Lady Gaga and Popular Music

Performing Gender, Fashion, and Culture

Martin Iddon, Melanie L. Marshall, Martin Iddon, Melanie L. Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134079940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música pop

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women's studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

Part I

Gaga’s Contexts

1‘I’ll Bring You Down, Down, Down’
Lady Gaga’s Performance in ‘Judas’

Stan Hawkins

One of the biggest hits of 2011 was ‘Judas’, a song that embodies everything pop is about. It comprises rousing compositional ideas: memorable chord sequences and hooks, catchy verse-chorus sections, and, most of all, a brash production. Lady Gaga’s performance in this song is compelling. It is thoroughly littered with clichés in a highly polished musical production that bashes out three huge memorable melody hooks. In all her performances she re-invents herself and appropriates a wealth of musical styles. A crucial part of her act is her playfulness. Throughout this chapter aspects of subjectivity are mapped against camp display in both the pop song and video of ‘Judas’. The critical approach undertaken accounts for performance strategies through style and agency. Questions posed are of a musicological kind: what features characterize the Gaga idiom, how do the details of music production shape her flamboyancy, and what is it about pop that promotes a camp aesthetic?¹

STAGING THE TRACK

If Jesus represents the good in Gaga, then Judas Iscariot certainly wreaks havoc in her life. Exposing the motives of an ex-lover who has cheated on her, she sets out to bring him down. Through her multiple personae Lady Gaga goes on the rampage in the name of pop. Her idiosyncrasies are sculptured by musical innovation, and inextricably tied to her production is a quest for originality and surprise. In ‘Judas’ there is a sense that pioneering production techniques layer and color-wash the storyline. This is achieved by the meticulous treatment of sounds and effects within a highly active audio image. Indeed, Lady Gaga’s brand of electropop represents a maze of sonic details that define her performance. Destined for the dance floor, her recordings simulate the ambience of a large space: the space of a crowded venue. Much of this is due to sonic density in the production. Textural layering, multi-timbral effects, contrasting dynamics, timbres, and a strident groove distributed over various tracks, all contribute to a high saturation of vivid musical ideas.

To start with, I am keen to probe at the production qualities that profile the song’s aesthetics. Made meaningful through the act of listening and interpretation, pop songs emphasize pop personalities through the dramaturgy of audiovisual imagery. It is precisely this that Philip Auslander argues: ‘Part of the audience’s pleasure in pop music comes from experiencing and consuming the personae of favorite artists in all their many forms, and this experience is inseparable from the experience of the music itself’.² Feeling for an artist therefore involves empathy. Lucy Green’s theorization of delineation, now a standardized model for understanding denotation and connotation in music, is useful for gauging this.³ Preferences for a specific style, Green has maintained, are predicated upon on a sense of familiarity and empathy that relates to the complex process of listening competence and identification. So what makes the productions of Lady Gaga instantly recognizable? And how does her music work empathically?

Much of pop’s appeal is down to the production of a song. One’s first impression of ‘Judas’ verifies this. When experiencing the song for the first time it is clear that a dazzling array of technologies are invested in the recording process. The way Lady Gaga’s voice is produced and treated in the mix is of particular musicological interest. All the conditions for featuring her persona depend on the communicative relationship she has through her voice with her fans/listeners. On this matter, I would suggest that a central part of her vocal aesthetic is linked to the dimensions and technological manipulation of her sonic space. By this I am referring to the specific arrangement of tracks and sound processing, as much as the regulation of dynamics, texture, timbre, and the control of reverb and echo. Contingent on engineering and production, Lady Gaga’s songs signify an illusion of physicality, not least through the technical manipulation of the voice.⁴ Consequently, the qualities of vocal recording are integral to patterns of reception. In an earlier study I argued that the recorded voice constitutes the most personal arena for pleasure because of ‘the sonic qualities of the body’ that implicate listeners in powerful forms of emotional response. One of the main strategies of the pop performer, after all, is to persuade the fan to believe that they have direct contact with the singer’s ‘real self’.⁵

Although the recording (or what I have referred to previously as the ‘pop score’) is fixed, it is likely to be perceived differently on every hearing.⁶ In the production of ‘Judas’ there is a sense that musical ideas randomly fly in and out of the audio space. This is a direct result of the handling of audio technology. Regulating the spatial aspects of sound in the engineering process is a crucial part of the overall aesthetics of a recording, and with ‘Judas’ it is the rapid turn around of events that makes the song appealing. In other words, sonic events (in the shape and form of, say, instruments, rhythmic loops, vocals) entering and exiting the mix at different rates heighten the musical interest. The organization and manipulation of musical ideas relates directly to the technical design of the audio space. All in all, the multitude of creative possibilities that occur in a Lady Gaga recording has to do with control and shaping the audio image. And it is the aesthetic choices the producer(s) come up with that make a Gaga track what it is.

MONSTROUS BY REPRODUCTION

Lady Gaga’s soundworld is discernible in every second of ‘Judas’.⁷ Written and produced by Lady Gaga and RedOne (a prolific Moroccan-Swedish producer and songwriter),⁸ this song, lasting just over four minutes, consists of numerous stylistic features set against an inexorable rock beat. The song is similar to earlier tracks produced by Lady Gaga and RedOne: ‘LoveGame’, ‘Bad Romance’, ‘Alejandro’, and ‘Poker Face’. Soaring vocals, programmed beats, cathedral-like synthesizers, and a pounding bass line reinforce the song’s anthemic feel. With a swirling instrumental eight-bar introduction and a contrasting staccato passage, consisting of intervallic fifths on the line Judas- Jud-a-a. Judas-Jud-a-a, Lady Gaga hurls herself into the first verse grounded by the C Aeolian root chord, C minor. Close inspection reveals that the effect of textural layering is compositionally decisive: one colossal textural block of sound ushers in the next, forming a glittering sonic mosaic. Already in the first 32 seconds of the track (16 bars) four textural changes occur:

1.a simple melodic line with synthesizer underlay and strident pitch shifts in lower register, evoking a calm, tranquil yet foreboding mood (8 bars [15”]);

2.a wall of a capella multi-vocals, chorused with a high dose of effects (4 bars [8”]);

3.bass synthesizer timbres positioned to the fore of the mix, imitating the octave motif from the previous section (4 bars [5”]); and,

4.a block of vocals in unison with the previous motif expand the timbral spectrum and pitch register (4 bars [5”]).

These textural blocks help regulate the tension levels in the music’s dramaturgy. One vivid example occurs in the space opened by the second textural change (see preceding list), where the vocals, without warning, are left raw and exposed. Cleverly, the engineering and textural coloration of such an a cappella gesture contributes to the unfolding of the song’s narrative. Textural control thus constitutes a major part of the musical composition, and is a direct outcome of the production techniques.

Lady Gaga is part of the generation of super songwriter-producers who deliver large-scale productions, and ‘Judas’ is bound up in an array of sonic gestures activated within a ‘perceived performance environment’ (PPE).⁹ Indeed the material conditions of Lady Gaga’s musical style—dance-pop with influences of house, techno, dubstep, disco, and Eurovision schmaltz— provides a vibrant sense of physical presence, albeit in many different variants. When it comes to creating a sense of space in the pop production, the performance environment is contingent on the technical regulation of sonic width and depth. William Moylan describes width as ‘defined by the furthest right and the furthest left sound (lateral localization)’ and depth ‘by the most distant sound source and the closest sound source’.¹⁰ Essentially, it is both of these aspects of sonic design that determine the spatial radius of the audio image.

The studio production of any pop track invariably involves a high degree of teamwork and influences by other artists. Lady Gaga has continuously emphasized her affiliations with pop artists, producers and fashion designers. In the case of ‘Judas’ she has acknowledged Bruce Springsteen’s ‘rock n’ roll/metal sound [sic]’ despite the dance track’s ‘hardcore upbeat’.¹¹ The influence of other artists abounds in all her songs: Madonna, Freddie Mercury, Whitney Houston, Iron Maiden, Kiss, Queen, TLC, Pat Benatar, and En Vogue. Perhaps of relevance here is the idea of recycling, and the inextricable bonds that exist between a constructed subjectivity and music production. If autonomy is a crucial aspect in the selling power of an artist, Lady Gaga’s identity is marketed through the channels of state-of-the-art music technology. Notably, the glossy production of ‘Judas’ is mirrored in other hits, such as ‘Bad Romance’, ‘Poker Face’, and ‘LoveGame’. Lady Gaga’s inclination towards highly processed tracks discloses her role as producer, and, as I read it, this is one of her trump cards as she re-negotiates the female’s presence in the pop industry.¹²

As I am suggesting, countless details characterize Lady Gaga’s musical expression, with her tracks slotting into an audio space that is hyperbolic: exaggerated melodic hooks, monstrous bass lines, infectious rhythmic riffs, lavish arrangements, and catchy chord progressions. In compositional terms, embellishments make a song’s arrangement effervescent, with a barrage of effects designed to titillate and energize the listener. One might describe the effect of this as sonic bombardment, emanating from the rapid stacking up of ideas that define Gaga’s signature. Take the juxtapositioning of her voice (in all its guises) in the recording: through the details of processing, the voice distils a vibrant sonic image that is captivating. Certainly, vocal multidimensionality is rendered possible by digital technology, a prime signifier of production that is contingent on processes, such as pitch shifting, compression, echo and reverb, flanging, and panning.

Staging the voice is a major part of the pop production, and in all her songs, Lady Gaga’s subjectivity is defined by her unique approach to singing. This is integral to communicating with her fans. As Simon Zagorski- Thomas claims, the spatial function of produced events is closely associated with the ways in which audiences perceive a performer.¹³

Manifested in the idiosyncrasies of compositional production, Lady Gaga’s subjectivity is the sum total of creative thinking and collaborative work. RedOne’s credits in ‘Judas’ consist of songwriting, producing, vocal editing, vocal arranging, audio engineering, instrumentation, programming, recording and even backing vocals. In an interview from 2008 with DJ Ron Slomowicz L...