Lady Gaga Update

I was a little dissatisfied with the job I did live-blogging the MTV Awards Sunday night, even though my partner in the venture, Erik Adams, took on all the technical heavy lifting, leaving me free to just watch and type, unencumbered. If I were Lee Siegel or some asshole, I might try to argue that there's something built into the live blogging form that automatically turns writers into third-rate comedians and prevents them from having, or recording, any thoughts of a deeper nature. Since I am the asshole my mother made, I will instead allow for the possibility that I'd never done that before and just choked, and hope that I will be given the opportunity to get better at it.

My biggest regret was in not taking note of a small but interesting moment towards the end of the evening, when Lady Gaga, in male drag, delivered an elaborate spoken tribute to Britney Spears before asking her up on stage to accept an award. Gaga said something to the effect that she herself was one of many performers who wouldn't be in the business now if not for Britney, and then, once the two of them were standing side by side, she tried to kiss her, in what looked to be an evocation of the famous moment during the VMAs, many years ago, when Britney Spears and Madonna played a little tonsil hockey for the fans. Spears, who looked more like a reasonably wetogether young mother eager to put her wild days behind her--she had what Pauline Kael, in a review of a Jill Clayburgh movie, once called "that post-frazzled look"--pulled away from her and muttered something about how she'd been there, done that; Gaga looked a little embarrassed, and, still in character, tried to recover by muttering something about how the two of them were restraining themselves because "Gaga wouldn't like it." For reasons that I suspect go beyond concern about her career, Spears wants to be seen as a responsible adult now, and even though she was perfectly aware that Gaga was going somewhere pop-referential rather than somewhere steamy-sexy, she decided not to risk losing her dignity. Gaga clearly see Spears as someone who blazed a trail for pop provocateurs such as herself. But where Spears strikes me as a nice girl who just seemed to blunder into provocation as a career strategy, Gaga sees it as something to be planned and executed with a bang.

Gaga seems to want to keep the stage set in place every minute she's before us and never let a glimpse of a "real person" peep out from behind the makeup. Maybe she learned something about that, too, from Spears, who really seemed to be letting the attacks she was getting from the media get to her a few years ago. (The attacks I'm thinking of, which ranged from sneering at her personal appearance to screaming that she was the world's worst mother, tended to be overly personal, unnecessarily mean-spirited, way over-the-top, and to a very great degree just fucking deranged, so I don't blame her for taking them as badly as she liked.) I can mostly take or leave Britney's music--though I wouldn't mind seeing her give movies another try--but I applaud her for getting her act together, because I like to believe that every time she's photographed not looking as if she's on an episode of Cops, an Internet banshee somewhere drowns in its own spite. But Gaga may see her as someone who paid the price for allowing herself to be seen as vulnerable.

The thing is, there are moments--such as that failed kiss, and at the end of her opening number, when she looked beseechingly into the camera for a few seconds and didn't seem completely sure that she was pulling it off--when Gaga shows a little vulnerability herself, and if I admire her for her showmanship and flair and drive, I like her for the moments when something human shows through. It's the closest she comes to letting you see her sweat. It's one thing that sets her apart from Madonna, who made it a point to never appear vulnerable--which is part of what made her so hopeless as an actress--yet who often, especially from around the Truth or Dare tour on, has often made a point of letting you see her sweat, making it impossible to miss the effort of what she was doing. At a certain point fairly early in her career, Madonna stopped being an entertainer, someone who cared about giving pleasure to an audience, and a self-generating adulatory headline machine whose act consisted of telling you in what terms to couch the next round of celebratory media attention that would be directed her way, and looking over the actual artifacts of her thirty-odd-year career, I imagine that some of the articles and papers examining her importance as a feminist gay rights icon and political performance artist would seem even sillier now than they did when they were written, which would be very goddamn silly indeed. Gaga's act is harder to reduce to a bumper sticker, and she seems less dictatorial about demanding that she be taken serious. Which guarantees that she will be taken less seriously by a lot people, at the same time that it makes her a better performer, a richer public presence, and more of an artist.