Friday, May 27, 2011

Lady Gaga: Born This Way (music video)

Thanks to Walter de Camp for tipping me on Lady Gaga: Born This Way (2011). The seven minute electropop video directed by Nick Knight starts with the Bernard Herrmann overture to Vertigo. The song's genesis was in Lady Gaga's Monster Ball tour last year. The lyrics are a celebration of pride of one's identity. But the video is also a "manifesto of Mother Monster", celebrating both good and evil. There is a strong affinity with Alexander McQueen's "savage beauty" themes. Another instance of the current "the monster inside" obsession in Western culture.

P.S. 28 May 2011. In Financial Times Weekend there is a two-page Lady Gaga interview by Stephen Fry worth reading. Even more interesting is Peter Aspden's Lady Gaga column.

Peter Aspden observes that Lady Gaga has launched a reverse trend to the disastrous course of the traditional pop music industry, ruined by piracy. Lady Gaga's (born 1986) income is soon expected to exceed the total lifetime earnings of veteran rock giants.

"What Lady Gaga has brought to her own party is a supreme sense of how to do 21st-century business. So say Jamie Anderson, Jörg Reckhenrich and Martin Kupp, a group of management academics whose recent paper for the Antwerp Management Scool "Lady Gaga: Born This Way?" enthuses over their subject's deft ways with self-promotion and marketing."

"For this trio, Lady Gaga is a true innovator, whose instinctive understanding of how to handle social media and digital platforms has lasting significance."

"Zealous protection of copyright? All of Lady Gaga's video clips are free to view or download on her own website. She likes her fans. They like her back and buy her material from iTunes. An industry insider is quoted in the paper: 'Maybe Gaga points a way to the future - to make your fans your trusted friends. After all, who steals from friends?'"

"Catfights in the headlines? Lady Gaga does not do feuds, and happily shares her platform with potential 'rivals'".

"Gaga as product ambassador? But she does not endorse brands, preferring instead to create new products in the companies that have asked her to come on board." "The objects with which she is identified are circumscribed by her own values. They sell relentlessly well."

"Sticking tightly to her own discipline? Lady Gaga understands other art forms, and the benefits of synergy."

"Lady Gaga's recipe for her phenomenal success? 'I was and I am a freak, a maverick, a lost soul looking for peers'."

The innovators "intuitively grasp the mechanics of mass adulation, the economics of brand loyalty, the importance of leadership projection. They are unfazed by the oxymoronic riddle that is 'mass intimacy'. All the buzzwords of good management practice - innovation, reinvention, distinctiveness - come naturally to them."

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