Bible CAMP: MAYHEM Requiem

[bxr 1,770]

45 minutes ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

“This is where dictatorship gets flipped- at the peak of one’s power, give it back to the public”

“Gaga’s not a fascist, but if that’s what it takes to free you, then so be it” 

Using the tools of the fascists for antifascist purposes, inverting the aesthetic, the propaganda, the hypnotic inundation…brilliantly said. Did you write this, btw?

Danke schön! Indeed, I hadn‘t revisited in a stretch of awhile, but having just watched “Anatomy of Change” ( 🖤 Zombie Boy Genest) to refresh the source reference, I realized in the DJWS/Mugler remix for the fashion film that launched the era, they omit any reference to the female empowerment / womanhood identity … which is wilde in immediate retrospect …

Spoiler

 

… that the “Anatomy of Change“ is definitively rooted in a sartorial menswear campaign, and shifts to a female empowerment anthem upon “Scheiße”‘s album-adjacent release within the music industry … is something else … not sure what it means specifically, but the narrative layers present in proximity … presence and absence and emergence and establishment … and alchemy … and androgynous harmony? just musing …

 

Edited Thursday at 03:12 PM by bxr

[gagacabana 5,538]

17 hours ago, bxr said:

the little underground-pop-civilization-syncretic-salon-bible-CAMP-that-could went full-stop blueprint symphonic make it real manifesto now mode … @Apec @gagacabana @Ladle Ghoulash our lil‘ tetramorph force tribe 

How the four of us look like following gaga's yellow (in a purple sky) brick road 

[bxr 1,770]

7 hours ago, gagacabana said:

How the four of us look like following gaga's yellow (in a purple sky) brick road 

Glitter and grease on down the road … 

 

[gagacabana 5,538]

4 minutes ago, bxr said:

Glitter and grease on down the road … 

 

YAAAAS my girlfriend just bought the wiz's vinyl the other day, stunningly beautiful film! oh dear sister bxr, how the people (me) long for your letterboxd  

[Ladle Ghoulash 45,987]

15 minutes ago, gagacabana said:

YAAAAS my girlfriend just bought the wiz's vinyl the other day, stunningly beautiful film! oh dear sister bxr, how the people (me) long for your letterboxd  

The way Home from The Wiz may be one of the greatest songs of all time…

 

[bxr 1,770]

On 5/20/2026 at 11:08 AM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

The feminist read of the BR vid as decentering men from positions of power as a spiritual reflection of the rejection of patriarchy in religion as a method of self and collective liberation is very interesting. Reminds me a bit of an interpretation I read of Alejandro and it’s MV years back which I found compelling: the three men in the song are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which I think does explain a lot of seemingly unconventional use of religious iconography in the video and live performances. The song, then, becomes less about dismissing a series of former lovers, but rather, disavowing received patriarchal notions of religion as made manifest through “traditional” interpretations and liturgical staging of Christian myth and iconography (evocative of BJ + AF’s “concrete poetry to feed my mind, old symbolism was left behind” as part of Gaga’s origin story and discovery of “Black Jesus” as a rebellious, queer, unconventional messianic icon). It also contextualizes one of the videos most iconic and controversial moments in the swallowing of the rosary beads: it becomes a theatrical depiction of consuming, digesting, and breaking down received symbology to arrive at its essential meaning, which is the only point at which it can be truly appropriated and put into practice.

Extending the ethos of that reading beyond BR’s personal rebellion into collective rebellion actually makes the bond between Gaga and her gay army in the Alejandro MV all the more potent- the dynamic becomes a shared, intersectional struggle between women and the gay (and broader LGBTQ+) community against hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchy as embodied through received notions of religion as the language and codification of real world power, which makes the use of the symbols not just hollow vectors for controversy, but rather a real world power struggle for the nexus at which icons and meaning become power, who gets to determine the meaning, and who has the power.

That power struggle and desire for liberatory myth making also serves as a great lead into the birthing of a new race born without prejudice in the BTW video: the point at which the deconstructed and digested rosary is metabolized into an evolved understanding that “loving thy neighbor,” for example, is not exclusive in practice and that it is, as Gaga asserts through her intersectional cross-section through the lyrics of BTW, not separate from “loving thyself.” This type of “vanity,” which would previously have been decried as heretical by the patriarchal church becomes sacred self-manifestation of the divine through self-expression and compassion (“letting your own light shine…[gives] others permission to do the same”).

By extension, the BTW MV feels like the nucleus of Gaga’s pop spiritual ethos: the articulation of how creation, the divine feminine, and a sort of metaphysical queerness through the rejection of received hierarchies and roles are essential and intrinsic parts of all life which are made manifest, not just in the process of being physically born, but extend into the psychic realm of self-determination, self-expression, and identity (which, in this context, feels like the fulfillment of the spiritual process begun through the desecration of the false altar of patriarchy in the BR video) and a process which we are not merely objects of, but participant subjects articulating and shaping the world through self-chosen roles in a religious mythic symbology of their own creation/reappropriation.

The way in which the video also decanters the othering binary of good/evil, sacred/profane etc. which is so often the origin of the scapegoating of out groups by those in power (in this case: the hegemonic masculine apex) through Gaga accepting and embodying the roles of Mother/Messiah, Goddess/Devil, creation/destruction, paves the way for the non-dualism completed by the synthesis of EtherealGa and the Mistress in TAOPC. 

In terms of REQUIEM; your read of BR also reminded me of how I felt the show was almost a spiritual retelling of her career: opening with Disease feeling like a black mass intuitively reaching for the sacred, which I think you could argue she was doing through her devotion to the grotesque, depraved, and profane during TFM, through finding a burgeoning spiritual center in the chaos beginning in Abracadabra, which builds out into simultaneously feeling like she’s sitting in the eye of the storm (à la SOAM) and being able to touch the “beast inside” while still claiming peace in DWAS, basking in the glory of the beautiful religion she forged in the midst of the rubble of the antique cathedral she destroyed. Her gift for fusing liturgical symbology and meta dramaturgy is honestly unrivaled.

All of this … just, clean. 

How you explore the relational identities between the artist‘s performance / representation and the audience really underscores this sense of iconographic significance as a sort of living discourse (or “terrain of struggle” within cultural / media studies) and fundamental signifier within the realm of cultural identity … how we recognize, receive, approach, engage, express, embody, adopt/resist and / or propagate meaning generated from the raw material of cultural works (particularly media narratives, archetypes, perpetuated norms, normative patterns / practices, and character identity tropes) … reminds me of Stuart Hall‘s work with the language, ideology, and fixed meaning power dynamic as a social institution of its own … by way of discourse as inherently dynamic, but once a discursive formation or framework is locked within a fixed meaning (usually one of domination / subjugation yielding to a ruling class or dominant authority) it functions as an oppressive institution … if only because this structure denies the audience‘s agency to adapt its significance or identity claim in/on the world it dictates … here, the performance and the performing artist inhabit the role of “image” (discourse) 

Spoiler

And I’d say the image has a whole range of potential meanings. But the meaning that you as a spectator take, depends on that engagement – psychic, imaginary engagement – through the look with an investment in the image or involvement in what the image is saying or doing. So then, whereas we have a notion in the way in which we talk about images that images flood us and barrage us with meanings; as if we can stand outside of them and allow them to be there. The fact is that, if we are concerned about the proliferation of images in our culture, it is because they constantly construct us, through our fantasy relationship to the image, in a way which implicates us in the meaning. And that is what is, in a sense, bothering us. We’re not bothered because we are barraged by something which means nothing to us. We are bothered precisely by the fact that we are caught. We do have an investment, in the meaning which is being taken from it.

[M]eaning depends on a certain kind of fixing. On the other hand, meaning can never be finally fixed. So what we're looking at is a practice, which is always going to be subverted; and, you know, the purpose of power, when it intervenes in language, is precisely to absolutely fix. That is what we used to call "ideology" tries to do. It tries to say, "I can tell you what the meeting … today means. That is what it means; it doesn't mean anything else. It's not going to change. Tomorrow, it's going to mean the same thing. It aims to fix the one true meaning and the only hope you have about power in representations is that it's not going to be true and that tomorrow it is, in some way, going to make a slightly different sense of it, meaning is going to come out of the fixing and begin to loosen and fray. And therefore it's not a sort of post-modern playfulness which insists on the relative openness of the meaning. It is absolutely central to a historical notion that meaning can be changed. It can only be changed if it cannot finally be fixed, because you bet your life that the attempt to fix it is why power intervenes in representation at all.

That is what they are trying to do. They want, as it were, a relationship between the image and a powerful definition of it to become naturalized so that that is the only meaning it can possibly carry. Whenever you see that, you will think that whenever you see that, you will think that whenever you see those people, you will assume that they have those characteristics. Whenever you see that event, you will assume it has that political consequence. That's what ideology tries to do, that's what power in signification is intended to do: to close language, to close meaning, to stop the flow.

This excerpt from your reflection though, in particular: Extending the ethos of that reading beyond BR’s personal rebellion into collective rebellion actually makes the bond between Gaga and her gay army in the Alejandro MV all the more potent- the dynamic becomes a shared, intersectional struggle between women and the gay (and broader LGBTQ+) community against hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchy as embodied through received notions of religion as the language and codification of real world power, which makes the use of the symbols not just hollow vectors for controversy, but rather a real world power struggle for the nexus at which icons and meaning become power, who gets to determine the meaning, and who has the power … reminded me so much of how John “the authority of celebrities derives from their ability, through the force of their personality, to translate political ideology into the person of themselves as legitimate rulers” Fiske described the information / entertainment dichotomy in relation to gender stratification: 

The structural difference, for instance, between information and entertainment television (roughly, between fact and fiction) is a residue of modernity that contains the hierarchical evaluation that the former is superior to the latter. This structured difference continues into the domains of gender and class by associating the former with masculinity and higher position, and the latter with femininity and lower social formation.

That the discursive formations in reference are conventional “entertainment products“ sort of amplifies that central tension at the nexus … and again it echoes this very real world power struggle in how authority over meaning is established and edified within contemporary reality … namely, how marginalized communities claim authority over narrative identity in a corporate media culture / market industrial society … but/and also the subversion of entertainers who establish a relationship rooted in reciprocal agency of narrative integrity with their audience community (What is our story? How do we protect the integrity of this plot in its own progression?)

On 5/20/2026 at 11:08 AM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

That power struggle and desire for liberatory myth making also serves as a great lead into the birthing of a new race born without prejudice in the BTW video: the point at which the deconstructed and digested rosary is metabolized into an evolved understanding that “loving thy neighbor,” for example, is not exclusive in practice and that it is, as Gaga asserts through her intersectional cross-section through the lyrics of BTW, not separate from “loving thyself.” This type of “vanity,” which would previously have been decried as heretical by the patriarchal church becomes sacred self-manifestation of the divine through self-expression and compassion (“letting your own light shine…[gives] others permission to do the same”).

This just felt … “So Happy I Could Die”-coded … for some reason … something about the “vanity allowed” … in larger context of the soniconceptual significance … and then, in immediate retrospect, pivot and pair that energy with “I‘ll be myself ‘til they … close the coffin—so that you can all be yourselves” #ARTPOP

Denouement into intermission, back to the dossier delve, more in the ‘morrow … ‘til next rhyme!

 

There‘s so much going on in these reflections … they truly deserve a roundtable of their own

Edited yesterday at 05:39 AM by bxr

[Ladle Ghoulash 45,987]

5 hours ago, bxr said:

therefore it's not a sort of post-modern playfulness which insists on the relative openness of the meaning. It is absolutely central to a historical notion that meaning can be changed. It can only be changed if it cannot finally be fixed, because you bet your life that the attempt to fix it is why power intervenes in representation at all.

So many great quotes and observations in your reply, but this one really stuck out to me because I had never seen this idea so cleanly articulated. So much of what gets arbitrarily labeled as “postmodernity” ends up just being the allowance of viewpoints and interpretations outside of what is the “accepted narrative” or “prescribed interpretations” at any given moment and the idea of postmodernity in that sense, sequentially, has always been laughable to me: the idea that, up until a certain point, history was stable, static, universally “understood”/agreed upon, until the modern era and its flights of intellectual fancy allowed for the fabrication of false or highly abstracted interpretations of previously shared (ie “real”) conceptions of history, culture, politics, and meaning. Not so much a Gaga specific response here as a sense of relief that I wasn’t alone in that reaction.

I also really appreciate the framework of people being “bothered” by iconography and mass symbolism not because it is meaningless, but precisely because it is meaningful in a way that feels as though we have no agency over, which only reinforces the ways in which Gaga (and many others) iconic iconoclasm is so potent: it serves to destabilize enforced or dictated meaning as a way of reopening “the flow,” allowing for collective discourse, conversation, and new understanding to emerge.
 

Reminds me of the quote Gaga used in promoting the Judas video: “If they weren’t who you were told they were, would you still believe?” That line of questioning is basically the center of Gaga’s pop cultural disruption: what if the meanings you’ve received aren’t true/fixed/stable…what then? How do you handle them?  Independent of reinforced meaning, what do these symbols mean *to you*? And from there, who do you become? And through our conversations about them, who do *we* become?

Thinking about it now, the recentering of symbols and narratives of power actually goes back to The Fame in the idea that anyone can choose to be famous. In the vein of Hall, there’s something powerful in reclaiming the association that likely “bothered” so many (what makes such and such celebrity so special and important in a way that I’m not) and redirects that received disempowerment into a form of agentic empowerment: what if I had the potential to be or the view myself as that special, influential etc? What’s more, echoing Fiske’s theory of entertainment as a vessel for political leadership and ideology, Gaga also encourages her audience to reclaim the power of the “inner sense of fame” not in a vain or vacuous way (which would mirror the shallow vapidity of much of tabloid celebrity culture at the time), but rather in a way that inverts it: what your inner sense of fame empowers is your individual agency, your ability to articulate your beliefs, pursue your passions, critically analyze the world…your inner fame is about who you are and living up to the greatest potential of who could be, not molding yourself into what the language of power would encourage you to become.

Building off Fiske’s assertion about celebrities and political ideology, when paired with Hall’s discussion of discursive meaning through symbolic renegotiation, feels especially relevant to the conversations we’ve been having around Alejandro + Scheiße and Gaga’s re-appropriation of fascist iconography and mass propaganda as a means of inverting their intention and cultural/political weight: destabilizing the tools, aesthetics, and modes of oppression as a way of demonstrating to those who have historically wielded them that their power is not fixed and that those they sought to control have the power and volition of their own wills.

Not necessarily adding anything so much as appreciating the value of your reflections and the sources you’ve shared. Bible camp is in session, henny!

 

Edited yesterday at 10:53 AM by Ladle Ghoulash