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I hope the media don't succeed in destroying her. I don't love Gaga – to have a really emotional response to her, you have to love surface, pure performance, you have to love the work of someone such as Andy Warhol, whom Gaga directly references, whose creations were obviously never about heart. But I do admire her. I think she's fascinating. And I think she makes us question what women today are, and should be. Most importantly, she doesn't give a fuck what anyone else thinks. And, in terms of traditional femininity, nothing could be more radical than that.
Hadley Freeman: 'A Grace Jones copyist, but with worse music'
Her recent songs, I grant you, aren't terrible. Not the earlier stuff, of course: Love Game, Just Dance, Eh Eh – to love those is to love watered-down rehashes of those famous titans of the musical world, Whigfield and Ace of Bass. Bad Romance and Telephone are fine, although they are basically the musical equivalent of cocaine – initially fun but ultimately unsatisfying, leading one to listen to them again and again in search of something that seemed to be there once. This is a brilliant tactic for success in the short term but makes the songs about as ephemeral as, well, bad drugs.
Yet Stefani Germanotta's celebrity status (sorry – I just physically cannot make my fingers type the word "Gaga" in a sentence that is intended to have an actual point) has nothing to do with her music. It's to do with her persona, one that has been repeatedly described, with no discernible irony, as "original", "feminist" and "iconic", with the latter two qualities being dependent on the first, which is precisely where the whole argument falls apart. From her name (which she ripped from a Queen song) to her music to her every look, everything has been done before. Even the meat dress she wore this week was done by Elsa Schiaparelli more than 70 years ago. This is not making a knowing cultural reference, it's not having a single idea of one's own. Now, lack of originality isn't necessarily a bad thing – heaven knows Madonna copied plenty of people along the way. But it is a problem when originality is supposed to be one's greatest quality. The fact is, she is little more than a Grace Jones copyist with more gratuitous nudity and worse music.