Music in America: Lady Gaga Revisited

It is by no means my intention to turn this into a Lady Gaga blog, but I will confess that I am a fan. Furthermore, this blog is partially about music and culture, so I believe it's perfectly valid to discuss something like Gaga's new album, Born This Way. I have now had to defend this album against far too many people, and every time the same issues seem to come up. Let me get to the point: for the American public, Lady Gaga has become too artistic. Yes, that's right. A music artist has become too artistic for mainstream America, and her ratings are subsequently sinking. I do hope with every bit of my being that you find this statement to be absurd, because it is the epitome of absurd - and yet, I'm not surprised in the least.

Let's face it, pop music was never invented to be profound. With the rise of the recording industry, coupled with a simultaneous bout of post-war trauma and American over-confidence, American music became so dumbed-down as to become pointless. Music became such a part of the mundane that it was quickly taken for granted, and capitalist record companies, eager to sell as quickly as possible, churned out a continuous spew of mediocrity that still plagues us to this day. This sort of capitalist swill, created supposedly for the sake of the masses, was quickly exported and shoved down the throats of many countries' populations. I am painfully reminded of Chile in the 60's, where the gross influx of American pop music sparked the Nueva Canción movement, a grassroots, pro-Socialist, indigenous music revival. This is pop music's origin; it is a genre based on keeping people ignorant, and blithely happy about nothing of any substance. Its subjects are usually so irrelevant that there is no real point to questioning the genre as a whole; people don't have to work in order to understand it.

But Western music history shows us that this is not what music has to be about. As Westerners, our heritage consists of composers and music makers who put titanic amounts of thought into their work, and expected their listeners to do the same. Once upon a time, the dialogue between artist and audience spurred by a challenging piece of music was something to be excited about! People wanted the librettos to operas in advance so they could study them before they went to see them performed; Renaissance printers made countless copies of the latest Italian madrigals for people to sing together in their homes; Haydn paid for the publication of his tour de force, The Creation, in both English and German, and set up a subscription system so that members of the public could gradually get their hands on the entire score; Wagner had fan clubs across Europe because people were so obsessed with his artistic vision; and today, musicians are still struggling to play pieces "as the composer intended." I could of course go on, but the point is this: in the West, music has always been considered an art of some kind, and with this definition comes an expectation that music will foster some kind of discussion or exchange of ideas.

But pop music, by nature, shuts this dialogue down. What's the point of doing a musical analysis of Britney Spears's "Hit Me Baby One More Time," or discussing the ideology of Train's "Meet Virginia?" Even songs that could be considered more in-depth than the more poignantly superficial ones are usually not so profound as to spark nation-wide arguments. Now, I understand that pop music is meant to let people just have fun. In some ways it's important to have an unpretentious, simple music genre for people to let loose with. But it's equally important to keep the public thinking. I also understand that not everyone listens to pop music, nor is it the only thing a person may listen to. But the fact that it chooses to label itself as "popular" demonstrates that it's a genre that believes itself to be accessible and likable for the general populace. It reflects a certain over-arching mindset when it comes to American music, and quite clearly tells us that American music should be simple, pointless, and fun, and not much else.

But Lady Gaga is different, and this is why she's so important to American culture. She has single-handedly attempted to turn a genre of music inherently anti-artistic into an art form. In the footsteps of Warhol and countless other modern artists, she has converted the mundane blandness of pop music and culture and turned it into something worth talking about. Her music and performances are controversial not just because their subject matter can be racy, but because they seek to penetrate and dissect the lifestyle that has sprung up around this type of music. Most of her music is trying to get you to think about something, sometimes several things at once - just like a good artwork will. I strongly believe that even if you dislike a piece of art, if it makes you question your own aesthetic values, your ideology, or your general perceptions, then that artwork was successful. It pushed you out of your norm and forced you to think of life in a broader scope. And this is what frustrates me so much about the mainstream criticism I've been hearing from people when it comes to Born This Way - the biggest complaint I hear is that her music has become too message-ridden. Heavens! Songs that make you think? Songs that make you angry or empowered or both? Songs that you can have a visceral connection or aversion to? What is the world coming to!?

So essentially, Lady Gaga has played the most genius cards I've ever seen. She has invaded the pop industry to seriously partake in it, and simultaneously criticized and questioned it. She has made millions fall in love with her and as many come to hate her. But this is not the same sort of distaste one expresses over other pop artists - when one condemns Britney for being talentless, they don't do it with the same sort of scorn that I hear the Gaga-haters toss around. There's a real anger present here that must be recognized, and at the same time appreciated. Lady Gaga, like it or not, has created a schism in this country by forcing us to ask ourselves the question, "what do we want to get out of our music?" Do we want pointlessness and fun? or do we want art? For the first time in a long time, we have the option to choose both, but with the awareness that the artist herself is cognizant of her genre's pointlessness.

Let me also be very clear about Born This Way as an album: I think it's bloody brilliant, and I wish more people would hear it the way I and many others do. I have heard people say it's not a cohesive album, that it's just edgy for the sake of it, that it's over-produced, that it's pretentious, etc. Yes, to some extent you're all right; but that's what's great about it. People simply must remember the purpose of the album, which is to encourage people to embrace themselves for who they are, and to defiantly be themselves in order to have fun, even at the status quo's expense. Therefore, we should expect an album whose music constantly pushes and pokes at the definition of "normal" pop music, an album that cannot be neatly categorized or defined, one that is sometimes unruly and seemingly undisciplined. Frankly, I find this "incoherence" to be a strength, as every song on Born This Way sounds different, and creates a singular world unto itself while still participating in several interconnecting themes. Some of these are particularly intriguing and worth discussing - man and metal, constructed identity versus natural identity, sanctity and harlotry, the performer's relationship to her audience, the abilities of electronic music, gay rights, and of course the general theme of self-liberation. When was the last time a pop album strove to cover issues like that? And shouldn't art challenge us to ask several questions and not just one or two? What's wrong with having an album that poses multiple issues at once while also being tonally complex and interesting? Aren't people's personalities complicated like that?

Here's what I find most compelling about Born This Way: no longer does the listener have fun because they're partaking in a vast social network that all agrees "this is the music everyone should be listening to and one has fun while listening to it" (often enough because alcohol, dancing, or general socializing is involved); rather, the listener has fun because they are being themselves, their own independent and unique individual. This is a step that has utterly obliterated the primary obstructions of pop music. Lady Gaga is as much obsessed with her fans as we are about her, and it's refreshing to know that. It's also refreshing to see that pop music can actually be done with some substance, by a woman who has a remarkable amount of talent in music performance, composition, dance, and design. So for those of you who hate the album, so be it. I don't expect to change your subjective aesthetic opinion, but I would like to think that I at least convinced you of there being more importance to this album than there seems to be at first glance.

Entering the Cloister: Tarot and the Contemplative Life

Being a medievalist can make the subject of one's religion a tricky issue, at least in my case. It's even harder if you're also a performer of early music, or just choral music in general. It's practically impossible to escape Christianity if you participate in either of these two things, especially as regards all things medieval. This is sort of where I found myself during my sophomore year at Vassar. I hadn't thought about my religion in years, though I had been raised Catholic. As a child, I was totally enthralled by the Church's mystery, drama, mythology, iconography, just about anything. I lost interest very quickly during adolescence along with my parents when the sex scandals became an issue, and ended up treading through general agnosticism for the rest of my high school career. I dabbled in Buddhism for a hot minute and then reverted back to a general "spirituality," though I couldn't even define this for myself. When I entered college, I started singing more medieval and Renaissance music by participating in the Vassar College Madrigal Singers, and I absolutely fell in love with all of it (thank you, Drew Minter). Since I was a music major, I had to take music history in the first semester of my sophomore year. Naturally, we started from antiquity and ended with the beginnings of the Baroque period. I don't think I've enjoyed learning about any kind of music quite so much as I did medieval music, and I was officially obsessed. I began taking out any CD of early music I could find in our music library, and found myself starting many of my days listening to chant, orwalking to my classes with Josquin masses in my earbuds. Though I love medieval secular music as well, I was inherently drawn to the period's sacred music, maybe because my attraction to religion has always been a guiding impulse in my life for unknown reasons.

But here was the issue: I didn't really believe in Christianity anymore. I had no clear sense of what religion meant to me and therefore experienced a relatively excruciating cognitive dissonance. How could I truly sing early music - half of it actually being prayer - with any sincerity if I didn't have some kind of personal connection to the music's text that went beyond just "finding it interesting?" Well, from then on, I took as many classes on the Middle Ages I possibly could, and ultimately completed what would have been a major if I had only taken another semester of Spanish and written a thesis. As was predictable, many of my paper topics that I got to choose myself dealt with medieval theology, saints, and Christian iconography. I became deeply interested in the monastic life, and wanted to know what it

was like in any degree. I admit I, like many others, sort of spun a highly romanticized image of what it entails, but even when I thought about the supposed "cons," I still felt the whole experience would be worth it.

I believe my answer from God came in the sumer after my sophomore year when a friend I'd recently made read my tarot at a party. He's slightly notorious in our friend group for being shockingly accurate, and I certainly remember being just that - shocked - by the time he finished. Something inside sort of clicked at that moment, and I knew I wanted to be able to read myself. It's been all downhill since then, especially since I vowed to myself that if I were to do something as New Agey and publicly frowned upon as tarot, then I was going to go all the way with it and find out as much about it as possible. From there I purchased Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth materials and got to work. I couldn't read them to save my life at first, and it really took about a year before I started feeling like I knew what I was doing. This took reading lots of Crowley's other works, as well as material by Israel Regardie and traditional Gnostic texts.

As I did more readings for myself and others, I became increasingly

convinced that there was more to it all than I had ever realized. For one, I am yet to do a reading for someone that is wildly inaccurate. And readings I did for myself were sometimes devastatingly accurate, impartially showing me my reality as I had made it or had left it. The solutions these readings provided resonated deeply with me, because they suggested things that I had already felt to be true, but hadn't had the strength to accept. With enough time, I had to accept that there was a part of me that I clearly didn't consciously know about that was guiding my readings, and also that knew what was best for my well-being. This is the real kernel of all my stories in this post: because of tarot, I can affirm, without a doubt, the existence of a Higher Self because I have experienced indirect communion with it through divination. This is the real basis for faith - empirical experience, not juvenile acceptance of "truth" simply because others label it as such.

I think what was most important about the way I approached tarot was that, despite my interest in Crowleyan literature, I always tempered it with my medieval

background and my love for some of Christianity's tenants. I saw tarot not as "fortune

telling," but as contemplation and prayer. I came to feel, as St. Teresa writes about, that there was a Christ-like being hidden within my fabric trying to rectify my actions. This is the goal of

mysticism and monasticism - to prepare the individual for this sort of divine consultation so that they can attain perfection and beatification. I can't remotely compare myself in direct parallel to this awe-inspiring doctor of the Church, but at least I can say I understand what she was talking about. But as wonderful as this is, there is also a darker side to it that is utterly torturous: I have learned how utterly weak I am. I am truly a being prone to failure, as I am never able to fulfill the Divine Will proposed for me in my contemplation. And yet, Christ forgives. The story of the Passion has never been so vivid before, and I can only lament that I am exactly like Judas, betraying God for petty things. I know that I do this and yet I continue to do so because my will is not strong enough to overcome the fickleness of emotions, logic, and instinct.

This is where actually leading a monastic life would be beneficial. It would force the body and mind into a way of life well-suited to simply listening to God and being ever ready to accept His Will. Monasticism produces individuals who are able to put aside their egos in order to better serve God, and they are more equipped to deal with the body's constant throes. But it is still important to remember that tarot can be a crucial aid to self-contemplation, the "vivisection of the soul." Reading tarot for yourself certainly is the equivalent of prayer, and God in His mercy gives us the answer we are looking for, even if it is painful and difficult.

The New Dilemma for Divine Love

There is a crisis upon the Christian community, and anyone else who believes Christ gave a valuable message. It is none other than the issue of homosexuality.

You may grab your Bible and cite several instances throughout the work in which the action of homosexuality is vigorously condemned, but Christ himself never singles it out as a sin. The Word of God in the flesh is silent on the issue. But Paul (that bastion of liberal opinions on gender) certainly has things to say, as does Lot, and supposedly the God of the Old Testament himself. For these figures, homosexuality is a sin that must be rooted out and eliminated, and is akin to idolatry, adultery, and general whoredom.

At the same time, however, it is generally accepted that the overall purpose of Christ's message was to reveal to man that God is forgiving and loving despite our flaws. What made Christianity so appealing to men and women of late antiquity, a period characterized by a fashionable love of syncretism and all things Jewish or Egyptian, was that it connected all the dots, so to speak, between these Mediterranean ideologies. It acted as the sequel to the Torah, which was greatly respected as all "holy books" were at the time; it contained the myths of resurrection espoused in Mithraism, Greek mythology (I'm thinking of Dionysus being torn apart by the Titans and being resurrected by Zeus), and the Egyptian religion; it posits a trinitarian God along the lines of Neo-Platonism, and Philo the Jew and others would have been thrilled with its inclusion of the Logos factor; it included mystical apocalyptic texts, which certainly were in vogue at the time; and it catered to the growing demand for privatized ritual centered around some sort of specific sacrament only allowed to the initiated. It is very difficult to say anything definitive about Christianity because of its bizarrely adoptive origins. What came first? And, if he came back today, would Christ's life be told in quite the same way? Wouldn't the new cultural demands color the story differently as it did in the religion's origins? In some ways these characteristics were contemporary selling points, and strong ones at that. It incorporated the most popular aspects of religion and magic of the time, while also delivering a powerful, redemptive message: God is love, and is willing to die for that love.

But what happens when this message is undermined by its own proponents? The Catholic

Church and other fundamentalist Christian institutions have raised a strong campaign against homosexuality, deeming it unnatural and the result of a "sick" society. As I'm sure many of you are aware, their argument has reached such high pitches as to create atrocities like the Westboro Baptist Church's signs that read, "God hates fags." While this does not characterize the Christian anti-gay sentiment as a whole, it is quite obviously worrisome. The notion that God "hates" someone because they have sinned is glaringly antithetical to the "God is love" message. On the more mild end of the spectrum, Catholics agree that the primary issue is one of procreation - God made Adam and Eve, man and woman, and that's that, end of discussion. Marriage, therefore, also must consist of this bond between man and woman solely. But what do we do when we find homosexual animals in nature? The line between "choosing" to be homosexual and simply being homosexual becomes irrevocably blurred. For the Church, animals do not have free will, and therefore cannot choose to be anything but what they are. While one can argue that man, in his ability to "choose the higher road," should choose to reject homosexual behavior, we can no longer deny the simple fact that the great Author of nature somehow slipped homosexuality into Mother Earth's architecture.

Then there is the argument, "hate the sin, love the sinner." But how is the expression of love between two individuals, whether two men or two women, a sin? Surely the issue is not about caritas, platonic love shared between neighbors. The issue comes down to eros, erotic love and sexual intercourse. The problem lies in the fact that reproduction cannot occur without opposing sexes. And yet, Pope Benedict has written that agape (sort of similar to caritas) and eros are two halves of one "true love." Therefore, God Himself must embody this sort of love, both passive agape and active eros, modulating in currents of both. Marriage is the greatest representation of this, as it depends on both forms as well. But eros, the pope explains, is grossly misunderstood by mainstream culture today, and it is really about the desire to possess something as one's own for unselfish reasons. True love is all about the sublime act of giving oneself and receiving another simultaneously. I believe the problem with society's interpretation of sex is that there's too much eros and not enough agape. It stresses the importance of sex's materiality, the idea that one gains some sort of accreditation by having intercourse, and thus it breeds individuals who only know how to take and possess and not give back equally.

Here lie several hitches, however. Firstly, if God embodies true love for all people, He must therefore also be homosexual, unless we finally dispense of the whole singularly gendered God idea. Secondly, how can we love as God does - indiscriminately - if we do not possess an equal agape and eros for both men and women alike? How do we act "as Jesus would do" if we are not willing to entertain a desire to essentially wed both sexes? If to marry is to perfectly embody God's love, then why do we deny marriage to same-sex couples? Does God, because he is supposedly male, not want to marry other men? Whatever one's definition of eros may be, it is crucial for us to truly understand Divine Love in its full scope by breaking down the segregating effect of marriage's limited social definition. Otherwise, we are left with a God that we are meant to emulate to the best of our abilities by following in Christ's example, but who, at the same moment, expects us to disregard entirely any feelings of love toward another of the same sex. It is dreadfully paradoxical and confusing, but it is what we are confronted with.

Christ is often termed the "Second Adam," as he reverses the mistake the first man made at the Fall. Adam failed to obey God and sacrifice his own egoistic curiosity in the name of love. He did what we moderns do and chose only eros without agape. But Christ managed both, and preached that God loves all people, and that we must learn to love in this same way. So now we have a few options. For one thing, either the papacy must revise its statements or change its position on homosexuality entirely. Additionally, we now may choose essentially between two Gods - one that represents a selective love, and one that embodies a holistic, indiscriminate love. What is more important to Christianity? the words of the Apostles? or Christ, the living Word? the apocalyptic image of Christ as Judge throwing sinners into lakes of fire? or the absolutely fundamental and foundational concept that a redemptive God is a loving God? For these reasons, we absolutely must resolve to admit that homosexuality is warranted by the infinite capacity of Divine Love, otherwise the whole religion implodes upon itself.

New Video!

Hey everyone,

New reading is up on youtube. Haven't really used my youtube channel much because not many people have been asking for readings lately (sad day). This was done for my friend who I went to college with. She said she found it really helpful!