On the one hand, all that exposure can be necessary to sustain pop superstardom, but on the other hand, all that exposure can be embarrassing, or incriminating, or just deeply destructive to any attempts to live life like a normal human being. Many celebrities have a severe love-hate relationship with the paparazzi. The paparazzi (the word comes from Paparazzo, a character in an Italian movie) are those odious freelance photographers who make their living chasing around celebrities, snapping candid shots they can sell them for big bucks to gossip-hungry magazines and websites like TMZ and US Weekly. The New York Times explains, "'Paparazzi'" is a love letter from camera to subject but stops short of admitting that the affection runs both ways." ( Source) As The Washington Post wrote, "She's freaky-deaky, like a female drag queen, a hot mess yet super-savvy, fierce and fab, a prodigious pianist, dressed like a vamp but almost childlike in her sincerity." ( Source) And her fans absolutely love her.Īrguably, the most meaningful track on her debut album The Fame, "Paparazzi" deals (on the surface) with the pressures of being a celebrity. And then came "Paparazzi."īy the time "Paparazzi" was released as a single just after the Fourth of July, 2009, Lady Gaga had become a household name and a fixture in American pop culture. But once "Just Dance" hit the top of the charts, it seemed that nothing could stop an endless torrent of Gaga: "Poker Face" and "LoveGame" following close on its heels. Quite an auspicious start to 2009 for a girl who had been, until quite recently, a nearly unknown singer/songwriter performing nightly burlesque-inspired shows in New York City dives after leaving the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU (where she gained early acceptance at age 17) to pursue her music career. Gaga madness had officially reached pandemic status. The following week, after 22 weeks of climbing, it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. By the end of 2008, "Just Dance" had become the unavoidable song of the moment, the ubiquitous soundtrack for just about everybody's New Years festivities. Released in April 2008, "Just Dance" steadily climbed the charts through the summer and fall, gaining Gaga a huge fan base through radio airplay and word of mouth (and, just a guess, from people blasting the song out of their cars). It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that 2009 was the "Year of the Gaga." After first appearing on the pop charts, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2008 with her hit single "Just Dance," Lady Gaga suddenly found herself on the tip of everybody's tongue. Kanye West made an even bigger joke out of himself than we thought possible and somehow skyrocketed Taylor Swift to fame in the process. Gay rights activists took to the streets to try to win the right to marry conservative Tea Party activists took to the streets to try to stop the Democrats from enacting what they saw as a "socialist" political agenda. Polar bears got stuck on thinning sheets of polar ice humans got hit with a nasty plague of H1N1 swine flu. Iraq cooled off a bit while Afghanistan heated up. Twilight conquered the world, sending teenage girls everywhere into a feeding frenzy over human/vampire/werewolf love triangles. The economy teetered on the brink of Great Depression 2.0. In so doing, they remind the viewer that although she may perceive female music video stars as objects of fantasy, as fantasies they are not always under her control.No mistake about it: 2009 was a big year.īarack Obama became the first Black President of the United States. These “errors” open up intervals of frustration-and potential critical reflection-in the playback and, by extension, in the temporal structures of fantasy. Working inside the genre of corporate music video and the logic of the glitch, performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga make visible their ambivalent relationships to patriarchal, heterocentric video culture through simulated freezes and drop outs in the streaming image. Some female performers recognized the potential of this electronic disruption to interrupt the male gaze and the traditional objectification of the female body. During the ascension and commodification of Web 2.0, online music videos became host to a new kind of glitch: the digital stutter of insufficient buffering in Adobe Flash Player and other streaming media software. This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson.
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