I’ve been listening to some new music recently, bought some Preston Reed, and while I was there, I remembered that someone had suggested a dance/pop artist named “Lady GaGa.” Dispite my initial reluctance to purchase music from anyone with such a silly name — I recalled that I shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover (and that I already owned music from a group going by “Jamiroquai”). In the long run, I’m glad I bought the CD, because if I didn’t, I never would have had opportunity to rant about the vapidity of her lyrics, even if her music is catchy.
Speaking frankly, this woman has some serious issues. Quoting from her song “Fashion”[1], the lead track on her latest album:
I am, I’m too fabulous.
I’m so fierce that it’s nuts.
I live, to be model thin.
Dress me, I’m your mannequin.
and from the same song:
I need, some new stilettos
Can’t walk, down the street in those
You are, who you wear it’s true
A girl’s just as hot as the shoes she choose
Now, I can appreciate an interest in fashion, I may not be fully capable of understanding it, but I can appreciate it. If you like fashion and enjoy it healthily, fine, but I cannot comprehend how any sane person could possibly think what these lyrics assert.
Is this what our society has become? A cesspool of vapidity and consumerism? Where the best dressed rule and the rest are treated as have-nots with no societal rights? We wonder sometimes why scientists and academics and thinkers and really smart people get shoved to the wayside for the likes of Tyra Banks and daytime talkshow hosts. Why we undervalue science and knowledge — why we demonize being smart. I roughly say — this is why.
If you can’t tell, I’m flabbergasted. This woman has gasted my flabber. Perhaps I am somehow broken, blinded that I cannot see things as normal people, who look at one’s shoes to determine relative attractiveness. Perhaps I’m a product of a bygone era where what is between one’s ears determines the quality of a human being, and not the straps of dead-animal hide attached loosely to one’s feet. Perhaps I’m simply a man out of place — in my existence, I’ve always valued one’s capability for rational, sober thought more than the ‘cuteness’ of one’s accessory. This obsession with merchandise — this is what we proffer as our legacy, to our children and there’s. A culture who at one time brought us Beethoven and Bach now hands us Greed and Consumerism, packaged about repetitive, thumping, tribal beats-of-drums.
No matter how catchy her rhythms, I will forever be turned off by this vapidity, this shallow view. She encourages consumerism as if it were virtue, I call it vice. I can only hope there is a silent majority who agrees.
[1] Disco Heaven, Lady Gaga, Track 1