Me and Del, shopping the Walmart, happened upon the latest from last year’s fave, Stefanie Germanotta, PKA, Lady Gaga. There were two versions of her CD (how quaint, a CD!), one was the two disc set. We went for the monster version, at about $18 USD.

Of course, we were cleaning house, so we popped it on an antique sound system in the dining room and let it rip while we mopped the kitchen. While we didn’t blow a fuse, we did have some issues with the audio. Del says, “hey, what’s up with that CD? Is it defective?” “Nah,” I say, “I think it’s ‘born that way.'” So I went in to the room and got on my knees before the old amplifier (1950 vintage 25 watt twin 6L6, made by National). Clipping the input phase was causing some nasty distortion, but the CD skipping bit was, in fact, part of the track. I cut back the gain. Without some serious sub woofers, the mix on this record doesn’t really work. The drop four beat, on the first few tracks at least, is the glue that holds the feel together. The upper structure by itself is very disintegrated and gets to seem out of time by itself. That’s not a fair critique: the whole thing is meant to be heard in full fidelity for the full effect. I can appreciate that. It is apparent that long gone are the days when the artist cared about the sound from a transistor radio or cheesy record player. Lady G’s electronic sounds are brutal, gritty, abrasive, nasty, and, as she is so fond of contradictions and opposites, ravishing in their astringency. This is no country for old amplifiers.

Then, the new Rolling Stone appeared in the mailbox with a full color picture of the Germ on the cover, with a lengthy, not quite hagiographic article/interview/profile piece on the artist, her wrap of the Monster tour, and her new product. I took the article in with me into the den to do some more serious listening. Playing the CD back on a modernized Dyna ST-70, all vacuum tube signal path, with decent speakers, including a sub, I got the idea more correctly. I tried reading the RS article while listening, but couldn’t do it. The music is way too aggressive for a casual approach. I also thought that there was much channeling of Madonna going on. I wasn’t as captivated by most of the lyrics as I had been by “Speechless” and “Bad Romance” on the Germ’s second CD. She’s fond of non sequitur: “I don’t speak German, but I can if you like.” (“Sheisse.”) The competing messages appear between tracks as well as within them. One song (“Born This Way”) reflects parental support while another (“Hair”) reflects parental misunderstanding. That’s not to say that contradictions aren’t cool. Cool is hot. Hot is satanic. Satanic is the blood of Christ, and Mary Magdalene is…a bit confused.

We’ve been poking around in “Lapham’s Quarterly,” “Celebrity” issue. We note the heading titles: “On the Rise,” “At the Top,” “Out of Site…,” and we note that the RS interviewer (Brian Hiatt) asks the Germ about the fate of Elvis and Micheal Jackson and refers to the corrosive effect of celebrity in our (American) culture. (Gaga wonders if she’s at that level, and Hiatt correctly informs her that “it’s within sight.”) We note that Gaga is reportedly driving herself and her team without mercy on the road, preforming all out, and making this new record along the way, unrelenting in pursuit of an ideal of some sort, and self conscious about it at the same time. She’s full of doubt and confidence (the dichotomy again), but she’s also…in a sort of developmental limbo. She’s a twenty five year old frozen at nineteen, trapped by celebrity, on the run, on the go, going for it, and giving it all she’s got. We begin to worry about Stefanie. We begin to feel parental, if not somehow protective. We find ourselves wincing, because we can see the trainwreck just up ahead…a little higher up the ladder.

We hope not. It is way too soon to leap to a leaping off that bridge, the plunge that Presley and Jackson took. However, regarding the making of art…the enterprise, we know, requires downtime, experience, and reflection. It cannot be done at consistently high quality without stimulation. Constant output cannot be good. The crops must be rotated. This new record shows signs of overconfidence, of a loss of self, of a forced effort, of a lack of maturity, of a diminished capacity for self-critique, and of ‘the corrosive effect of celebrity.’ It’s not just that it is derivative (it is); imitation would not be so galling if it offered also some truly shocking new twist. (The song about Mary Magdalene – “Bloody Mary,” for example, has a shockingly beautiful tangoesque feel at the start, before the groove kicks in. But while it arrests at first, it fails at length. This is because the lyrics strain in their art-schoolish use of faux-French. Say wha’?) She certainly tries for so much, and intellectualizes and theorizes so much aesthetic. She fails to synthesize. No surprise. We’re looking at the slightest (maybe not so slight, at that) falling off in quality of a major talent. The making of art requires an effortlessness, unselfconsciousness,  playfulness, but also – a space in which new experience is forged into new insight.

For Black Christ’s sake, Steph. Get some rest, live some real life, with some real love, for a real span of time, and then get some real critical eyes in your head, and then get back to us. This entourage lacks a George Martin. It is almost airless.