Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Barf
My contention has always been that Kanye West is actually a vehemently racist white man in blackface making fun of his ignorant concept of Blackness in general and hip-hop in particular. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga's vaunted feminism has always seemed fake to me, just another emptily ironic hipster gesture (I'm all for irony, but only in the service of something, rather than the nothing that is Lady Gaga). Somehow, this picture doesn't do much in the way of convincing me that I was wrong about either of those things.
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6 comments:
It doesn't take a White man in blackface to make hip-hop performers (or listeners) look like clowns. They do it all on their own. Recognize.
Yes, that IS exactly the most tiresome and stupid comment you could have written. Congratulations!
Lady Gaga is even a little farther down the scale than Stephen Colbert - supposedly (I have not yet seen actual evidence of this however, it could be just a self-serving Democratic urban myth) some people take his act seriously and refuse to believe he's a parody. The same thing seems to be true with Lady Gaga, except she's even closer to the line between parody and something you'd expect to see in all earnestness. At what point does that cease to be effective and just serve to push the Overton window in exactly the direction you don't want it to go? I still love her acoustic piano version of Poker Face though.
Maybe...I tend to think, though, that the problem is that while Steven Colbert uses parody to make a point (a fairly weak point, unfortunately, but a point nonetheless), Lady Gaga uses parody because...uh, I dunno, people think it's cool and smart, Overton windows be damned. That I find damaging, and more importantly, damned boring.
What is Stephen Colbert's point, exactly? Can you articulate it any better than Lady Gaga's?
Oh, and Happy New Year.
Yeah, you called my bluff. Honestly I just like him better because a) he makes me laugh sometimes, b) Strangers With Candy was brilliant, and c) a friend of mine works for him.
Happy New Year!
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