Bible CAMP: MAYHEM Requiem

[bxr 1,794]

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 5,613]

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 1,794]

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 5,613]

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 46,422]

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 1,794]

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 Friday at 05:39 AM by bxr

[Ladle Ghoulash 46,422]

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 Friday at 10:53 AM by Ladle Ghoulash

[Apec 198]

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

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.
 

[..]
 

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.

I need to answer here too... I have always found BJ+AF to be such an incredibly fascinating song (a bonus track even!) because it's supposedly about her background and coming-of-age yet centers on not only worldly but spiritual change the whole way through, the line that embodies the entire song for me has always been the one you quoted, “concrete poetry to feed my mind, old symbolism was left behind", embedded in a song in which she indeed centers a notion many Westerners still find too radical: That Jesus, geographically, would never be white, but darker in skin tone merely JUST CANNOT BE according to so many because of dogma. He needs to look like "us" to be acceptable. 

This hints at much deeper developments for her younger self: that the symbolic nature of this concept meant that all her received religious notions were on shaky foundations and while she yearned for truth and freedom, her mind needed community and liturgy, but in thinking for herself she rejected dogma and the discovery of such free ecstasy AND secular freedom (as it were) must've meant a lot to a young person trying to rhyme seeming contradictions (belief, ecstasy and liturgy making you feel more connected to humanity as well as divinity while organized religion has and still spreads misogyny, homophobia and further "others", marginalizes/scapegoats and has incredibly painful skeletons in its closet that came out even more as she grew up)... Seeing that she could integrate both profane openness of thought/sheer kindness and strenghten religious texts and ecstasy about loving, grace and humanity's inability to "throw the first stone" must've been the second layer to this song and why she chose "Black Jesus" to represent a song about her growing up and thus also about expanding her mind.

Again the way you called BR a personal stepping stone in her growing ethos and strength for Alejandro's collective, intersectional rebellion makes her bond with the LGBTQ+ community and the gay men in the video especially more potent, in the struggle as you said "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." Couldn't have said that more poignantly, if I felt better in general or not. 

The incredible feat to turn said tools of oppression in either ways of self-expression and identity, using tools of subjugation and either defang them or use them to show survival or even dominance in a MV (I talked more at length about my views in a previous post) was masterful. But that rosary was indeed the key to understanding nearly all that came next: I've always seen it as HER portal, as it were, to her ever-evolving thinking. You put it beautifully, that the deconstruction and digesting of said rosary signals her already blossoming but finally integrated views: "loving thy neighbor" isn't an exclusionary idea ever and is even inextricably bound to "loving thyself". As you put so eloquently: "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”). Non-dualism shows up more and more in her work, a fascinating tightrope.

Requiem was indeed a journey through her career and life - at least that is what is what I feel when I watch and listen, and raw feelings are incredibly important journeying through the rubble, the light, and the glory. She can finally balance the beast inside while feeling peace, looking at what she forged herself (a veritable religion, as you said). In the beginning she holds her black mass, fights with both light and dark, first clinging to the profane until Abra starts showing some notes of ecstasy or at least spiritual life, GoE gave more light AND dark, until seeds were planted that grew and transformed this transcendent concert into one of the biggest mergers of secular and spiritual worship of art I've ever seen, a struggle but worship from Gaga nonetheless. She not only achieved inner peace, she achieved the best of both worlds and stopped fighting her non-dualistic roles, she became whole again and seemed to feel the warmth of the opera-house-turned-cathedral that she destroyed in her mind. I cannot stop watching, this is an incredible piece of art. 

I want to analyze changes (those bending away from spirituality and why/in what ways, which go towards it, what's merging) through several mythological lenses. Abra, Killah, ZB, LoveDrug, VIY, The Beast, BoG, DWAS and more  I'll try picking the ones I have most to say about. I still need to match the specific gospels/elements depicted before whichever songs they appeared and if they hold specific meanings when comparing them. I'll try not to write a double essay-length re: Mayhem!GoE symbolism vs. Mayhem Requiem! mythological theories and I'll answer everyone's replies! Tysm 

I'm a bit slower than normal, but I'm not forgetting anything. Thank you for the stimulating convos! 

EDIT: Complete and utter appreciation for inserting Fiske and this insight: "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." Can't agree more: she's been encouraging her fans to be the best versions of themselves, the most true, encouraging them to follow their personal passions since the very beginning.

Edited Saturday at 03:01 PM by Apec

[bxr 1,794]

On 5/22/2026 at 6:36 AM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

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.

When I was transcribing the Hall commentary, for some reason, that passage in particular just felt somehow intrinsically your hermeneutic frequency—I think, as I was transcribing, my mind read it in Gaga‘s “Notes on…” Met Camp cadence—but/and/so … vibes and tribes, how the tempos they do align

How you explore the postmodern paradox within that capacity shed light on this sort of range / scale / spectrum of postmodernity as a “discourse” (or, beyond the word / phrase / concept itself, postmodern(ity), as a discursive formation roots its function in its cultural identity and social significance … almost, how this word / phrase / concept actively engages or presents itself in culture and society … how it emerges in expression and embodiment (primarily, through how its power is defined / prescribed by the dominant or ruling class … its hegemonic presence, possibly)) … where on the one hand, there is the Warhol postmodern ideology (the former, almost nihilist—“if anything can/does mean everything, and everything means anything, then everything means nothing, and nothing means anything, etc.”) and on the other, the Stuart Hall postmodern ideology, which you articulate with astute lucidity, that operates from postmodernity‘s necessary nascency—not that it locks the fixture of historical consciousness in a mausoleum of moral levelling, but rather that this postmodern dynamic is definitively catalytic in its necessary transformation. Oh, the postmodern adaptive Reverse Warholian echoes lingering just beneath the surface …

I‘m also reminded of Howard Zinn‘s A People‘s History of the United States … as a kid it always registered as a complete cultural reset … but, that consensus speaks to your point, to where, that this decentering of the historical narrative felt like such a paradigmatic shift (in the 1990s no less), means that even then, within the mainstream (or Western realm of residual mainstream modernity), it was a novel concept to consider that history might have always been a record of formal flux and conditions in perpetual caprice

On 5/22/2026 at 6:36 AM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

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.

Okay, this … so much thus.

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.

This is crucial … this feels inherently, iconoclassic … or manifesto of the iconoclass … 

This was one of those scenarios where details and empirical nuance would surface throughout the commentary, but then by the conclusion, I stepped back and was like, maybe focus on one point that incorporates relevant nuance … so, this, admittedly still stream-of-consciousness ramshackle, a brush with thus …

How you unravel and interpret this interactive practice of iconographic agency … it sort of illustrates this iconoclass model and metamorphosis … the icon itself as a discursive form is essential in relation to identity and agency, and it definitively yokes the secular and sacred / culture x religion discursive communities … cultural icons and religious icons are foundational emblems within their respective realms, if not necessarily polarizing and paradoxical at times … iconography also materializes the abstraction of material and mystical, and so, for instance, when the icon is a living being—whose significance is predicated upon fluctuating interpretations / projections / ideological constructs—how does their expressed experience / articulation of presence / lived performance exalt, empower, liberate, suppress, marginalize, or destroy the authority or significance of their personal identity or very existence? For instance, when the artist icon consumes the rosary … does this signify iconoclastic desecration or an emergent iconoclassic transubstantiation adaptation, so to speak … and further … to revisit the effigy aspect … here, the artist or human icon, in sacrificing their cultural identity to the court of public opinion, lives the development and destruction of that external / material / cultural self that was introduced to the shown world from the dominant frame of industry fame … and so, to your point, The Fame is almost an electronic blueprint symphonic on that alchemical process … defining, dismantling, and rediscovering your identity through expressed / articulated presence or your own certain curation of the raw materials of contemporary culture … which is where the original (pre-corporate entity, LLC, Inc., etc.) Haus was crucial as a makeshift creative collective separate from the label (within a capacity) … there was that balance in expressed iconography …

I‘m reminded of … and maybe this is a sort of prototype of iconoclass anatomy or evolution … but again, how you work your way through the reflection, reminds me of interpretive communities, imagined communities, and structures of feeling (namely, [W]hen a formation appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures. Any of these examples requires detailed substantiation, but what is now in question, theoretically, is the hypothesis of a mode of social formation, explicit and recognizable in specific kinds of art, which is distinguishable from other social and semantic formations by its articulation of presence.) …

Spoiler

Interpretive Communities

In 1976, literary critic Stanley Fish used thus term to describe the unspoken (often unknown) alliances among readers who share similar strategies for determining what a text means. This theory of pragmatics, he says, “is the explanation for both the stability of interpretations among different readers (they belong to the same community) and for the regularity with which a single reader will employ different interpretive strategies and thus make different texts (he belongs to different communities).”

The notion of interpretive community insists upon the primacy of situated readers, and it can be thought of as a theory of creative reading. Fish says that a set of general assumptions on how one ought to interpret a text precedes every act of interpretation; thus, a reader always perceives a given text within an already in-place hermeneutical framework. One does not read the words on a page and then decide what those words mean because no temporal separation exists between acts of perception and interpretation. Instead, one’s community conditions how its members read those words in the first place. As such, readers actually write a text for themselves as they read, for they have a tool kit of interpretive strategies always at work determining what certain words will mean should they arise in a given context. Readers using the same tool kit belong to the same community.

Fish’s theory has been criticized for making words have no meaning. He responds with just the opposite: Words always have meaning, in fact many meanings, all of which are constructed by situated readers in various communities. Fish adds that his theory is sociological, not normative, that is, it describes only what people say (or think) a text means; it does not prescribe how we ought to interpret texts. Finally, to the objection that some authors use certain techniques to ensure that their texts convey certain meanings, he responds that those meanings come to fruition only if the reader belongs to the same interpretive community as that author.

Spoiler

Imagined Communities

Imagined communities refer to groups of individuals who identify with a shared community identity, despite often never interacting with most of the other members. This concept was popularized by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 work, where he explored nationalism as a socially constructed phenomenon influenced by political and economic factors.

Anderson depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group. 

Anderson focuses on the way media creates imagined communities, especially the power of print media in shaping an individual's social psyche. He analyzes the written word, a tool used by churches, authors, and media companies (notably books, newspapers, and magazines), as well as governmental tools such as the map, the census, and the museum. These tools were all built to target and define a mass audience in the public sphere through dominant images, ideologies, and language. Anderson explores the colonial origins of these practices before explaining a general theory that demonstrates how contemporary governments and corporations can (and frequently do) utilize these same practices. These theories were not originally applied to the Internet or television.

Structure of Feeling

The term is difficult, but 'feeling' is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of 'world-view' or 'ideology. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them, It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences.

An alternative definition would be structures of experience: in one sense the better and wider word, but with the difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the most important obstacle to recognition of the area of social experience which is being defined. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.

We are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations. By that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present.

Methodologically, then, a 'structure of feeling' is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence. It is initially less simple than more formally structured hypotheses of the social, but it is more adequate to the actual range of cultural evidence: historically certainly, but even more (where it matters more) in our present cultural process.

The hypothesis has a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as lived and experienced, with or without tension, as it also evidently includes elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience which may lie beyond, or be uncovered or imperfectly covered by, the elsewhere recognizable systematic elements.

Spoiler

The unmistakable presence of certain elements in art which are not covered by (though in one mode they may be reduced to) other formal systems is the true source of the specializing categories of 'the aesthetic". 'the arts", and "imaginative literature'. We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome the specificity of these elements-specific feelings, specific rhythms-and yet to find ways of recognizing their specific kinds of sociality, thus preventing that extraction from social experience which is conceivable only when social experience itself has been categorically (and at root historically) reduced.

We are then not only concerned with the restoration of social content in its full sense, that of a generative immediacy. The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conven-tions-semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming. These relations will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters, but as a matter of cultural theory this is a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms, but as social formation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced.

Not all art, by any means, relates to a contemporary structure of feeling. The effective formations of most actual art relate to already manifest social formations, dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates. Yet this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact minority) generation; this often, in turn, the generation that substantially connects to its successors. It is thus a specific structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and sup-pressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms, particular deep starting-points and conclusions.

[W]hen a formation appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures. Any of these examples requires detailed substantiation, but what is now in question, theoretically, is the hypothesis of a mode of social formation, explicit and recognizable in specific kinds of art, which is distinguishable from other social and semantic formations by its articulation of presence.

Spoiler

 

like this iconoclass, or this community of denizen icons, evolve from the shared interpretation of the icon / discourse as text (interpretive community), to the shared imagination of the icon / discourse as terrain itself (imagined community), to the shared inhabitation of the icon / discourse as institution (structure of feeling) or the shared identification of the icon / discourse as enclave (subculture, callback to Hebdige) … something within that interdisciplinary trajectory felt somewhat symbiotic with your interpretive tapestry 

There … might have been more (or less) to this stream-of-consciousness (if any of the aforementioned communicated a hint of legible sense) … but denouement for now … 

Genuinely appreciate your presence!

Edited 22 hours ago by bxr

[Economy 52,435]

On 5/17/2026 at 3:32 PM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

Also if we consider REQUIEM as the fulfillment of the Resurrection, Catholic liturgy contends that Christ spend the three days before he rose again in Hell. Interesting to consider in the context of the Hellish and “demonic” imagery deployed throughout the MAYHEM era and how the black mass turned legitimate ceremony of REQUIEM is, as you said, the fulfillment of the ascension: the transcendence of the cross she bore throughout her career (early career trauma, the burdens and betrayals of fame), which would also be the redemption of what she may have come to view as the Original Sin of the creation of Lady Gaga…

Wait what? I never knew of this belief existed. How does that make sense? Isnt he Gods son and the loved and righteous one? Why would he have gone to hell?

[Ladle Ghoulash 46,422]

18 hours ago, Economy said:

Wait what? I never knew of this belief existed. How does that make sense? Isnt he Gods son and the loved and righteous one? Why would he have gone to hell?

The premise, as I understand it, him descending to Hell represents him experiencing the full extent of the suffering humans were condemned to as a consequence of the original sin of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace to redeem that sinful nature.
 

However, if I were to put on my theologian hat, I’d say I think the overall trajectory of the relationship between God and man from the Old Testament to the New would be God’s own evolution from Creator to legitimate Father: the God of the Old Testament responds to transgression and sin with wrath and violence (plagues, mass murder, apocalyptic events) because, while he created man, he doesn’t understand man because he isn’t one, he only understands his own power and the unwavering authority he believes should follow it. By taking a part of himself and embodying it in flesh in Christ, he was putting *himself* into the shoes of man, not just to “forgive” mankind, but in hopes that, through coming to understand the pain, loss, and hardship they experience and sharing it with them, that they could come to forgive him. 

Edited Sunday at 08:13 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[Economy 52,435]

1 minute ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

The premise, as I understand it, him descending to Hell represents him experiencing the full extent of the suffering humans were condemned to as a consequence of the original sin of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace to redeem that sinful nature.
 

However, if I were to put on my theologian hat, I’d say I think the overall trajectory of the relationship between God and man from the Old Testament to the New would be God’s own evolution from Creator to legitimate Father: the God of the Old Testament responds to transgression and sin with wrath and violence (plagues, mass murder, apocalyptic events) because, while he created man, he doesn’t understand man because he isn’t one. By taking a part of himself and embodying it in flesh in Christ, he was putting *himself* into the shoes of man, not just to “forgive” mankind, but in hopes that, through coming to understand the pain, loss, and hardship they experience and sharing it with them, that they could come to forgive him. 

Ahhh. Interesting. In Portugal I grew up with nearly everyone being catholic but I was unaware of this belief

[Ladle Ghoulash 46,422]

On 5/17/2026 at 8:23 AM, bxr said:

Reminds me of Gaga saying that she “needed to find the religion in the show” during the BTS commentary. In spite of the conversation about Gaga and religion often centering around her provocative use of religious iconography, I think her most interesting contribution to the discussion is actually decentering the ecstasy and liturgy of religious experience from the nexus of tradition/established faith practices (“my religion is you”). Taking religion, at first, as obsession and devotion during TFM, then gradually building it into a personal practice, belief system, shared ceremony, but also, probably most radically in the idea that religion is the machination of personal meaning using the world (both figurative and abstract) as raw material.

Saw this old interview clip circulating from the BTW era and thought it was especially relevant to the convo we’ve been having about decentering received notions of religion and the ethos of religion as a form of personal meaning making and self-actualization

“This album in a lot of ways, the religious quality of it in terms of the sonic nature—the Gregorian chanting and the church bells and the organs—it’s meant to be a representation of pop culture as religion, not religion as in the institution of religion, but religion *as faith*, *religion as hope* and the fans are my hope, the fans are my faith…so the album is posturing that pop culture can be your religion, pop culture can be your way of having faith in yourself, having hope in yourself, envisioning your potential and becoming that.”

[Ladle Ghoulash 46,422]

19 hours ago, bxr said:

the icon itself as a discursive form is essential in relation to identity and agency, and it definitively yokes the secular and sacred / culture x religion discursive communities … cultural icons and religious icons are foundational emblems within their respective realms, if not necessarily polarizing and paradoxical at times

This sense of the “iconoclassic” reminds me of one of the ways in which Warhol’s (admittedly nihilistic) sense of postmodernity actually holds space for the sacred: Warhol discusses how, as a child, when his parents took him to church, he experienced profound aesthetic arrest at the icons of the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Christ in the statues and stained glass windows. These experiences he describes as formative to his own conception of the deification of pop cultural figures as these impressionistic archetypes and icons from which he derived a similar sense of aesthetic arrest. I do also think, in his own trickster way, Warhol’s nihilism was perhaps his own version of leveling the Cathedral by decentralizing conventional objects of worship, opening the door for the ruins to be inspected and interrogated to see what they were really made of.

The difference, and the way in which I think Gaga is truer to that ethos than Warhol ever was, is that Gaga’s sense of iconic and iconoclastic was always intertwined with a sense of the ecstatic: icons are not figures that live behind the glass at a museum, in the tabernacle of the church, or behind the sheen of a TV screen, icons (religious, pop cultural, political) become a discursive psychic force that animates our behavior, help us to interrogate and actualize ourselves, and, by extension, help us arrive at beliefs and principles around which we organize our understanding of the world and our role in it.

Taking it further, the way that Gaga revolutionized that process was by asserting that icons are not idle constructs emerging from the ether, but are actively forged (or born, should I say) through cultural, historical, and political dialectics. By becoming an icon openly engaged in conversation surrounding the nature of icons, iconoclasm, and the social/cultural/historical/political forces that animate them (and us, by extension), she becomes a figure that functions almost like a lens for her audience: a way for them to see their own agency through the nature of her own self-invention and a way for them to understand all of the potential avenues for self-invention through the scope of her omnivorous cultural and intellectual attitudes and also a force that, through it’s own synthesis of its own relationship to its context in culture et al, both becomes aware of itself, the world in which it lives, and its relationship to it, she provides a sublimated experiential blueprint for the individual, through the initially mediated lens of the icon, to become agentic within that same matrix.

So much to consider and I definitely want to respond to more of what you wrote, but I’ll have to circle back to this in a bit.

As always, appreciate you, your presence, and this discourse!

 

Edited Sunday at 06:45 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[bxr 1,794]

3 hours ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

Saw this old interview clip circulating from the BTW era and thought it was especially relevant to the convo we’ve been having about decentering received notions of religion and the ethos of religion as a form of personal meaning making and self-actualization

“This album in a lot of ways, the religious quality of it in terms of the sonic nature—the Gregorian chanting and the church bells and the organs—it’s meant to be a representation of pop culture as religion, not religion as in the institution of religion, but religion *as faith*, *religion as hope* and the fans are my hope, the fans are my faith…so the album is posturing that pop culture can be your religion, pop culture can be your way of having faith in yourself, having hope in yourself, envisioning your potential and becoming that.”

… and to cross radar consciousness on the Feast of the Pentecost, no less—the timing, how Kairos!

The understated impeccable … and from the “camp becomes camp over time” lens, this somehow echoes an undercurrent bible campground throughout her career … from zeitgeist theology to a makeshift zeitgeist ministry … founded upon the embodiment of this heretofore imagined music community … arguably an emergent structure of feeling en route, as we speak (namely, in thread context of a latin high mass-adjacent requiem liturgy) evolving into a social formation … this new pop parish … “explicit and recognizable in specific types of art, which is different from other social […] formations by its articulation of presence”

What an era for interviews … this, I don‘t know … it just registers with such an odd precision in context … but almost maybe somewhere between this musical government and the messianic zeal (of an effectual fantasy bubble dream world, that just happens to operate at the nexus of pop culture) … the graduating groundswell of a de facto renaissance humanist revival spiritual revolution

Spoiler

Spoiler

Lady Gaga has work to do. She’s a manager, and the client she manages is Lady Gaga. She is obsessive, a style she learned from people like her friend the late Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer for whom she was a muse. She spends hours on many days constructing and fine-tuning what designers call mood boards — collages of artwork, fashion inspirations, and drawings meant to direct the stylists and artists (wardrobe, hair, and makeup) who execute her vision of Lady Gaga. A mood board develops into a storyboard, and it all morphs into a live show. The music is just one element of the presentation.

The most important thing you should know about Lady Gaga is that she has just started. The four number-one singles on her debut album (five if you count the deluxe version with “Bad Romance”), the sold-out world tour last year at age twenty-three — she doesn’t see these as her moment. To her, this is the foundation.

“There is a musical government, who decides what we all get to hear and listen to. And I want to be one of those people.” The girl who said that didn’t yet have the number-one hits (although she had already written most of them). She was not yet the creative director of the Haus of Gaga, which is what she calls the machine of more than a hundred creative people who work for her. She didn’t make that statement in an interview or from the stage. She made it in 2007, when she was a go-go dancer sewing her own outfits and I was her DJ. She wrote it in one of my notebooks.

[ … ]

Once she told me that she wanted to be the “grandmother of pop music,” bringing up new bands, nurturing their talents, watching them grow.

Suddenly she is a star. That happens to a lot of people, and then suddenly they aren’t stars. But flashes in the pan often disappear because they follow what they think are the rules of becoming famous — or what someone else tells them the rules are. Nobody tells Lady Gaga anything. The same bright girl who popped out of cakes and who created her own way of being famous once helped me understand something important. I was stressing out about how to end my novel, and she stopped me. She grabbed the draft, flipped over the final page, pulled the cap off a Sharpie, and wrote, “No story should ever end in resolution.”

Spoiler

She has said more than once, “I see myself in them.” Why is that? “I was this really bad, rebellious misfit of a person—I still am—sneaking out, going to clubs, drugs, alcohol, older men, younger men. You imagine it, I did it. I was just a bad kid. And I look at them, and every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a f—k about the bullies at my school.’ For some reason, the fans didn’t become more Top 40. They become even more of this cult following. It’s very strange and exciting.”

“I don’t feel spiritually connected to anyone in Hollywood makeup and a gown with diamond earrings on. I am just a different breed. I want to be your cool older sister who you feel really connected with, who you feel understands you and refuses to judge anything about you because she’s been there.”

When she talks about her fans, one hears shades of messianic zeal. “I want for people in the universe, my fans and otherwise, to essentially use me as an escape,” she says. “I am the jester to the kingdom. I am the route out. I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself. Because, as funny as it is that I am on the cover of Vogue—and no one is laughing harder than I am—I was the girl in school who was most likely to walk down the hallway and get called a s—t or a b—h or ugly or big nose or nerd or d—ke. ‘Why are you in the chorus?’ ” (She’s more Glee than Gary Glitter in some ways.)

For Gaga, the stakes are high. “Because as an artist and as a performer, the person that they look up to to create this space of freedom and escapism, I want to give my fans nothing less than the greatest album of the decade. I don’t want to give them something trendy. I want to give them the future.”

Not everyone gets Gaga, of course, and no one is more aware of that fact than the singer herself. As she puts it, “What I do for a living is not a cheese sandwich. It’s not like, either good or bad. It’s much more complicated than that.”

[ … ]

At the end of the day, the way she dresses is part of the entire performance-art aspect of her life. “It’s not about a choice,” she says. “It’s about a lifestyle that I live and breathe.” Does she sometimes feel misunderstood? At first she says no but then retracts it. “Well, yes, actually,” she says. “There is this assumption that women in music and pop culture are supposed to act a certain way, and because I’m just sort of middle fingers up, a-blazing, doing what my artistic vision tells me to do, that is what is misunderstood. People are like, ‘She dresses this way for attention.’ Or like, ‘Ugh, the meat dress.’ ” She rolls her eyes. “People just want to figure it out or explain it. The truth is, the mystery and the magic is my art. That is what I am good at. You are fascinated with precisely the thing that you are trying to analyze and undo.”

Spoiler

Spoiler

I saw lots of girls that had no real grasp on reality. Then I’d go home, where I was not allowed to just come and go as I please or go on playdates like everybody else. It was much stricter. My dad’s Italian. […] I was probably more dysfunctional than [anyone] in our family […] But something inside of me felt like I was living in a delusional world; I wanted to know what the real world was all about. And I used to pray every night that God would make me crazy. I prayed that God would teach me something, that he would instill in me a creativity and a strangeness that all of those people that I loved and respected had.”

Gaga, who currently “works with” “spiritual guides,” believes that her creativity began before she was conceived. “My father’s sister Joanne died when she was 19 and he was 16. And when my mother was engaged to marry my father, they were staying in his house, where he grew up, and a light came into the room and touched her stomach and went away. She believes that Joanne came into the room and sort of O.K.’d her for my dad, and that Joanne transferred her spirit into my mom. So, when I was born, it’s almost as if [I was] her unfinished business. She was a poet and a real Renaissance woman, pure of heart—just a beautiful person. She died a virgin. And one of [my guides] told me he can feel I have two hearts in my chest, and I believe that about myself.”

 

Also … 

“There is a maintaining of the synthetic and electronic quality of the previous two albums but an evolution in the soulfulness of the vocal, mixed with the electronicness …

It shows much more of my abilities as an artist—both as a songwriter, and as a vocalist, as a pianist The lyrics take you through this journey of the psychology of my life, and my belief that birth is not something that happens once; it’s something that happens over and over again throughout your life; that you can be reborn, and that your identity is something that you can put on and decide for yourself.”

Something about the “maintaining of the synthetic and electronic quality … but an evolution in the soulfulness of the vocal, mixed with the electronicness” … feels like such a signature sonic aesthetic, something about the merger of the “synthetic,” which at once means ersatz or artificial, but/and the synthesis of … and then to blend that (along with the tantamount electronicness) with the soulfulness of vocals, in particular, is just … I don‘t know something very inherently native to the frequency or identity … it feels like the primordial sonic structures of a harmonic paradigm … one that sounds like this kind of subcultural sanctuary in progress

 

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