - covered only in meat.  As this was yesterday's news, I don't want to dwell on what such a statement means - indeed, the semiotics of Gaga seems a tad 80s as a time-waster.  We know she is mass figure, we know she seeks attention, we know she claims to be an artist.  I am more interested in the great big what next that faces all artists of her size and wealth and fame - she is, in a sense, the new Hirst . One can only deploy so many...

Speaking of prisons, the latest online sensation is the nine-minute trashy video from Lady Gaga , riffing off of Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction . It is also a knowing wink to girls behind bars movies, and employs a number of porn tropes, too (not least the sadomasochistic outfits and situations). Beyond blue, this sort of thing would have been banned a few years ago, and is surely a new low in terms of exposing young people to mind-poison, and the glamour of evil. That, or it is hyper-cool, po-mo fun. In the digital age, even the identity of genres and their ethical implications are fluid and fastly-shifting. One thing is for sure. Watching and listening to the kooky, sexy Telephone , it is more than ever clear that the Wilde-Madonna template has been lifted and learned exquisitely. Using decadent costumes and witty cultural inversions that shock and expose masks and facades, Lady Gaga is now the 21st century Madonna - a pop culture instigator of artistic purpose and ge...