All of the lights

[rockmarooned]

After the Mountain Goats extravaganza on Friday, Marisa and I spent Saturday in Philadelphia with Bayard and Alex. We hit the Philadelphia Book Festival, which as a science-fiction-friendly and science-fact-averse English major I'm surprised to report was sort of upstaged by the Philadelphia Science Festival. Maybe some people dropped out due to

Comments

[freakjaw]

I was just coming back here to mention that Weird Al thing! Not cool, Gaga!

This line from that backlash piece you posted seems to match up with your central complaint about Lady Gaga: "Her songs are too disposable to be highbrow, and her public persona too self-important to be lowbrow or camp." And that seems like a fair criticism of her music, the literary qualities of her writing, or even her persona as a pop-star, but that "condescending" swipe up top was about the message she's putting out. Even the parsing here of "don't be a drag, just be a queen" seems nit-picky to me since it's a play on a common phrase and the meaning is fairly obvious both in an out of the context of the song ("don't become self-loathing, withdrawn and depressed, or suicidal, be what you are and be proud/defiant about it...born this way, etc, etc"). The song we're talking about came out in a culture that just had like a half dozen nationally publicized gay teen suicides in the last six or eight months. So it may be nit-picky or oversensitive of me to keep arguing that she deserves more credit here, and unfortunate that I'm at least partly doing the "it's just not meant for you" argument when she's being played on Top-40 radio. But I do kind of think that it's not really meant for you, and that it's pretty cool that she's got a Top-40 song saying this stuff. That obviously doesn't mean you can't complain that her hooks are lame or her lyrics are simplistic, but you've got a trickier time of avoiding the actual content of the song if you don't want to rankle busy-bodies like me. It's super easy for me to say since I don't keep up on Lady Gaga criticism, but I think the price of some music critics getting more insufferable when writing about her is worth it when the bullied and culturally marginalized get to bop along to something telling them to hang in there and give some back.

[slightlyoffaxis]

I really shouldn't just jump in at the end of this, and I should probably keep my mouth shut because I really don't care about Lady Gaga, but isn't it kind of mean to call the opposite of the "queens" the "drags?" Sorry, all you closeted, self-loathing, or suicidal people...you're all just such a drag! Just snap out of it already.

[freakjaw]

Sure, maybe. I could understand if somebody said it was indelicate or insensitive. If somebody called me a drag in conversation it'd bum me out. But this isn't conversation, it's a riff on the phrase "drag queen" in a song that seems otherwise quite affectionate and supportive, by a person who very publicly identifies with the people she's singing to/about. So while I assume the LGBT community is varied enough that there have been plenty of different reactions, and this is an instance where mine actually isn't as valuable as theirs, my read is that the line isn't telling the "drags" that there is something wrong with them, but that there isn't and don't let anybody tell you different.