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Friday, May 29, 2009

Lady Gaga - Paparazzi



Some performers, like Britney Spears, play at being decadent, but they generally do a bad job of it. It's just not them. They don't know how. A dead giveaway is their sly sense of humor....

For Lady Gaga, however, decadence is home. And what is decadence? From Wikipedia:
Used to describe a person's lifestyle, it describes a lack of moral and intellectual discipline, or in the Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence".

...Applied to the arts, decadence implies an elevation of self-indulgence and pretension over effort and talent; when applied to science and the professions, it describes an erosion of professional ethics.

...In literature ..."decadents" relished artifice over the earlier Romantics' naive view of nature (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Some of these writers were influenced by the tradition of the Gothic novel and by the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.

Oscar Wilde gave a curious definition: "Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts."
One of the things that impressed me most about Kylie Minogue was her inherent classicism: in contrast, Lady Gaga seems quite....different.

Then, of course, there was this interview from Australia where Lady Gaga discusses what I suppose one might call romance. And there is little sign of a sense of humor...

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