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Jan. 15th, 2014 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI mostly find Lady Gaga's "Artpop" album disappointing, because I don't think the dialectic she's playing with is, quite, art-pop. I think she's really struggling with fun-serious and she's confusing it with art-pop, and I think the result is less thoughtful than I was hoping for.
I can construct a set of axes around art-pop and fun-serious, where David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is the epitome of Art/Fun, Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past is archetypal Art/Serious, Orwell's 1984 is Pop/Fun, and Dickens's David Copperfield is Pop/Serious. Stipulating, obviously, that all four of these works are literary masterpieces and have a diversity of style and mood that defies this schematization.
Or in the musical world, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is Art/Fun, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick is Art/Serious, Michael Jackson's Thriller is Pop/Fun, and Paul Simon's Graceland is Pop/Serious. Again, stipulating that these four works are musical masterpieces and have a diversity that makes this all essentially nonsense piffle. Michael Jackson as a pop musician does not mean his work is not artistic. His work is sublimely artistic. It means that on the Art-Pop spectrum, I am using the word Art to mean something different than just art, which is elastic and elusive, but which I think my examples bring out reasonably clearly. I might say that by Art I mean inaccessible, but I don't think that quite covers it, and definitely has a more negative connotation than I want. We could bend in the opposite direction and say that by Art I mean complexity, but I don't want to claim that Pop cannot be complex, either. But these are the ideas I am gesturing towards.
Lady Gaga's work straddles the art/pop line at times, but only incidentally. Her music is always fundamentally pop, in that it is accessible, danceable, comprehensible, immediately enjoyable even though it certainly courts deconstruction. None of the songs on Artpop are not pop. Very few of them are even arguably Artpop hybrids. Actually, if anything, I found the album less musically interesting than The Fame Monster or Born This Way.
But there is a lot of hybridization on Artpop, along the second axis I posited. For example, "Venus", a strong, catchy pop song that has such a density of ideas that it would be strongly positioned on the Pop/Serious part of the spectrum, except that Gaga can't resist sprinkling in puerile genital jokes. There's something a little Shandyan about it, except the fusion is not graceful enough. (I tried to categorize Tristram Shandy on my proposed axes, but every time I try it comes out Art/Pop/Fun/Serious. I think Shandy is my graph's origin.)
Anyway, I'm curious what other people thought of Artpop.
I can construct a set of axes around art-pop and fun-serious, where David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is the epitome of Art/Fun, Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past is archetypal Art/Serious, Orwell's 1984 is Pop/Fun, and Dickens's David Copperfield is Pop/Serious. Stipulating, obviously, that all four of these works are literary masterpieces and have a diversity of style and mood that defies this schematization.
Or in the musical world, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is Art/Fun, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick is Art/Serious, Michael Jackson's Thriller is Pop/Fun, and Paul Simon's Graceland is Pop/Serious. Again, stipulating that these four works are musical masterpieces and have a diversity that makes this all essentially nonsense piffle. Michael Jackson as a pop musician does not mean his work is not artistic. His work is sublimely artistic. It means that on the Art-Pop spectrum, I am using the word Art to mean something different than just art, which is elastic and elusive, but which I think my examples bring out reasonably clearly. I might say that by Art I mean inaccessible, but I don't think that quite covers it, and definitely has a more negative connotation than I want. We could bend in the opposite direction and say that by Art I mean complexity, but I don't want to claim that Pop cannot be complex, either. But these are the ideas I am gesturing towards.
Lady Gaga's work straddles the art/pop line at times, but only incidentally. Her music is always fundamentally pop, in that it is accessible, danceable, comprehensible, immediately enjoyable even though it certainly courts deconstruction. None of the songs on Artpop are not pop. Very few of them are even arguably Artpop hybrids. Actually, if anything, I found the album less musically interesting than The Fame Monster or Born This Way.
But there is a lot of hybridization on Artpop, along the second axis I posited. For example, "Venus", a strong, catchy pop song that has such a density of ideas that it would be strongly positioned on the Pop/Serious part of the spectrum, except that Gaga can't resist sprinkling in puerile genital jokes. There's something a little Shandyan about it, except the fusion is not graceful enough. (I tried to categorize Tristram Shandy on my proposed axes, but every time I try it comes out Art/Pop/Fun/Serious. I think Shandy is my graph's origin.)
Anyway, I'm curious what other people thought of Artpop.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-15 06:20 pm (UTC)I agree that her music never is precisely Art, which is a problem. I also just wish that she'd go back to the four on the floor style of The Fame Monster, tbh--that managed to unite some great music with at least a little bit of Pop/Serious fun, especially in the videos. I think her music now has gotten too--not narcissistic, precisely, but narcissistic in its focus? No one wants a whole album about the travails of being a pop star. Just make more pop music!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-15 07:07 pm (UTC)I don't know, The Fame Monster is just put together with such assurance that it seemed like Lady Gaga wasn't an artist figuring out where she wanted to go, but someone with a clear vision of where she was taking her art. I think if Gaga were more like the Arcade Fire, I'd be willing to accept Born This Way and Artpop as albums on the level of Neon Bible- a good, sometimes disappointing album with clear signs that the artists were struggling toward something more ambitious. But it's not as easy to do that with Gaga because she comes with a different narrative, you know?