I have a guilty pleasure playlist on an old Spotify account that I no longer use. The playlist has a perfect alibi of a title: one that makes very little sense and is designed to bore the reader into disinterest. A similar technique was used for the United Kingdom’s nuclear programme, ‘Tube Alloys’. Masterfully anodyne.
Anyway, this playlist was called ‘Robert Willis noted engineer and architectural historian’, after the Victorian polymath. Its contents? Chart topping hits from the 90s and 00s. High camp was the mood. It contains an elite selection of high quality earworms, and there’s only eight of them.
One track on this album is part of Lady Gaga’s debut, the massive hit song Poker Face. Revisiting the track after nearly 15 years post release, I had enough historical distance to judge the merits of the piece. This is a problem with most popular culture. When it’s readily available, it’s so ubiquitous that you are blind to it. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s any good or not.
It’s hard to overestimate just how big Lady Gaga’s first album, The Fame, was.1 We now have enough historical distance to understand the album in context, to see it as a part of bigger historical events and shaped by them.
The Fame was released on the 19th of August, 2008. One big historical event should be screaming out to readers from that fact alone: the financial crisis. The financial crisis was a very complex event, with many factors that led up to it. It has proven to be a weirdly cinema-friendly event, with a handful of big movies about what was a fundamentally ‘desk based’ problem. Anyway, the take-away for most lay people like myself is that vast tracts of finance in the west was completely overvalued, re-packaged and re-sold to the point of total obscurity, and the system eventually caught up.
Emotionally, the financial crisis was provocative. An elite cadre of bankers had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—and many of their own eyes—and everyone else took the hit. The consequences were catastrophic for many. The budgets of whole nations, such as Greece, were laid to waste. Vanishingly few bankers were actually tracked down and prosecuted for their practices, which amounted to very elaborate scams. The contrast between those that got off scott free and those who had their savings or jobs eliminated was stark. Envy, rage and confusion would be natural reactions to such a situation.
Enter The Fame. The Fame is all about money. It’s all about being rich, specifically: it’s about being obscenely rich, disgustingly rich. More precisely, though, the album is about wanting that richness. It’s about the idea of wealth more than the reality of it.
Take one track from The Fame, the track Beautiful, Dirty, Rich. If you read the lyrics of this song literally, they make very little sense. The chorus and verses contradict one another. The song begins with its rebus, which implies that the speaker is, well, beautiful and dirty rich. Lady Gaga whispers this into the microphone with sexed-up vibrato-whisper:
Dirty, dirty, rich, dirty, dirty, rich, beautiful
Beautiful and dirty, dirty, rich, rich, dirty
But in a few seconds, the track flips on its head in a more melodic passage which states:
We got a red light
Pornographic dance fight
Systematic, honey
But we got no money
Our hair is perfect
While were all getting shit wrecked
It's automatic, honey
But we got no money
What gives? Is Gaga supposed to be dirty rich or immaculate impecunious? The way I read this track is not that Gaga was too lazy to make the song make sense, or that it’s two different speakers. Instead, I read that the ‘beautiful and dirty rich’ refrain as an aspiration, not a reality. A similar reading would be that the speaker was formerly rich, but their lifestyle has burned through the cash. Either way, the song becomes quite interesting with this tension in place. It makes sense of Freudian bits such as:
Daddy, I'm so sorry, I'm so s-s-sorry, yeah
We just like to party, like to p-p-party, yeah
The speaker of this poem has shame towards the father figure, a deep sense of failure, yet they like to p-p-party, yeah. The production helps this unnerving euphoria-shame along, with its 90s breakbeat, chromatic interludes and occasional, joyous, chords. Society does not like vulgar wealth. Simultaneously, it craves wealth.
In Beautiful, Dirty, Rich, Gaga speaks for the listener who is almost certainly not rich, but who daydreams about wealth because it is human nature. In 2007-8, they daydreamed about wealth while they watched it collapse, dumbfounded. After a financial crisis, there’s a sharp edge to daydreaming about wealth, because deep privations are just around the corner. Indeed, one is a lot more likely to lust after money when the news is constantly talking about money. Beautiful, Dirty, Rich might not be a description of the financial crisis, but it’s still an oddly poignant expression of the times.
Gaga plays with an intimate connection between money, deception, and, of course, sex, throughout The Fame. Most notably, in Poker Face, we have:
I won't tell you that I love you, kiss or hug you
'Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying, I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunnin'
Just like a chick in the casino
Take your bank before I pay you out
I promise this, promise this
Check this hand 'cause I'm marvelous
The financial crisis was all broken promises. The banks took money and secured it with ‘subprime mortgages’, which were basically worthless, a chocolate teapot of finance. I am not saying that Gaga is really talking about subprime mortgages here. She’s talking more broadly about deception and using one’s ‘poker face’ to get advantage. People might vulgarly call this ‘gold digging’, but that’s not quite true. The speaker of this song “won’t tell you that I love you, kiss or hug you”—they’ll allow you to delude yourself that’s about to happen!
The cynicism of the piece is perfect. Gaga selects the “chick in the casino” as her simile for her scheme because she knows the house always wins (unless it is managed by Donald Trump). You, the listener, won’t win. The listener is shut out of Gaga’s Poker Face, just as the massive black sunglasses (and literal smokescreen) on the album cover shut us out. In Paparazzi, the themes are arguably more obvious still. It’s a song about literally chasing fame and wealth in the form of a famous, wealthy “boy”.
The track Money Honey is, interestingly, a lot clearer when it’s written on the page:
When you give me k-kisses (that's money, honey)
When I'm your lover and your mistress (that's money, honey)
When you touch me, it's so delicious (that's money, honey)
Baby, when you tear me to pieces (that's money, honey)
It’s all money, honey. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bacchus gives king Midas the gift that he craved: the ability to turn everything he touches into solid gold. This was obviously a curse, because you can’t eat money. Gaga has the Midas touch in reverse: the ability to reveal that everything was always in fact money, including love and sex.
So, many of The Fame’s tracks are riffing around the theme of money, of being shut out, of being deceived. The album, in my opinion, is therefore riffing around the 2007-2008 financial crisis in an emotionally precise and interesting way. What’s perhaps more interesting still is the fact that this was Gaga’s debut. She was not yet a superstar. The lyrics of these tracks, from someone who had already definitely ‘made it’ would come across as deeply patronising, gloating even. But Gaga wasn’t quite there yet—though she may have had an inkling and, of course a desire, for great success. She had been picked up by a big producer, and The Fame was indeed published by a big label, but not all such ventures are successful.
Gaga beat the house. She won. But the tracks she won with were all about aspiration and yearning for vulgar riches, not actually having vulgar riches. She got there very soon after, and that slightly weird fact makes The Fame all the more interesting to me. It’s a kind of life-as-performance art, a self fulfilling prophesy, even an incantation.
Bernard Williams wrote about 'proleptic reactions', especially the reaction of blame. Suppose James is a bit of an arsehole and, by his own lights, he has no reason to be kind and very many reasons not to do it: it's time-consuming and annoying and can be costly. But he knows that if he is a very obvious arsehole, people will blame him and dislike him. The expectation of blame from others, and the fear of corresponding shame and isolation, *gives* James a reason to be kind (at least to some degree some of the time) that he doesn't get from his own individual motivations.
What Williams noted was that there is a weird kind of circularity going on here. You can only blame someone if they had reasons to act otherwise. But in this case, James only has any reason to be kind *because* of the risk of blame; he has no other, 'internal' reasons to be kind, like 'it's a nice thing to do' or 'I want to be a kind person'. If you believe in a God or Kantian categorical imperative, you might want to say that James has abstract, 'objective', moral reasons to be kind. But if we don't believe in such things, if we can only rely on naturalistic and concrete reasons, then the only reasons we have to blame James are themselves the result of the social practice of blame. When we blame someone like James, it's circular in an important way; a kind of prolepsis.
The hope, in the long term, is that James will internalise the reactions of others in a positive and productive way, so that he comes to feel an 'internal' reason to be kind to others, not just an expectation of social censure. In that case, if James falls short, we can blame him non-proleptically: the reasons that ground the blame are not social and circular but dependent on James' own individua; values. But equally, Freud would tell us, James could come to internalise blame and shame in harmful and negative ways.
Williams' point was just that there is a certain 'obscurity' to our practices of blame, and that the productiveness and reasonableness of blame depends a lot more on these complicated and circular psychological processes than it does on abstract moral theory. In his most Nietzschean moments, Williams actually suggested that people feel the need for abstract moral theory (whether Christian or Kantian or utilitarian) precisely because they want to escape the contingent, circular, psychoanalytical obscurities related to our actual ethical reactions, ground them in something more solid and dependable, even if that solidity is an illusion.
Anyway. On your analysis of The Fame, the album is itself a kind of proleptic response. The album makes sense only if Lady Gaga achieves a level of fame and wealth and success, but her fame and wealth and success resulted from the album. I think that, like proleptic blame, proleptic fame has a problem relating to internalisation. If prolepsis is successful (and in Lady Gaga's case it was, although untold dozens of mid-2000s bling rappers can attest that this is not always the case), then the newly-famous celebrity will have to now act authentically in a manner that she was previously just apeing. For some people, it might be that the 'performance' of fame was so successful that they are fully adapted for their new role of actually being famous. But for many, there's a gap between the play-acting of fame and the actual experience of it, and it can cause a certain level of toxic conspicuous consumption and various other phenomena Freud would have a field day with. When proleptic fame is internalised, it can be productive, or it can be dangerous, just as with proleptic blame. (It's up to you whether you think Gaga's stunts in the post-The Fame years were more 'authentic protest' or more 'struggling to combine her over-the-top play-acting of fame with the real deal'.)
And, separately, there is also a problem with our deep desire for something more solid. Even though almost all of us know that it's not true, some part of the mind *wants* to believe that wealth and fame aren't just down to contingent, circular, unpredictable luck. A lot of wealth influencer ideology comes down to this. You're right that Gaga's work in particular has a deep ironic vein running through it. But it's hardly impossible to miss it, and take it as a pure celebration. That's the risk posed here too.