Having just watched it, I am compelled to comment about the new Lady Gaga video. It is, by the way, incredible. This is my love letter to Ms. Gaga.
Over the last couple of months Lady Gaga has come to embody—for me and, I imagine, for her fans—a kind of posthuman life strategy. She presents a response to the horrors of the 21st century that reeks, strangely, of absolute sanity—to very archly embrace the most grotesque excesses of the materialist culture that is destroying the planet. At once clinging to a very human New York hoodrat identity and also becoming indistinguishable from the inhuman culture machine that promotes her, she is the perfect evolutionary advance, designed to outlive the cockroaches themselves.
Ezra Pound once said: “And round about there is a rabble?—of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.” And so she has.
Lady Gaga is the Devil card of the Tarot: the lie that there is nothing but matter—though the card is inverted, tongue-in-cheek. She is a successful gray alien hybrid, stripped of all human emotion or compassion, a thing made to flourish in this grim, mechanical age. She is the newest model android from the MTV fembot assembly line. She is the latest and greatest Terminator. She is Skynet. She is self-aware.
Lady Gaga is everything that terrifies us about the Coming Race: Absolute destructive materialism and complete lack of identity past a 140-letter Twitter quip. Female sexuality inverted into male sexuality and weaponized. Did they build her in an underground laboratory, like the one featured in this video? They must have, for what other perverse, mutated perfection of the human form could be better equipped to succeed in this most horrible of world climates?
While the rest of the world spirals into economic degradation, environmental pestilence and complete systems failure of ALL of the old world models, Lady Gaga reigns above the flames. Pay attention to the lesson: Lady Gaga is the ONLY person prospering in this cultural climate. Therefore she has done something RIGHT. She is the necessary evolutionary adaptation to our times and THIS is why people are disturbed by her: This is what we must all become.
Indestructibly empty.