Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline

"If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment."

So wrote Tom Engelhardt, in an essay titled "America Detached from War," and he couldn't have picked a more perfect metaphor. Gaga is sexy, ubiquitous, and oh so of-the-moment. She exists on a line between monstrous and beautiful, making us ask questions about progress, about agency, about control, about men and women, about Americans and the world. She is both a perfect embodiment of American cultural dominance and subverting what that means at every turn.

Gaga-analysis could fill a library at this point. It is impossible to ignore her. She demands in a voice somewhere between a howl and a snarl at the Grammys "I wanna be a star!" and she makes philosophers (like Nancy Bauer, in a New York Times piece) as well as pop critics talk about her.

The Predator drone is the latest and sexiest symbol of American dominance through military technology; Gaga is the latest and sexiest symbol of cultural hegemony. The media is full of both of them, breathlessly discussing the capabilities of the unmanned drones, a giant leap forward in our technology, a way to detach us even further from the reality of war, to spend a day at war and then go home to the family at night. And of course picking over the latest Lady Gaga video -- a cultural event that has turned YouTube into the site of the new Fireside Chat. Instead of talking about the news, millions of Americans talk about the new Gaga video.

Meanwhile, Predator drones kill civilians in countries that millions of Americans probably couldn't find on a map. Wars continue, dead bodies pile up. The living bodies of women are contested territory abroad and at home. And the body of a 24-year-old white woman who regularly calls herself a monster is one of the few things we come together to discuss. America dominates the world; Gaga dominates our pop culture universe.

We have made monsters out of others in order to kill them without fear. Gaga makes herself a monster to try to show us ourselves.

So Succsexy

Follow the pattern -- the hemlines, the headlines/Action distraction,faster than fashion… War as we knew it was obsolete/Nothing could beat denial

So sang Canadian indie pop group Metric in the run-up to the Iraq war. Iraq was our Lady Gaga back then, with all the hype about new technology and American sex appeal splashed all over the headlines, the TV. We heard about smart bombs and "shock and awe." It was broadcast as entertainment as much as news.

When when the news flash came announcing the beginning of the Iraq invasion I was trapped in my house on the third day of a blizzard and had succumbed to watching American Idol. The broadcast broke right from a pop song to bring me footage of explosions in the sky over Baghdad.

Fast-forward more than 7 years later, and we've reached a saturation point --Iraq doesn't even get day-to-day coverage in the corporate media. It has faded into the background, just another facet of our lives. People in their twenties now have grown up on war. People Lady Gaga's age (she's 24).

Empire Down

There's always been something deeply problematic about the way war is sold, about pitching the idea of heroism to young men (and now to women too). The Iraq war was sold like it was a pop star, something sexy to look up to, and snuck into video games and YouTube videos, and the mainstream media mostly didn't question. We saw stronger, fiercer critiques of war from our pop music than we did from the people we were supposed to look to for guidance.

The selling of war has informed our pop culture as much as any previous stars have. Where fame was something that happened to stars before, Lady Gaga launched a full-on assault on the culture and scrambled her way to the top, planted a designer six-inch heel and raised her flag. More so even than Madonna, she has learned her technique from America itself. As much as sexiness, violence and a sense of unease and even voyeurism saturate her music and her videos.