Death drive: Lady Gaga

• 08 November 2010 at 20:56
• Music, cinema, TV, books...

Have you heard of the meat dress Lady Gaga wore for Vogue Homme Japan?

Image credits: Vogue, I guess

It's said to be real meat. Which is, in the end, like wearing fur, that is, killing animals in a simply esthetic goal. And this is even worse because this dress can only be worn once. If you can appreciate the provocative, trashy and novating aspect of the dress, ethically speaking, you can't. By the way, Gaga went to Ellen DeGeneres' show, a vegan lesbian, who asked her if she understood that vegetarians and animal rights organisations could have got offended. And Gaga played it über-hypocrite:

No but you know Ellen, it's a metaphore. If we don't fight, soon we won't be worth the meat on our bones! You know, there are people who get fired from our military because they're gay, and we need to fight!

That's such bollocks. And she couldn't be more of an opportunist by talking about Don't Ask Don't Tell to a lesbian. She could have done so much better! At her place, I would first have worn a fake meat dress, and then, I would have said it's a statement about the textile industry where everything's been made in countries where people are exploited and that we were supporting an unfair industrty, so that's it, we would blood on our shoulders ==> FLESH!! But no, she even sends the opposite message: we can kill to be talked about in the press, which pleads for a cruel society.

It shows something recurrent about her, and more and more present in entertainment: the need for violence.

In their video Telephone, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé get into a restaurant and kill everyone. Among the corpses, they can't find anything better to do than dance on their crappy lyrics song. I have nothing against some dedramatisation/humorisation/esthetisation of violence, when it's in an "artistic" context, I even think it's got some cathartic potential. But the dress goes way beyond for me, because it's not comedy anymore, real cows got chopped up just so that we talk aboutLAdy Gaga.

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