So...Bad Romance, Virgina Woolfe, Emily Bronte, and Lady Gaga

[shadowkat]

Most of the stuff I post on this thing isn't flocked, filtered or privatized, but I will privatize or flock items that...well are either really personal or I'm a little afraid of posting, but am posting because it's something I need to write about.

This is in a way of sort of prelude to this new singer that I've been reading about on my flist. liz_marcs brought her up first. Then I saw the entertainer perform on Gossip Girl and she blew me away - particularly the song - "Bad Romance". To be honest, I thought it was another Madonna or Christine Aguilerra or Amy Winehouse trend. Then I saw her again tonight on anne1962's lj - via youtube videos. This is a performer that is rather brave, I think. Not brave like Madonna or not in the same way as Madonna, but brave in a different way. She has something to say. And I'm wondering if the people who are hearing the song...are hearing the metaphors, I'm guessing they are, and I'm guessing it's commentary on our pop culture...may well be part of the appeal.

Looked up the lyrics...and they are rather interesting. A deft commentary on dark desire.
And they stretch the envelope a bit further...than I think Madonna did. People say Madonna paved the way, but I remember David Bowie, and the glam rockers, such as Queen. Madonna may have been the first female rocker to go there...with "Like A Virgin", before Lady Gaga was born.

Gaga has a better voice than Madonna - it's deeper and richer, and can go high and really low.
Almost as low as a man's and in that regard is reminiscent of Amy Winehouse, without the drama.

I've seen three performances of "Bad Romance" now - the first on Gossip Girl - which to be honest is rivaling Buffy for best alternative pop soundtrack. The one on Gossip Girl had Gaga in a huge red dress, a Marlyn Monroesque hair style, and falling off a large white pianon. It was part performance art and part song.

Here's what wiki says about her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Gaga

Apparently she's been around since the age of 19, and her first album was produced in 2008.
And won several Grammys.

Here's the video: Note in the video - she's been kidnapped and sold to the Russian Mafia by a bunch of supermodels. She's forced to bath, dressed, and forced to drink vodka, then sing and dance for them as they bid on her. The video ends with her toasting the highest bidder/winner in their bed, with a combustable bra, she's lying beside his burnt skeleton singing. It's a powerful rallying cry. And takes Madonna's power vids one step further.

The lyrics are stating - I know I am caught in a bad romance. I want your love and your revenge. I want the disease. I want the ugly. I know you are a criminal, but you are mine.
And no, I don't want to be friends. You and me could write a bad romance.

The appeal of dark desire. Flirting with it. But making fun of it. Showing the pain of it.
It's hard to explain. It can't really be put into clear-cut words. It can only be sung and performed - metaphorically.

It reminds me of something that Virgina Woolf wrote a century before about Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights - Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion - "I love", "I hate", "I suffer." Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no "I" in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughtout the novel - a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely, "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers" the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, "If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem part of it." It breaks out again in the presence of the dead. "I see repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter - the eternity they have entered - where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy and joy in its fullness." It is the suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels. But it was not enough for Emily Bronte to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel (they haven't)..

Woolfe ends the essay thusly: Hers, then is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
From Norton Anthology of Literature by Women circ 1985 (before Lady Gaga was born, sigh yes, I feel old). Virgina Woolfe's essay on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

A good song, a good lyric will haunt you long after it is sung. Such as Adam Lambert's Mad World. Or Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. Or Frank Sinatra's My Way. Or Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind. You don't have to like it. You may hate it. I've never been fond of Wuthering Heights.
But it does haunt me. I still vividly see Henshaw and Catherine. I still see Heathcliff wandering the moors screaming his Catherine's name. I still hear the wind blow. I still feel the uneasy and uncomfortable emotion. Bad Romance is filled with those uncomfortable emotions.
It's not just the song, but how it is sung, how it is performed.

Here is another version - ganked from buffyannatator

Each version, much like Bronte's Wuthering Heights comments on our own society, how we view each other. What the archetype of the day currently is. How people are exploited. In Bad Romance - Lady Gaga more or less states Joss Whedon's premise in Dollhouse, but fights back.
I'm not just your fantasy, you are mine. I'm not your victim, you are mine. Just as Bronte wrote her Catherine - I'm not the object of your lust, but you are mine. I am not your obscure object of desire, you are mine. It is intertwined. Madonna tried to say it in Truth or Dare. But here...it is said in way that I think trascends reality and stays with you far longer than the dance floor.

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting, I particularly like how you tied it to 'Wuthering Heights' (which I've never really appreciated).