A very brilliant man, in conversation with a brilliant woman, astutely compared Lady Gaga’s new video to Madonna’s ’90s coffee table book “Sex,” a book to which time hasn’t been particularly kind. For those of you too young to remember, “Sex” was a metal-bound $50 book of “naughty” photos by Steven Meisel of Madonna entwined in risque poses with celebrities such as Vanilla Ice, Naomi Campbell and Big Daddy Kane. At the time, “important” intellectuals like Camille Paglia bandied about adjectives like “transgressive” and “taboo-shattering” to describe it (do those words ring a bell?).
Everything you need to know about the book can be summed up by the picture above: the awkwardness of Big Daddy Kane’s patterned bikini briefs and the uncomfortable expression on his face. You can see his embarrassment, as if he knows better and is asking himself: ”What the fuck am I doing here? Am I part of the ‘joke’ or is the joke on me?”
I felt a similar sort of embarrassment/empathy for Beyonce while viewing the “Telephone” video, though she seems a much better sport than Big Daddy Kane (a rapping legend for whom, back in the ’90s interestingly enough, Beyonce’s husband Jay-Z was once the “hype man”).
As for the video itself, it was reasonably clever and stylish, I suppose (conceptually, at least), and being able to make a splash with a music video and getting people to talk about a music artist in this day and age is certainly no small feat. But being the squeakiest wheel in the room doesn’t necessarily translate into being “transgresive.” And playing “spot the reference” with arbitrary lifts from other movies doesn’t automatically make one “post-modern” (if it did, Friedberg and Seltzer, the “auteurs” behind “Epic Movie,” and “Meet the Spartans” would be in the Whitney Biennial).
Personally, I could have done without Jonas Akerlund’s ugly, grimy freakshow aesthetic and clumsy editing, which really seemed to be at cross-purposes with the rest of the video. I saw “Spun” once already, thank you, and it was more than enough.
This is a completely valid argument. I dont agree with you, but its a valid perspective.
The difference is, everyone thought this coffee table book was stupid when it came out. The album Erotica tanked. It didnt connect…with anyone.
via schwenk
via nudawn