More symbols: Camille Paglia on Lada Gaga!

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”. Most of her worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin, with their huge personalities and deep wells of passion.

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

(this is just the start of a longer article that is behind a firewall)

This sounds like some of the best Paglia in a while. Paglia was fantastic in her book “Sexual Personae”, and wrote outstanding columns online in the earliest days of the Internet. And then, she faded. Here we have Paglia’s sharp eye back online, but does Paglia understand modernity – by which I mean post-2008? The libertarian Paglia infamously supported Obambus. In my read, Paglia simply failed to understand either the candidate or the context. Or perhaps Paglia was just as tired of the world as she seems to perceive is symbolized by Gaga. Maybe that’s the real message here, Camille, should you happen to read this. Gaga is everything you say she is, and proud of it, and she is you, too, the current you, the current me, the current us, and that’s the sad truth of the matter.

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ps – aadvard. apologies for many previous misspellings.